Very little is known about the life of Matthias Grünewald, a painter (German Maler) who worked in the early decades of the 16^th Century in Germany. He is renowned for the pictures he created between 1512 and 1516 for the altarpiece of the Monastery of Saint Anthony in Isenheim in southern Alsace. The face of Saint Sebastian in one of these paintings (above) is considered to be a self-portrait. 

Life of Mathis der Maler

Very few details are available about the life of the painter who came to be known as Matthias Grünewald (Anderson, 2003). His first name has been considered as Matthias, Matthis or Mathis. His surname is disputable: Nithart, Neithardt, Gothart or Gothardt. The name “Grünewald” (green wood) was given to him by his first biographer, Joachim van Sandrart, about a century and a half after his death. The major confusion in his biography is whether Mathis Nithart and Mathis Gothart were one or two people. My intuition is that they were two distinct individuals: one a master painter and the other a water artist (builder of fountains), who also worked as an assistant painter (cf Bruhn, 1998, pp 21-42; Sebald, 1988, 2002). 

Given this intuition, the main stages of Grünewald’s biography are as follows. He was born in about 1480 in Aschaffenburg. After learning the techniques of painting, he worked for the episcopal court of Mainz, painting altarpieces in several churches in Frankfurt. In 1512, he married Anna, a young woman of Jewish descent who had recently converted to Christianity, and bought a house near the cathedral in Frankfurt. In the same year he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece in the Monastery of Saint Anthony in Isenheim. While he worked on the altarpiece, Anna stayed in Frankfurt. Grünewald was assisted in Isenheim by an older painter, Matthis von Würzburg, and the two men lived together. After finishing the Isenheim altarpiece, they returned to Frankfurt. Grünewald continued to paint under the patronage of Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg, who was the Archbishop of Mainz from 1514-1545 and the Archbishop of Magdeburg from 1513-1545. Albrecht, one of the most powerful prelates in the Holy Roman Empire, was a patron of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Matthias Grünewald.  

These were times of great social upheaval. Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses (A Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences) in 1517. These were specifically addressed to Albrecht von Brandenburg, who used indulgences to support his life of luxury and patronage. The theses marked the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

The German Peasants’ War (Deutscher Bauernkrieg) began in 1524. Though partly related to the Lutheran rebellion against the Catholic Church, the revolt was mainly directed at the feudal aristocracy. Some of the reformist clergy supported the peasants. However, Luther was terrified of the anarchy that might result, and encouraged the nobility to eliminate the rebellious peasants. Pitchforks were no match for artillery. Over 100,000 peasants were massacred and the revolt came to an end in 1525. It is not known whether Grünewald participated in the rebellion, or how he was affected by it. His friend died in 1528 in Halle where he was working as a hydraulic engineer. Grünewald appears to have moved back to Aschaffenburg where he died in 1532.

A portrait in the Chicago Art Institute, initialed MN, has been considered as a possible self-portrait by Grünewald (Mathis Nithart), though its authenticity and dating is unclear. My intuition is that it is the work of the young Grünewald and that it dates to about 1500. The following is the portrait and its description by Sebald in his poem After Nature (1988, translated by Hamburger, 2002)

       The small maple panel
shows a scarcely twenty-year-old
at the window of a narrow room.
Behind him, on a shelf not quite
in perspective, pots of paint,
a crayon, a seashell and a precious Venetian
glass filled with a translucent essence.
In one hand the painter holds
a finely carved knife of bone
with which to trim the drawing-pen
before continuing work on a female nude
that lies in front of him next to an inkwell.
Through the window on his left a
landscape with mountain and valley
and the curved line of a path is visible.

 

The Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony

Saint Anthony the Great (251-356 CE) was a Christian monk from Egypt who lived most of his adult live alone in the desert. At the beginning of his desert life, he was assailed by monstrous demons and tempted by seductive women. Despite a severe asceticism bordering on starvation, he nevertheless lived to be 105 years old. Although he was buried in the desert, his remains were miraculously discovered about two centuries after his death and transferred to Constantinople. In 980, a French count named Jocelin de Châteauneuf bought the relics from Constantinople to a monastery in what is now known as Isère in the French Alps. The relics were found to alleviate a disease characterized by skin inflammation, gangrene, hallucinations and convulsions that often broke out in devastating epidemics. In 1095 Gaston de Valloire founded the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony (also known as the Antonines) in gratitude for his son’s miraculous cure. The Abbey of Saint Antoine in Isère became the mother church of the order.

The disease came to be known as “Saint Anthony’s Fire.” The cause was the consumption of bread made from rye contaminated by the fungus Claviceps purpurea (Grzybowski et al, 2021). The fungus produces ergotamine and other compounds: these cause peripheral vasoconstriction and excessive stimulation of the central nervous system. The nature of the disease, however, was not known in the Middle Ages: it was first attributed to blighted rye in 1676 by Denis Dodart, but the fungus itself was not identified until the 19^th Century.     

Grateful patients gave land and money to the Antonines. This support allowed them to establish other hospitals in various locations in France, and later in other European countries. The Isenheim monastery in southern Alsace was founded around 1300. As the years went by, the Antonine hospitals also treated patients who suffered from leprosy, from the Black Death (an epidemic of bubonic plague) in the 14^th Century, and from the syphilis epidemics of the 16^th Century. The program of treatment involved prayer and the application of vinous extracts from the saint’s relics in Isère (Saint vinage). Whatever success occurred, however, was likely the result of the concomitant improvement in hygiene and nutrition.  

In 1505, the Antonines at Isenheim commissioned a carved wooden altarpiece from Niklaus Hagenauer (Mayr, 2003). The altarpiece contains a gilded central statue of Saint Anthony, flanked by Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Jerome: asceticism aided by doctrine and by scripture. The predella of the altarpiece contains polychrome statues of Christ and the 12 apostles. In 1512 the Antonines asked Grünewald (Mathis der Maler) to adorn the altar with paintings (Hayum, 1989; Scheja, 1969; Réau, 1920; Sieger, 2025). Over the next 4 years he created two fixed wings, two sets of retractable wings painted on both sides, and a cover for the predella The retractable wings could be opened to provide three distinct views of the altar. An animation of the opening is provided below. This has been adapted from that at the SmartHistory website, and provided with a brief excerpt of music from the first movement of Hindemith’s symphony Mathis der Maler. Following that is a diagrammatic representation of the three views.

First View of the Altarpiece

Other than on holy days, the altarpiece was kept closed and the viewer was presented with the terrifying representation of the crucified Christ. The scene is set in the darkness that fell “over all the land” (Matthew 27: 45) as Christ died.  

The gigantic body of the dead Christ is rendered with brutal naturalism and seems to leap out at one with redoubled violence, as if to take the viewer in an ambuscade: flesh in the greenish color of death with the scars of the frightful ordeal, an atrocious benumbed pain written across the face, the mouth extinguished in death, the body pulled up high by the tensile arch of the crossbeam and, at the same time, twisted with the torsion of the tree of the Cross, all limbs ripped out of joint, the loincloth in tatters, while a thorn of the crown pins the head fast in an excruciatingly painful position digging low and deep into the chest (Scheja, 1969, p 15).

The cross is contorted as though it shares in the agony. The crossbar is bowed under the weight of the dead body. The vertical post is twisted: it faces to Christ’s right above his head and to his left at his feet. The resin of the wood mixes with the blood of the dead Christ (Bryda, 2018)

The vision of Christ on the Cross as a dead body rather than as a suffering savior perhaps comes from the visions of the 14^th Century mystic Saint Bridget:

The color of death spread through his flesh, and after he breathed his last human breath, his mouth gaped open so that one could see his tongue, his teeth, and the blood in his mouth. Th e dead body sagged. His knees then contracted bending to the side. His feet were cramped and twisted about the nails of the cross as if they were on hinges (quoted in Bryda, 2018, p 13)

On Christ’s right side his mother Mary swoons, and is supported by the disciple John. Near them, Mary Magdalene laments the death of her teacher. The figures vary in their size as in their importance to the story.

On the left side of the crucified Christ is a representation of John the Baptist. This is in no way realistic: John was from another time – he was beheaded before Christ was crucified. Yet he was the last of the prophets to announce the significance of Jesus as the son of God. His words are written in red:

Illum oportet crescere me autem minui
[He must increase, but I must decrease]. (John 3:30)

At the feet of the Baptist is a lamb from whose chest blood drops into a communion chalice. When John had baptised Jesus, he had proclaimed “Behold the Lamb of God!” (John 1:36) The Baptist’s right arm points dramatically to the crucified Christ. The eye may move to the attendant figures but Grünewald insists that it return to the dead Christ. 

In The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald describes the experience of Max Ferber on viewing the Isenheim crucifixion

The monstrosity of that suffering, which, emanating from the figures depicted, spread to cover the whole of Nature, only to flood back from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death, rose and ebbed within me like a tide. Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced — consciousness — and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next. (Sebald, 1993/1996)

Perhaps the sight of the dead Christ served to numb the pain and suffering of the patients who came to Isenheim for treatment. 

The fixed wings of the altarpiece provide a stark contrast to its horrifying centerpiece. On the left Saint Sebastion tranquilly suffers through his wounds. On the right Saint Anthony remains unperturbed by the demon threatening him through the window at his shoulder. Both Saints are invoked for protection against disease. Saint Sebastian actually survived the onslaught of arrows that pierced his body. Saint Anthony endured his temptations and lived to die of old age.

Radiographic examination of the Saint Sebastian has revealed that the head was painted over an earlier version. In After Nature, Sebald interprets this in terms of the existence of two painters: Grünewald and Mathis Nithart:

And indeed the person of Mathis Nithart
in documents of the time so flows into
the person of Grünewald that one
seems to have been the life,
then the death, too, of the other.
An X-ray photograph of the Sebastian
panel reveals beneath the elegiac
portrait of the saint
that same face again, the half-
profile only turned a tiny bit further
in the definitive overpainting.
Here two painters in one body
whose hurt flesh belonged to both
to the end pursued the study
of their own nature. At first
Nithart fashioned his self-portrait
from a mirror image, and Grünewald
with great love, precision and patience
and an interest in the skin
and hair of his companion extending
to the blue shadow of the beard
then overpainted it.
The martyrdom depicted is
the representation, to be sensed
even in the rims of the wounds,
of a male friendship wavering
between horror and loyalty.

 

Second View of the Altarpiece

On holy days the altarpiece was opened to show a sequence of paintings depicting episodes from the life of Christ. On the left is the Annunciation. The center, where once was presented the horror of the death of Jesus now shows the wonder of his birth. Heavenly angels provide a marvelous music while the baby Jesus plays with a golden rosary on the lap of his mother Mary. 

In 1938, Paul Hindemith completed an opera about Mathis de Maler. The prelude to the opera is a musical version of the concert of the angels in the Isenheim altarpiece. This was also used as the first movement of his 1935 Symphony Mathis der Maler. Hindemith introduces three themes: a setting of an old German hymn Es sungen drei Engeln (There sang three angels) mainly in the brass, a lively melody on the strings and a more peaceful tune on the flute. He then plays these themes against each other. The following is an illustration of the painting together with the initial introduction of the themes in the Symphony Matthis der Maler with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra led by Marin Alsop:

The beautiful angel in the foreground of Grünwald’s Concert of the Angels is playing a viola da gamba, the forerunner of the modern violoncello. Grünewald was clearly familiar with the instrument, which has been closely studied and reproduced. However, the direction of the bowing is strangely reversed from normal. It is difficult to understand what his means (Rasmussen 2001). Perhaps the angel is producing heavenly rather than earthly music. Even more disconcerting is the angel directly behind and above the foreground cellist. This angel is covered in iridescent green feathers and looks upset rather than entranced by the birth of Jesus. Mellinkoff (1988) proposed that this is the angel Lucifer who rebelled against God, brought about the fall of man, and is now aghast that man will be redeemed by the birth of Christ.

Between the concert of the angels and the representation of Mary and the infant Jesus is a vision of a woman, with a crown of flames, surrounded by a bright yellow and red aureole (see below). No one is sure who she represents. Malinkoff (1988) suggests that she is Ecclesia (Church), who with the birth of Christ takes over from Synagoga as the intermediary between man and God. Others (e.g., Réau, 1920, p 187-94; Scheja, 1969, p 48) consider her to be the Eternal Mary, Queen of Heaven, the woman “clothed with the sun” of Revelation 12. She is there to witness herself in her temporal form together with her infant son.  

The most striking painting in the second view of the altarpiece is the Resurrection on the right side. Christ arises from the tomb in glory, scattering and tumbling the guards:

Joris-Karl Huysmans, the first modern critics to consider the importance of Matthias Grünewald in Trois Primitifs (1905, reprinted in part in Huysmans & Ruhmer, 1958), described The Resurrection:

As the sepulchre opens, some drunks in helmet and armour are knocked head over heels to lie sprawling in the foreground, sword in hand; one of them turns a somersault further off, behind the tomb, and lands on his head, while Christ surges upwards, stretching out his arms and displaying the bloody commas on his hands.
This is a strong and handsome Christ, fair-haired and brown-eyed, with nothing in common with the Goliath whom we watched decomposing a moment ago, fastened by nails to the still green wood of a gibbet. All round this soaring body are rays emanating from it which have begun to blur its outline; already the contours of the face are fluctuating, the features hazing over, the hair dissolving into a halo of melting gold. The light spreads out in immense curves ranging from bright yellow to purple, and finally shading off little by little into a pale blue which in turn merges with the dark blue of the night.
We witness here the revival of a Godhead ablaze with life: the formation of a glorified body gradually escaping from the carnal shell, which is disappearing in an apotheosis of flames of which it is itself the source and seat.
… Having dared to attempt this tour de force, Grünewald has carried it out with wonderful skill. In clothing the Saviour he has tried to render the changing colours of the fabrics as they are volatilized with Christ. Thus the scarlet robe turns a bright yellow, the closer it gets to the light-source of the head and neck, while the material grows lighter, becoming almost diaphanous in this river of gold. As for the white shroud which Jesus is carrying off with him, it reminds one of those Japanese fabrics which by subtle gradations change from one colour to another, for as it rises it takes on a lilac tint first of all, then becomes pure violet, and finally, like the last blue circle of the nimbus, merges into the indigo-black of the night.

This is no ordinary representation of the Resurrection. Christ has not just risen from the tomb: he has also been transfigured into a vision of the Godhead. Scheja, 1988, p 40) notes how Grünewald has accurately depicted Dante’s vision of the Trinitarian Godhead at the end of The Divine Comedy published two centuries before his painting (Paradiso XXXIII 115-120):

Nella profonda e chiara sussistenza
de l’alto lume parvermi tre giri
di tre colori e d’una contenenza;

e l’un dall’altro come iri da iri
parea reflesso, e il terzo parea foco
che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri.

[There appeared to me in the profound and bright
reality of that exalted light
three circles of three colors and one size.

As rainbow by rainbow, one seemed reflected
by the second, and the third seemed a fire
that breathed as much from one as from the other.]
(translation by Louis Biancolli)

 

Third View of the Altarpiece

As well as the statues created by Niklaus Hagenauer the third view has two lateral paintings that are the obverse of the Madonna and Child and the Concert of Angels. These represent The Tribulations of Saint Anthony and The Meeting between Saint Anthony and Saint Paul.

Although often called the “temptations” of Saint Anthony, the subject of Grünewald’s painting on the right is more accurately considered his “tribulations.” Scheja (1969, p 28) tells the story from original biography of Saint Anthony written by Athanasius a few years after his death. When Anthony first went to the desert he was attacked by demons. Despite the pain, he refused to give up his devotion to Christ. Finally, the heavens opened, light streamed down from Christ in majesty, and the demons vanished. Anthony had passed his test and was worthy of his God. Anthony cried out the words written at the lower left of the painting (Hayum, 1989, p 79):     

Ubi eras ihesu boni, ubi eras? Quare not affuisti ut sanares vulnera mea?
[Where were you good Jesus, where were you? Why were you not there to heal my wounds?]

The poor wretch at the lower left of the painting represents a patient suffering from ergotism. The distal parts of his fingers have been lost to gangrene and his skin is covered with sores (Grzybowski et al, 2021). The image serves as an intermediary between the patients in the hospital and Saint Anthony. Even the fingers of Saint Anthony’s left hand are turning grey with incipient gangrene (Kluger& Brandozzi, 2023). The patients can see in the painting that their disease is the same as that of Saint Anthony. They can therefore hope that God may relieve their pain, just like he drove away the demons that tormented Saint Anthony. The following is Hindemith’s musical version of Saint Anthony and the Demons: from the beginning of the 3^rd movement of his Mathis der Maler symphony:

The painting on the left is as tranquil as that on the right is turbulent.  After his tribulations, Saint Anthony sought out Saint Paul, an older ascetic who had retired to the desert. Paul convinced him that the monastic life was worth pursuing. Although the meeting was reported to have taken place in a cave, Grünewald locates it in a peaceful wooded landscape with a gently doe acting as an intermediary between the two saints. In the background a stag waits patiently. On a high branch, a raven, accustomed to providing Paul with his daily slice of bread, gets ready to deliver two slices. The head of Saint Paul is another self-portrait of Grünewald (Scheja, 1969, pp 30-33; von Mücke, 2011)

 

Afterlife of the Altarpiece

The altarpiece remained in the abbey church at Isenheim until the French Revolution (1789-1799) led to the suppression of the monasteries. In 1852, the altarpiece was moved to the new Unterlinden Museum located in Colmar, about 25 km north of Isenheim. The museum is housed in what was once a convent for the Dominican sisters, originally built in 13^th Century.

After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Alsace became part of Germany. The unification of Germany bought with it a desire for a distinct national culture. Philosophers conceived a Northern or Gothic tradition in art, as distinguished from Mediterranean Classical art (Rosenblum, 1975; Stieglitz, 1989). Its characteristics were a sense of the sublime, an emotional intensity, a mystical predisposition, and a deep subjectivity (or inwardness, Innerlichkeit). Grünewald’s paintings fitted easily into these ideas.

During World War I, for safety’s sake, the altarpiece was taken away from Colmar to Munich, where it was exhibited to great acclaim. The peace arrangements after the war included a requirement that the altarpiece to be returned to Colmar. Since 1919, the altarpiece has lived there in the Unterlinden Museum. The following illustration shows how it is exhibited.

The visitor can go behind first section to see the paintings on the obverse side of The Crucifixion – The Annunciation and The Resurrection. And then behind the The Nativity (Angel Concert and Madonna with the Infant Jesus) to see The Temptation of Saint Anthony and The Meeting between Saint Paul and Saint Anthony.      

 

Otto Dix

Otto Dix (1891-1969) studied art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. When war was declared in 1914, he volunteered for the army and served for the duration of the war. He took part in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, was transferred for a while to the Eastern Front, and then back to Flanders for the end of the war. He was profoundly affected by the horrors he experienced. After the war he painted images representing both his ghastly memories of trench warfare and his anger at the hypocrisy and depravity of post-war German society. He was one of the painters of Der neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) Exhibition of 1925.

Dix became a professor at the Dresden Academy in 1927. A 1929 photograph by Hugo Erfurth is shown on the right. Between 1929 and 1932 he worked on a large triptych entitled Der Krieg (The War) based on old German triptychs especially that of Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (Bayer, 1920).

The left wing of the triptych, entitled Aufmarsch (Deployment), depicts the soldiers leaving for the frontline early in the morning before the mists have cleared.

The right wing, entitled Nachtlicher Ruckzug (Nightly Retreat) shows a soldier (a self-portrait of the artist) trying to bring a wounded colleague back to safety behind the frontlines.

 

The central section, Der Krieg, takes the place of the Crucifixion in a medieval altar. Instead of Christ on the cross

a rotting corpse has been hurled onto iron girders in similar fashion. His eye sockets have already become black holes, the teeth are bared, with what remains of his uniform hanging in tatters. (Bayer 1920)

The corpse points to another dead body on the right. This is clearly an illusion to Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece wherein John the Baptist points dramatically to the crucified Christ. The body to which the finger points is upside down and riddled with bullet holes in much the same way as Grünewald’s Christ was covered in sores. The background to these horrors is a landscape completely destroyed by artillery.

The predella of Dix’s triptych shows several soldiers lying down under what might be a camouflage screen. It is unclear whether they are dead or sleeping. If the latter there is a clockwise circular logic to the triptych: the exhausted soldiers will wake up, advance to the front again, engage in the murderous work of war, and then retreat, wounded and exhausted to sleep another night.

Dix’s description of the war was loathed by the Nazi government, who wished to portray war as an occasion for heroism rather than a field of horror. In 1933 Dix was dismissed from his position at the Dresden Academy. Many of his paintings were removed from galleries and destroyed. Some were included in the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in 1937. Dix saved the triptych, took it apart, and stored it in a friend’s farmhouse until after the war. The Galerie der Neue Meister (Gallery of Modern Masters) in Dresden purchased the painting in 1968.     

 

Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) studied music at Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium in Frankfurt and joined the Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra after graduation. He served in the German army on the frontlines in Alsace during the last year of the war.

After the war, he founded the Amar Quartet, playing the viola, and began to compose. During the 1930s he worked on his Opera Mathis der Maler, based on the life of Matthias Grünewald. As he was writing this music, he used some of the orchestral interludes in the opera to make his Symphony Mathis der Maler which was published in 1935.  The opera was not completed until 1938. Because the Nazis considered his music degenerate, Hindemith was unable to get the opera performed in Germany. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1938 and then to the United States in 1940.

As well as the modernity of the music, the subject matter of the opera was anathema to the Nazi powers (Bruhm, 1998, 2002; Paret, 2008; Watkins, 2002; Fuller, 1997). It revealed the horrors of war: the summary executions, the raping and pillaging. One of the scenes concerned the burning of Lutheran books as ordered by the Catholic Church. This made obvious reference to the Nazi book burnings which had begun in the early 1930s.

The opera has been performed only rarely. A 1977 production starred Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Mathis. A striking recent production in Vienna that was captured on DVD by Naxos in 2012.

The opera is concerned with the life of Matthias Grünewald after he completes the Isenheim altarpiece. Hindemith imagines that Mathis leaves the service of Albrecht von Brandenburg and joins the rebellion of the peasants. Throughout these terrible times, images from the altarpiece (and Hindemith’s musical versions thereof) return to comfort or to haunt the painter. During the rebellion, he takes care of Regina, a young woman whose father, one of the leaders of the rebellion, was cruelly executed before her eyes. The beginning of the 6^th scene of the opera finds them fleeing from the mercenaries through the forest of the Odenwald southeast of Frankfurt, Mathis tries to comfort the grieving Regina with the story of the Concert of Angels who played music at the nativity of Jesus. The following is part of the aria, as sung by Wolfgang Koch as Mathis and Katherina Tretyakova as Regina: 

             Alte Märchen woben
Uns fromme Bilder, die ein Widerscheinen
Des Höheren sind. Ihr Sinn ist dir
Fern, du kannst ihn nur erahnen.
Und frommer noch reden
Zu uns die Töne, wenn Musik, in Einfalt hier
Geboren, die Spur himmlischer Herkunft trägt.
Sieh, wie eine Schar von Engeln ewige Bahnen
In irdischen Wegen abwandelt. Wie spürt man jeden
Versenkt in sein mildes Amt. Der eine geigt
Mit wundersam gesperrtem Arm, den Bogen wägt
Er zart, damit nicht eines wenigen Schattens Rauheit
Den linden Lauf trübe. Ein andrer streicht
Gehobnen Blicks aus Saiten seine Freude.
Verhaftet scheint der dritte dem fernen Geläute
Seiner Seele und achtet leicht des Spiels.

              Wie bereit
Er ist, zugleich zu hören und zu dienen.

REGINA
Es sungen drei Engel ein süssen Gesang,
Der weit in den hohen Himmel erklang.

The following is a translation

                 Old fairy tales wove
Pious images for us that are a reflection
Of something higher. Their meaning is so
Far from you, that you can only guess.
And music speaks even more piously
When, born here in simplicity,
It brings a breath of heaven.
See how a host of angels eternally follow
Our earthly paths. How one feels each one
Is immersed in their gentle office. One plays the violin
With a wondrously bared arm, lightly bowing
Lest any roughness darken
Cloud the gentle melody. Another,
With an uplifted gaze, strokes joy from the strings.
The third seems captivated by the distant chiming
of his soul and hardly attends to the music.

                    How ready
he is to listen and serve at the same time.

REGINA
Three angels sang a sweet song
That resounded far into the heavens.

 

The Comfort of Images

Hindemith’s Mathis comforts the grieving Regina by describing to her his painting of the Concert of Angels. The world is difficult to understand. The suffering that occurs is often unjustified. So we tell ourselves stories – we weave together fairy tales – to make sense of the world. We can represent these stories in paintings and in music.

The story that Grünewald unfolds in the Isenheim altarpiece is the myth of a Son of God who suffered and died so that we may be redeemed and live forever. And the life of Saint Anthony who lived in holiness so that our illness can be cured. 

And even if these are only stories, the comfort they provide is real.

 

References

Andersson, C. (2003). Grünewald, Matthias [Gothart Nithart, Mathis; Gothardt-Neithardt, Matthis]. Grove Art Online.

Bayer, M. (2020).  Der Krieg: Otto Dix’s War Triptych, memory, and the perception of the First World War. In Hutchison, M., & Trout, S. (Eds.). Portraits of Remembrance. (pp 250-269) University of Alabama.

Bruhn, S. (1998). The temptation of Paul Hindemith: Mathis der Maler as a spiritual testimony. Pendragon. (difficult to find; preview in Google Books)

Bruhn, S, (2002). Wordless songs of love, glory, and resurrection: musical emblems of the holy in Hindemith’s saints. In Voicing the ineffable: musical representations of religious experience. (pp 157-188). Pendragon.

Bryda, G. C. (2018). The exuding wood of the cross at Isenheim. Art Bulletin, 100(2), 6–36.

Fuller, M. (1997). Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler: A parable for our times. New Blackfriars, 78(916), 260–267.

Grzybowski, A., Pawlikowska-Łagód, K., & Polak, A. (2021). Ergotism and Saint Anthony’s fire. Clinics in Dermatology, 39(6), 1088–1094.

Harrisville, R. A. (2004). Encounter with Grunewald. Currents in Theology and Mission, 31(1), 5-14.

Hayum, A. (1989). The Isenheim altarpiece: God’s medicine and the painter’s vision. Princeton University Press.

Huysmans, J.-K. & Ruhmer, E. (1958). Grünewald: the paintings. Phaidon Press.

Kluger, N., & Brandozzi, G. (2023). Digital necrosis in the Isenheim altarpiece (1512–1516). Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, 37(7), 1265–1267. 

Mayr, V. (2003). Hagenauer [von Hagnow; Hagnower], Nikolaus [Niclas]. Grove Art Online.

Mellinkoff, R. (1988). The devil at Isenheim: reflections of popular belief in Grünewald’s altarpiece. University of California Press.

Paret, P. (2008). Beyond Music: Hindemith’s Opera Mathis der Maler as political document. Historically Speaking, 9(5), 6–9.

Rasmussen, M. (2001). Viols, violists and Venus in Grunewald’s Isenheim Altar. Early Music, 29(1), 60–74.

Réau, L. (1920). Mathias Grünewald et le retable de Colmar. Berger-Levrault. (Available at archive.org)

Rosenblum, R. (1975). Modern painting and the northern romantic tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. Harper & Row.

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Schloss, M. F. (1963) Grünewald and the Chicago portrait. Art Journal, 23(1), 10-16.

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Ely Cathedral was originally situated on a low island in the middle of the Fens, a region of marshland in eastern England lying inland of the Wash. Because of the flatness of the surrounding land the cathedral could be seen from great distances, appearing as the “Ship of the Fens.” The marshes were drained in the 17^th Century, but it is still easy to imagine the building floating above the waters: the embodiment of Auden’s image of the English cathedrals:

Luxury liners laden with souls,
Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
(Auden, 1936, p 43; also McDiarmid, 1978, p 292)

The Present Cathedral

The following illustration shows the cathedral as viewed from the southeast.

The present building was begun in 1083 by the Normans soon after their conquest of England. They bought with them a style of architecture known as “Romanesque” on the continent but considered “Norman” in England. The style was characterized by large weight-bearing columns surmounted by semi-circular arches. As the years passed, additions, collapses and renovations to the original building left it with a blend of styles that still somehow achieve harmony rather than incoherence.

The following is the view of the cathedral from the south from Bentham (1771, Plate 42, scale 100 ft):

The West end of the cathedral shows its mixture of styles. The following illustration shows a engraving from King (1881, plate XII) as well as two modern photographs showing the Gothic arches on the Galilee Porch and the Norman arches on the south west transepts

The following is a floor plan of the cathedral:

The dashed semicircular lines in the Presbytery show the eastern extent of the original Norman cathedral.

Saxon Beginnings

The region of England northeast of London – comprising the present counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex – was settled by Angles and Saxons in the 5^th and 6^th Centuries CE. Multiple kingdoms were set up on the island of Britain: East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, and Kent. Augustine of Canterbury arrived in England in 597 CE; and the various Saxon kingdoms in England soon converted to Christianity.

Anna, the king of East Anglia (reigned 636-654 CE), a devout Christian, probably reigned in Exning – just east of present-day Cambridge. A large ancient earthen wall, known today as the Devil’s Dyke, stretching from the southern end of the Fens to the River Stour, appears to have built as a defense against the Mercian kingdom to the west. The following map shows the kingdom of East Anglia at the time of Anna:

Anna’s daughter Æthelthryth (or Etheldreda) was born in 636 CE (Keynes, 2003). In 652, at the age of 16, she was married to Tondberct, a prince who ruled over part of the Fens. This was a political marriage, designed to extend Anna’s domain, and Æthelthryth insisted on maintaining her virginity. As a wedding gift she was given the Isle of Ely in the Fens. The name “Ely” probable comes from the Old English elge meaning “region of eels.” Tonberct died in 655, and Æthelthryth retired to live in Ely.

After Anna died fighting against the Mercians at the battle of Bulcamp in 654, Æthelthryth was married in 660 for a second time to Ecgfrith, a 16-year-old prince of Northumbria. Once again, she insisted on maintaining her virginity. In 670, she formally took the veil as a nun and lived in the double monastery (for both monks and nuns) at Coldingham, in what is now southeast Scotland. In 672, in need of an heir, Ecgfrith decided that he wished to consummate his marriage, and sent armed men to apprehend his wife. She and her attendants fled to Ely; Ecgfrith’s men were prevented from capturing her by the tidal waters of the Fens. Æthelthryth then founded a new monastery at Ely, where she presided as abbess until her death in 679. The following illustration shows two of the capitals on the octagon pillars in Ely cathedral (from Bentham, 1771, plates 9 and 10): Æthelthryth’s taking of the veil, and her miraculous salvation by the rising waters of the Fens. On the right is a 1960 statue of Æthelthryth by Phillip Turner.

Little is known of the abbey at Ely after its founding. In 869 the Vikings conquered the kingdom of East Anglia and much of Northumbria and Mercia. Alfred the Great (849-899) ultimately prevented the Vikings from further expansion, but allowed the continuation of Danelaw in the eastern parts of England from 886 to 1066. The original abbey of Æthelthryth may have been destroyed or may have simply fallen into disuse during the early Viking period. However, Ely Abbey was re-founded toward the end of the 10^th Century as a monastery for monks alone. As his boat approached Ely, King Cnut (reign 1016-1035) was impressed by the music of the monks and wrote a poem, a fragment (perhaps the refrain) of which survives (Parker, 2018):

Merie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely
ða Cnut ching reu ðer by.
Roweþ cnites noer the lant
and here we þes muneches sæng.

[Sweetly sang the monks in Ely
When Cnut the king rowed by;
‘Row, men, nearer to the land
So we can hear the friars’ song.’]

 

The Norman Cathedral

Under the direction of Abbot Simeon, the Normans initiated the construction of a large abbey church in Ely in 1083. The remains of Saint Æthelthryth were moved from the old church to the new in 1106. Her marble tomb was placed in a shrine bedecked by gold and jewels behind the high altar. The building was granted cathedral status by Henry I 1109. The nave, central tower and transepts were completed by about 1140, and the western transepts and tower were finally finished by about 1190.

The nave is 72 meters long and 22 meters high. There are three levels: the arcade, gallery (or tribune) and clerestory, the last containing large windows for light (clerestory means “clear storey”). The proportions for these levels are 6:5:4 (Clifton-Taylor, 1986, p 36). The arcades of the gallery are divided into two and those of the clerestory into three. The columns alternate between piers with multiple shafts and piers with large cylindrical columns, providing a gentle visual rhythm. The aisles on either side of the main nave are each one half the width of the nave (Fernie, 2003). The roof was made of the same timbers that were used to provide the scaffolding when constructing the nave.

The following illustration shows on the left a diagram of the nave (Dehio & Bezold, 1887, plate 88), On the right is a modern photograph that shows its three levels, and at the bottom a photograph that illustrates the alternation of the main columns.

The monk’s door and the prior’s door from the cloisters into the nave were likely built and decorated in the 1130s. Both are intricately sculpted. The prior’s door (shown below in a plate from Bentham, 1771, and in a modern photograph) is surmounted by a tympanum containing Christ in Majesty surrounded by two angels. Though far less accomplished than the Romanesque sculptures in France, it has its own charm.

The Gothic Cathedral

The Galillee Porch was added to the west front of the cathedral in the first two decades of the 13^th Century. As we have already noted the style is early Gothic: the blind arcades decorating the façade have pointed arches, narrow columns, and trefoil openings.

A little later, the east end of the Cathedral was extended to form a Presbytery: a space for the monks to worship separate from the choir and the nave. This extension in a richly decorated Gothic style was completed in 1252 (Maddison, 2003). The large columns of the arcade are divided into multiple smaller columns and the pointed arches are geometrically ornamented. The tribune gallery has twin trefoiled openings beneath a large pointed arch. The clerestory has lancet windows with an inner row of cinquefoil arches. The stone vault is supported by tierceron ribs.

The following illustration shows a view of the choir and presbytery toward the east by John Eaton (2016) surrounded by two views of the north wall, the left by Arthur de Smet (1972) and the right from Broughton (2008):

In 1321, work began on a large separate Lady Chapel north of the choir and presbytery. Constructing the foundations for this new building led to the central section of the cathedral being undermined by water. The central bell tower of the cathedral collapsed in 1322, damaging parts of the north transept and the choir. Under the direction of Alan of Walsingham a new octagonal tower was built, with the stonework completed by 1328 (Maddison, 2003). The crowning glory of the tower was a magnificent “lantern” built of timber that allowed light to descend into the cathedral (completed in about 1340). The following illustration shows the octagon viewed from the western tower and a diagram of the carpentry underlying the lantern from Hewett (1974, plate 76):

The following illustration shows views of the lantern from the interior of the cathedral:

Because of the lantern, Ely cathedral provides a marvelous interplay of light and shadow. Frederick Evans took many photographs in 1897 and published these in Camera Work in 1903 (Lyden, 2020). Two of his images are below:

After the stonework of the octagon was completed Bishop Hotham and Akan of Walsingham then returned to complete the lady chapel – a wonder of Decorated English Gothic. The vault is supported by interconnecting ribs forming star shapes (lierne, from French lier, to tie, or stellar vaulting). This approach supports a wider vault than the simple tierceron ribbing. The large windows are supported by thin vertical columns that extend outward to provide a buttressing effect. The following illustration shows a photograph of the chapel and a diagram of the lierne vaulting.

The chapel was completed in the 1340s. The lower sections of the walls are decorated with vegetal patterns, giving the visitor a sense of being in a garden (Broughton, 2008). The present chapel is very different from the way it was in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries. At that time, numerous painted sculptures existed in the niches, and the windows were made of stained glass.

The Monastery

Ely Cathedral, like Canterbury, Durham, and Norwich, was a monastic cathedral. The monks at these cathedrals followed the Benedictine order. The bishop of a monastic cathedral was the titular abbot of the monastery, but the monks were essentially led by the prior. Although most of the old cathedrals in England were monastic, some cathedrals, such as Lincoln and Hereford were secular and had no associated monastery.

The monastery (or priory) at Ely was prosperous. Many of the medieval buildings of the monastery still stand. Some are used by King’s Ely School. The following plan shows the probable layout of the monastery (Dixon, 2003). The castle motte is the site of a fortress in Norman times.

The Reformation

As the years wore on the monastery at Ely became rich. The sale of indulgences brought in much money. Death acted like the church’s tax-collector, as those in need of heaven left their land and possessions to the church rather than to their children. Pilgrims to the shrine of Æthelthryth/Etheldreda were expected to make significant donations to the church. Æthelthryth was also called Saint Audrey. Ribbons bought at her shrine were called “St Audrey’s lace,” whence comes the word “tawdry” for overpriced finery. Some Bishops at Ely made special ornate chapels for themselves: Bishop Alcock (1486-1500) at the end of the north aisle and Bishop West (1515-33) at the end of the south aisle. It was easy to accuse the church of luxury and greed.

As the 16^th Century progressed, Henry VIII came to need both a new wife and a source of gold. In 1533 Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer allowed him to marry Anne Boleyn. In 1534, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chancellor, arranged for Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy declaring the king to be the head of the English Church. In 1537, Cromwell convened a synod of British bishops who produce a book The Institution of the Christian Man, espousing many of the principles proposed by Martin Luther. In 1839 Parliament passed a bill to allow the Dissolution of the Monasteries. All of the small monasteries were to be closed, their monks let go, and their assets expropriated by the king. The monasteries associated with the cathedrals were also to be closed, although some of their monks could remain as officers in the newly secularized cathedrals.

On 18 November, 1539, Prior Robert Seward and 23 other monks signed a deed of surrender of the monastery of Ely to Henry VIII (Duffy, 2020, pp 31-45). There was not much else they could do. The abbots of Gastonbury and Reading had been executed on November 13 for refusing to dissolve their houses. The monastery and cathedral were held at the pleasure of the monarch and its riches were duly plundered. In 1541 the cathedral was given a royal charter as a secular cathedral. The church which had been devoted to Saint Etheldreda and Saint Peter, was renamed “The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Ely.”

The bishop during this time was Thomas Goodrich, a colleague of Thomas Cranmer. Trained in theology at Cambridge University, he was appointed Bishop of Ely in 1534 and remained bishop until his death in 1554. After the dissolution of the monastery, he ordered the destruction of the shrine of Ethelreda, the defacement of the statues in the Lady Chapel, and the removal of the statues in the chapels of Bishop’s Alcock and West. Every one of the 147 statues of Mary and the other saints in the Lady Chapel was beheaded. Goodrich continued as bishop after the death of Henry in 1547; during the reign of Edward VI (1547-53), he was also appointed Lord Chancellor (1552). He died in 1554, before Mary (reign 1553-8) had time to pursue her vengeance.

The following illustration shows two photographs from the 1890s by Frederick Evans showing the mutilation of the statues in the Lady Chapel and the empty plinths on the gateway to Bishop West’s chapel. Also shown is the memorial brass to Thomas Goodrich, located on the floor of the south presbytery. The bishop holds in his right hand both a bible and the seal of England, emblematic of his chancellorship.

After the Reformation the cathedrals of England fell into disrepair. The architecture was contemptuously referred to as “Gothic” or barbaric (see Clifton-Taylor, 1986, pp 9-12). In 1699, the north west transept of Ely Cathedral collapsed (Fernie, 2003, p 96). There was no money to rebuild:

To this day, Ely looks like the wounded veteran of some forgotten war. (Jenkins, 2016, pp 91-2)

Watercolors by J. M. W. Turner from the 1790s show the cathedral octagon and the dilapidated Galilee Porch.

Repair

The cathedral was extensively restored during the 19^th Century: The roof of the nave was retimbered and painted; the windows were provided with stained glass; the choir was provided with new stalls and a beautifully carved choir screen; the high altar received an intricate reredos (from French arere, behind, dos, back).

The following illustration shows some of the carvings above the choir stalls. These depict episodes in the life of Jesus: the supper at Emmaus, the appearance of the risen Jesus to Thomas, and the ascension:

Ely in the Present

Most people in England no longer attend church, and those who believe that there is a God are equaled by those who believe that there is not. What should be the place of the church in modern society?

Intriguing to me are the modern statues that now adorn the cathedral. Below are illustrations of four of these works. Clockwise from the upper left are the Virgin Mary in the Lady Chapel urging us to exultation by David Wynne (2000), Christ and Mary Magdalene wondering at the mystery of the resurrection by David Wynne (1967), Christ in Majesty above the pulpit by Peter Ball (2000), and half-life-size statues by Sean Henry on the empty plinths in Bishop West’s chapel, part of an installation entitled Am I My Brothers Keeper? in 2024.

An optimistic view of the future is from Nicholas Orme (2017, p 262):

The most astonishing feature of cathedral history, when one has journeyed through its seventeen hundred years, is its immense and varied creativity. If we take buildings, there is the evolving history of their plans and construction, the sourcing of the materials, the labours of craftsmen, the elaboration of the decoration, and the successive layers of repair and restoration. There is the worship, complex in its calendar, its liturgical texts, the ways in which it is done, and the application of the worship to God, saints, or popular, needs. There is the vast range of arts involved in producing worship and its setting: sculpture, painting, stained glass, metalwork, fabrics, singing, instrumental music, and chorography. There is the written and spoken word in prayer- and hymn-books, preaching, inscriptions, archives, libraries, guide-books, and service-sheets.

A more restrained understanding of what it is like to visit a church when faith has passed away can be found in a 1954 poem by Philip Larkin entitled Church Going, the last verse of which reads:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

References

Atherton, I. (2003). The dean and chapter: reformation and restoration. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 169-192.

Auden, W. H. (1936). Look, stranger!  Faber & Faber

Bentham, J. (1771). The history and antiquities of the conventual and cathedral church of Ely : from the foundation of the monastery, A.D. 673, to the year 1771 : illustrated with copper-plates. Cambridge University Press.

Broughton, L. (2008). Interpreting Ely cathedral. Ely Cathedral Publications.

Clifton-Taylor, A. (1967, revised 1986). The cathedrals of England. Thames and Hudson.

Dehio, G., & Bezold, G. v (1887). Die kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes. Atlas 1 (Tafel 1-116). Stuttgart.

Dixon, P. (2003). The monastic buildings at Ely. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 144-155.

Duffy, E. (2020). A people’s tragedy: studies in reformation. Bloomsbury Continuum.

Eaton, J. (2016). English medieval cathedrals. Blurb.

Fernie, E. (2003). Architecture and sculpture of Ely Cathedral in the Norman period. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 97-11.

Hewett, C. A. (1974). English cathedral carpentry. Wayland.

Jenkins, S. (2016). England’s cathedrals. Little, Brown.

Keynes, S. (2003). Ely Abbey 672-1109. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 3-58.

King, R. J. (1881). Handbook to the cathedrals of England. Volume 3. Eastern Division: Oxford, Peterborough, Norwich, Ely, Lincoln. J. Murray. Available at archive.org.

Lyden, A. M. (2010). The photographs of Frederick H. Evans. J. Paul Getty Museum.

McDiarmid, L. S. (1978). W. H. Auden’s “In the Year of My Youth…” The Review of English Studies, 29(115), 267–312.

Maddison, J. (2003). The Gothic Cathedral: new building in a historic context. In Meadows & Ramsay, op cit, pp 113-141.

Meadows, P., & Ramsay, N. (2003). A history of Ely Cathedral. Boydell Press.

Orme, N. (2017). The history of England’s cathedrals. Impress Books.

Parker, E. (2018). ‘Merry sang the monks’: Cnut’s Poetry and the Liber Eliensis. Scandinavica, 57(1), 14-27.

In the 9^th and 10^th Centuries CE, Europe began to awaken from the has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Imposing churches were erected and many of these were decorated with sculptures. This new style of art and architecture, thought to be derived from that of the Roman Empire, has been called “Romanesque.” The sculpture from this time is full of a tremendous vitality and marked by a rich imagination. Some of the most impressive examples adorn the portal of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre in Moissac in southwestern France.

History of the Abbey

Moissac, situated on the confluence of the Garonne and Tarn rivers in southwest France (see map below), is surrounded by rich agricultural land. Legend has it that a monastic community was founded there in the 6^th Century CE by Clovis, the first king of the Franks, though the monastery likely began a century later (Vidal et al., 1979). Over the years the monastery was pillaged by various invaders: the Arabs in the 8^th Century, the Normans in the 9^th Century, and the Hungarians in the 10^th Century. In the 11^th Century, as more and more pilgrims began to travel to Santiago de Compostella in Spain (Oursel, 1970), Moissac became an important way-station on the route from Geneva (dotted purple line):

 

In 1047, Saint Odilon, the 4^th Abbot of Cluny, arranged for the monks in Moissac to be affiliated with the Benedictine Abbey at Cluny. In 1059, Durand de Bredon, archbishop of Toulouse, was installed as its first abbot. He arranged for the abbey church and cloisters to be rebuilt, and in 1063, the Abbaye de Saint Pierre de Moissac was reconsecrated. Abbot Durand is commemorated in a bas-relief sculpture in the east gallery of the cloisters (see illustration on the right adapted from Vidal et al, 1979). The sculptures adorning the portal and the porch were created under the direction of abbot Ansquitil (Franzé, 2015) during the years from 1100 to 1115 (Forsyth, 2010).   

 

The Concept of “Romanesque”

The architecture and sculpture of the middle of the 10^th to the beginning of the 13^th Centuries is usually considered “Romanesque,” a term (roman in French) first used by Charles de Gerville (1769-1853) in the early 19^th Century (Charles & Carl, 2012). He proposed that the style was a revival of the art and architecture of the Roman world before the Barbarian invasions. In England, Romanesque architecture is often called “Norman” since it came with the Norman Invasion in the 11^th Century.  

The key characteristic of Romanesque architecture was the use round arches (Toman, 2004, pp 24-30; Charles & Carl, 2012, p 17). The transition to pointed arches in the late 12^th Century marked the onset of “Gothic” architecture. Both terms are inaccurate: Romanesque architecture has little to do with the Romans, and Gothic architecture has nothing to do with the Goths.

The period of time between the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE and the rise of the Romanesque after 1000 CE has often been considered a time of ignorance and violence – the European “Dark Ages.” However, such a concept is inappropriate. Multiple separate kingdoms existed during this time, and each of these fostered its own learning, art and architecture. The Visigothic kingdom ruled much of Spain until the Arab Conquest in the 8^th Century. The Merovingian dynasty governed France from the 5^th to 8^th Century. The Carolingian Empire (the precursor of the Holy Roman Empire) controlled much of France and Germany in the 9^th Century. The kingdom of Asturias ruled northwest Spain in the 8^th to 10^th Centuries. The Vikings established the Duchy of Normandy in northwest France the 10^th Century. Celtic monasteries in Ireland sent their missionaries and their artists back to convert and teach the people of the old Roman Empire. And Europe could not help but be affected by the Islamic art of Moorish Spain, and the magnificent art of the Byzantine Empire and Ravenna. The period of the so-called Dark Ages was actually a time of intense artistic ferment, wherein different styles came together and interacted (Busch & Lohse, 1966; Oursel, 1973, pp 13-86; Fleischer, 2004).  

Romanesque architecture differs from Roman architecture in its use of steeples and towers. Christian churches differ from Roman temples in their concentration on interior teaching rather than external show. Romanesque sculpture differs from Roman sculpture in its vitality and imagination, characteristics that it learned from Celtic and Norse carvings, in an iconography that follows Byzantine precedents, and in an ornamental geometry that largely comes from Islam.

The French language is particularly confusing in its description of artistic styles. “Romanesque” is roman in French, and “Roman” is romain. The word romanesque in French actually means “romantic” or “novelistic.” In French, the noun roman meaning “novel” derives from an earlier word romanz, meaning “story” (or “romance”). Another use of the French term romanesque is to describe the European languages that derived from Latin, equivalent in English to “romance” The only word that is equivalent in French and English is romantique, “romantic”

 

The Portal

The following diagram shows the south portal of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre. Sculpture adorns all parts of the portal as well as the walls of the porch in which it is located:

Tympanum

The tympanum represents the vision of John as described in Revelation (80-100 CE). Though some have proposed that the author of the Gospel of John also wrote this Apocalypse, most scholars now believe that Revelation came from a different person: a Christian prophet who retired to meditate and write on the island of Patmos off the coast of Asia Minor near Ephesus (Koester, 2014, pp 65-69; Pagels, 2012, pp 2-3). The first of John’s visions is striking:   

And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.

And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. (Revelation 4: 2-7)

Christ in majesty (Maiestas Domini) is the focus of this vision. This type of representation – a bearded Christ, wearing a crown, seated on a throne, holding a book, his head surrounded by a halo that usually incorporated a crucifix – had developed over the preceding centuries in illuminated manuscripts. The following illustration shows examples from the Codex Amiatinus (700-720), the Godescalc Evangelistary (783) and the Bamberg Apocalypse (1000-1020). 

 

The following is a bas-relief sculpture of Christ in Majesty from the 7^th-Century sarcophagus of Saint Agilbert in Jouarre, about 70 km east of Paris. 

The Moissac tympanum represents in monumental stone the words of the prophet John.

 

In the center, Christ in Majesty is surrounded by four creatures and two angels (Schapiro & Finn, 1985, pp 77-104; Vidal et al., 1979, pp 95-99). The feet of Christ rest upon a crystalline sea, as described in the passage from Revelation, but not in the illuminations illustrated above. Bede’s interpretation (early 8^th Century) of this is that it represents the baptism that is necessary for Christian salvation (Wallis, 2013, p 134).

The setting for Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose is a monastery loosely based on the Sacra di San Michele, an abbey on Mount Pirichiano in Piedmont, Italy. However, the portal of the fictional abbey church is clearly based on that in Moissac (Geese, 2004, p 259). The young monk Adso describes his impression of the Christ in Majesty:

I saw a throne set in the sky and a figure seated on the throne. The face of the Seated One was stern and impassive, the eyes wide and glaring over a terrestrial humankind that had reached the end of its story; majestic hair and beard flowed around the face and over the chest like the waters of a river, in streams all equal, symmetrically divided in two. The crown on his head was rich in enamels and jewels, the purple imperial tunic was arranged in broad folds over the knees, woven with embroideries and laces of gold and silver thread. The left hand, resting on one knee, held a sealed book, the right was uplifted in an attitude of blessing or—I could not tell—of admonition. The face was illuminated by the tremendous beauty of a halo, containing a cross and bedecked with flowers, while around the throne and above the face of the Seated One I saw an emerald rainbow glittering. Before the throne, beneath the feet of the Seated One, a sea of crystal flowed, and around the Seated One, beside and above the throne, I saw four awful creatures—awful for me, as I looked at them, transported, but docile and dear for the Seated One, whose praises they sang without cease.

Surrounding the central figure of Christ are four creatures. Although there are other interpretations, most scholars suggest that these creatures represent the writers of the four gospels since each is holding a book:

Matthew has the human face because he begins his gospel with Jesus’ human genealogy; Mark is the lion because he begins with a voice roaring in the desert; Luke is the ox because he begins with offering in the temple; and John is the eagle because of the book’s soaring opening lines. (Koester, 2014, p 353).

Each of the creatures has six wings. Bede considered the number six auspicious because it is both the sum and product of the first three numbers (Wallis, 2013, p 135). The sculptural representations of the four creatures, with their wings and books, are marvelously dynamic – they twist themselves toward the focus of their praise. There is a striking contrast between the immobility of the central Christ and the movement of the surrounding creatures: one exists in eternity whereas the others try to portray this in human time. Beside the creatures are two angels, each holding a scroll, unopened on the left and open on the right.    

Surrounding the central group are 24 “elders” arrayed in white gowns and wearing golden crowns. No one knows who they represent. They may be: the elders of the Christian Church in Jerusalem; the Christian Apostles and the leaders of the tribes of Israel; the whole church composed of both priests and people; or those who have already died and been resurrected (Quispel, 1979, p 49; Koester, 2024, pp 360-363; Wallis, 2013, p 136). Twenty-four is another auspicious number: the product of the first four integers.

Hearn (1981, pp 170-172) stresses the remarkable variability of the elders, who differ in the posture of their legs or arms, in the way they hold their instruments, in the shape and ornamentation of their crowns, and in the decorations of their robes. Yet all the elders are the same in that they are looking at Christ.

 

 

Each of the elders holds a stringed instrument (probably a version of the vielle or medieval fiddle) but the number of strings and the shape of the sounding body vary from elder to elder. Only one appears to be actually playing his instrument with a bow (see right). Most of the elders also hold a goblet in their hand.

 

In The Name of the Rose, Adso is completely entranced by the elders:

Around the throne, beside the four creatures and under the feet of the Seated One, as if seen through the transparent waters of the crystal sea, as if to fill the whole space of the vision, arranged according to the triangular frame of the tympanum, rising from a base of seven plus seven, then to three plus three and then to two plus two, at either side of the great throne, on twenty-four little thrones, there were twenty-four ancients, wearing white garments and crowned in gold. Some held lutes in their hands, one a vase of perfumes, and only one was playing an instrument, all the others were in ecstasy, faces turned to the Seated One, whose praises they were singing, their limbs also twisted like the creatures’, so that all could see the Seated One, not in wild fashion, however, but with movements of ecstatic dance—as David must have danced before the Ark—so that wherever their pupils were, against the law governing the stature of bodies, they converged on the same radiant spot. Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image.  Bodies inhabited in every part by the Spirit, illuminated by revelation, faces overcome with amazement, eyes shining with enthusiasm, cheeks flushed with love, pupils dilated with joy: this one thunder-struck by a pleasurable consternation, that one pierced by a consternated pleasure, some transfigured by wonder, some rejuvenated by bliss, there they all were, singing with the expression of their faces, the drapery of their tunics, the position and tension of their limbs, singing a new song, lips parted in a smile of perennial praise. (p 42)

The following photographs of some of the elders and their ecstasy:

The Trumeau

Carved from one piece of stone, the trumeau (deriving from the Germanic root thruma, trunk, stump) of the Moissac portal is one of the most striking pieces of Romanesque sculpture (Vidal et al, 1979, pp 99-100; Schapiro, 1931, pp 525-529; Schapiro & Finn, 1985, pp 128-132). On the front of the pillar are arrayed three pairs of lions. The lions are similar in style to the lion of Mark in the tympanum. Each lion is definitely sexed with either female breasts or male genitalia. The iconography of lions harkens back to the Ishtar gate of Babylon, and to Coptic sculptures. Their intertwining owes much to the complex patterns of Islamic imagery. Behind the lions is a pattern of vines and rosettes.  

 

On the sides of the trumeau are carved sinuous and elongated representations of the prophet Jeremiah with an open scroll and the apostle Paul with a book of his letters. Jeremiah looks downward in melancholy as he laments the state of Jerusalem and foresees the Babylonian captivity. Paul looks upward with hope for the redemption offered to those who elect Christ as their savior. My intuition is that the sculpture of Paul may be a portrait of the abbot Ansquitil, who devised the iconography of the portal and supervised its construction.

 

The Birth and Childhood of Jesus

The walls of the porch portray two narratives related to salvation and damnation (Schapiro & Finn, 1985, pp 107-126; Forsyth, 2002). On the east wall are represented episodes from the birth and childhood of Jesus. In the lower section of the wall are the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Adoration of the Magi. Though these were damaged during the French Revolution, the upper panel of the wall is well preserved.

 

It represents from right to left: the presentation in the temple (Luke 2; 23-32), the angel warning Joseph that Herod is planning to massacre the infants of Bethlehem and the flight to Egypt (Matthew 2: 13-23), and the fall of the idols of Heliopolis.

The last episode may derive from a prophecy of the Messiah in Jeremiah 43: 11-13:

And when he cometh, he shall smite the land of Egypt, and deliver such as are for death to death; and such as are for captivity to captivity; and such as are for the sword to the sword.

And I will kindle a fire in the houses of the gods of Egypt; and he shall burn them, and carry them away captives: and he shall array himself with the land of Egypt, as a shepherd putteth on his garment; and he shall go forth from thence in peace.

He shall break also the images of Bethshemesh, that is in the land of Egypt; and the houses of the gods of the Egyptians shall he burn with fire.

Heliopolis (Greek) and Bethshemesh (Hebrew) both mean “city of the sun.” A passage in one of the apocrypha describes the destruction of the idols and temples of Egypt when the Holy Family arrived for their sojourn there (Forsyth (2002; Franzé, 2015). The fall of the idols may also relate to the success of the First Crusade which had recently liberated Jerusalem in 1098 (Franzé, 2015).

 

Dives and Lazarus

The upper sculptures of the west wall of the porch recount the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-26).

There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:

And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Dives is the Latin word for a rich man, and Lazarus is the name of a beggar, derived from the Hebrew Eleazar or “God is my help” (Lazarus in this parable is not the Lazarus that Jesus later raised from the dead. Their common name is just coincidence).

During his life, Dives enjoyed his luxury and took no notice of Lazarus. After they died, Lazarus was taken to Abraham’s bosom whereas Dives went to hell. Justice was served. The parable has always been popular. The poor are more numerous than the rich.

 

The right side of the Moissac tableau shows Dives eating a sumptuous meal. He pays no heed to Lazarus, who lies on the ground in the lower center part of the panel, beset by dogs. At his death Lazarus is taken by the angel to the bosom of Abraham. This is in accord with the law as personified on the far left of the sculpture. The fate of Dives is played out in a separate representation lower down on the wall (not illustrated). Devils take both his soul and his accumulated riches. Like Dives, this sculpture has not survived well.

An old English ballad, dating from medieval times, retells the story with the refrain

Then Lazarus laid him down and down
And down at Dives’ door
“Some meat, some drink, brother Dives,
Bestow upon the poor”

Ralph Vaughan-Williams composed Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus for Harp and String Orchestra (1940), based on various versions of the ballad.

Henderson (1972, p 90) points out that the parable of Dives and Lazarus follows appropriately from the warnings of the prophet John that come immediately before his vision of Christ in Majesty:

Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:

I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.

As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent. (Revelation 3:17-19)

 

The Artists

The overall conception of the portal and the cloister of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre has long been attributed to the Abbot Ansquitil. The chronicle of Aymeric de Peyrac, an abbot of Moissac in the 14^th Century wrote:

Dictus Ansquitilus fecit fieri portale pulcherrimum [The said Ansquitil arranged for the most beautiful portal to be made] (quoted by Vidal et al 1979, p 96)

The central pillar of the west gallery of cloister (illustrated on the right) has an intricately carved epigraph that reads

ANNO AB INCARNATIONE ÆTERNI PRINCIPIS MILLESIMO CENTESIMO FACTVM EST CLAUSTRVM ISTVD TEMPORE DOMNI ANSQUITILII ABBATIS AMEN VVV MDM RRR FFF

De la Haye (2023, p 133-135) suggests that the final abbreviations might have represented

VIR VITÆ VENERABILIS / MOYSSIACENSEM DOMUM MELIORAVIT / RESTITUIT RESTAURAVIT REXIT / FAUSTE FORTUNATE FELICITER,

Thus, a full translation would read

In the year 1100 following the incarnation of the Eternal Lord, this cloister was erected, in the time of the Abbot Ansquitil: a man of venerable life who improved, rebuilt, restored and governed the house of Moissac, favored, fortunate and felicitous

He also suggests that the fish scale (écaille in French, escata in the old Occitan language) ornamentation at the top of the pillar is a punning reference to the name Ansquitil.

The names of the sculptors who worked under the direction of the learned abbot remain unknown. Vidal et al (1979, p 96, my translation), however, notes

By a detail, usually unnoticed or forgotten, we know their person, if we do not know their name; because we can see them represented to the left and right of the tympanum, under the second arch: one in a working position, tools in hands, a bearded man in the prime of life; the other, young and beardless with a broad and blissful face, identifiable by the secret sign of initiation of the bare foot. They contemplate their work.

 

Doorway to Eternity

The doorway to a church marks the boundary between the problems of the world and the peace that comes with salvation. Just before he describes his vision of Christ in Majesty, John of Patmos conveys Christ’s message: 

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. (Revelation 3: 20)

Vernery (2019) comments on how the doorway is the threshold between a world wherein time and mortality hold sway and a life attuned to the mysteries of eternity. The sculptural representations provide material images of a spiritual idea:

La perception sensible des sculptures donne lieu à la construction d’une image mentale rendue une par la contemplation. Une fois cette forme conceptuelle mise en place en l’esprit, l’homme est amené à se détacher de la sensation corporelle. Laissant les images matérielles sur le parvis de l’abbatiale en en franchissant physiquement l’espace, il conserve mentalement ce qu’elles ont éveillé en lui.

[The perception of the sculptures creates a mental image that becomes unified by contemplation. Once this conceptual form becomes established in the mind, one becomes detached from bodily sensation. Leaving the material images on the square in front of the abbey church while physically crossing the space, one mentally preserves what they awakened]

The spiritual idea is the concept of Christ in Majesty. This is what separates the temporal from the eternal

Vernerey (2020) also remarks about how the very process of sculpting, wherein matter is removed to reveal the hidden form, is analogous to the crossing from the outer world into the inner mysteries. Just as the process of sculpture extracts images from raw material, so the entry into the church extracts the soul from the temporal world.

The present is much different from the days when a hundred monks led lives of prayer and ritual in Moissac. In 1793 the mobs of the French Revolution drove the monks from the abbey and damaged many of the statues that were easily accessible. Years later, the abbey church became a simple parish church. The cloister and other remaining monastery buildings became a museum.  

In our secular age we no longer believe in the specifics of salvation that Ansquitil arranged to be displayed in stone. Yet the portal still makes us think of processes beyond the flow of time, that we can write about and wonder at.

 

References

Busch, H., & Lohse, B. (1966). Pre-Romanesque art. Macmillan.

Charles, V., & Carl, K. (2012). Romanesque Art. Parkstone-International

de la Haye, R. (1995, revised 2023) Apogée de Moissac. L’abbaye clunisienne Saint-Pierre de Moissac à l’époque de la construction de son cloître et de son grand portail, Maastricht.

Eco, U. (1980, translated W. Weaver, 1983). The name of the rose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Eco, U. (translated W. Weaver, 1984). Postscript to The Name of the Rose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Fleischer, J. (2004). Pre-Romanesque church walls and their “language.” In Petersen, N. H., Clüver, C., & Bell, N. (Eds.). Signs of change: transformations of Christian traditions and their representation in the arts, 1000-2000. (pp 247-264) Rodopi.

Forsyth, I. H. (2002). Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro’s Legacy. Gesta, 41(2), 71–93.

Forsyth, I. H. (2010). The date of the Moissac Portal. In Maxwell, R. A. & Ambrose, K. Current directions in eleventh- and twelfth-century sculpture studies. (pp 77-99). Brepols.

Franzé, B. (2015). Moissac et l’oeuvre de l’abbé Ansquitil (1085-1115): un discours de penitence. Hortus Artium Medievalium, 21, 385-405

Geese, U. (2004). Romanesque sculpture. In R. Toman (Ed.). Romanesque: architecture, sculpture, painting. (pp 256-380). H. F. Ullman (Tandem).

Hearn, M. F. (1981). Romanesque sculpture: the revival of monumental stone sculpture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Cornell University Press, 1981.

Henderson, G. (1972). Early Medieval. Penguin Books.

Koester, C. R. (2014). Revelation: a new translation with introduction and commentary. (Anchor Bible). Yale University Press.

Oursel, R (Ed.) (1970). Les Chemins de Saint-Jacques: textes de saint Augustin et des Miracles de saint Jacques. Zodiaque.

Oursel, R. (1973, 1976). Floraison de la sculpture romane. 1. Les grands découvertes. 2. Le coeur et la main. Zodiaque.

Pagels, E. H. (2012). Revelations: visions, prophecy, and politics in the book of Revelation. Viking.

Quispel, G. (1979). The secret Book of Revelation: the last book of the Bible. McGraw-Hill.

Schapiro, M. (1931). The Romanesque sculpture of Moissac. The Art Bulletin, 13(3), 249–351; 13(4), 464-531

Schapiro, M., & Finn, D. (1985). The Romanesque sculpture of Moissac. Georges Braziller.

Toman, R. (Ed.). (2004). Romanesque: architecture, sculpture, painting. H. F. Ullman (Tandem).

Vernerey, É. (2020). En deux temps, un mouvement. Définir la temporalité du sacré par la sculpture sur le porche de Moissac. Temporalités

Vidal, M., Maury, J., & Porcher, J. (1979). Quercy roman. (3rd Ed.). Zodiaque.

Wallis, F. (2013). Bede: Commentary on Revelation. Liverpool University Press.

 

 

In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.

Early Life

Lawrence’s father Sir Thomas Chapman (1846-1919) was a gentleman landowner in Ireland, who had married a vindictively religious wife and fathered four daughters. In the late 1870s he hired a young Scotswoman, Sarah Lawrence, as a governess for his daughters. He soon fell in love with Sarah, who became pregnant and gave birth to a son in 1885. After his wife finally found out, Chapman decided to leave his family and moved with Sarah to Wales, where he assumed her surname for the sake of respectability. In 1888, Thomas Edward, was born. Three more sons were born and in 1896 the “family” settled in Oxford, where Lawrence and his brothers attended the City of Oxford High School for Boys.   

Lawrence read history at Jesus College in Oxford. His honors thesis on the architecture of the Crusader castles (Lawrence, 1910) was based on a 3-month walking tour of Ottoman Syria in the summer of 1909. The main conclusion of the thesis was that Crusader castles followed the principles of European fortifications and did not absorb any influences from local architecture. The illustration below shows  Lawrence’s pen-and-ink sketch of the south-east corner of Sahyun castle.  

Selim Ahmed

After graduating in 1910, Lawrence joined an archeological expedition to Carchemish to investigate the remains of the Hittite civilization (2nd millennium BCE), staying there until the outbreak of the war in 1914. While in Carchemish he took an intelligent young Arab boy, Selim Ahmed (1896-1918), nicknamed “Dahoum” (dark one), as his apprentice (Sattin, 2014, pp 200-202; Wilson 1989, pp 543-545). Selim nursed him during a severe attack of dysentery in 1911. For the last three years of Lawrence’s time in Syria, the two of them lived together, Lawrence teaching Selim mathematics, English and photography, and Selim helping Lawrence with his Arabic. Their relationship was intense; no one knows whether it remained platonic or became physical. The following paired photographs show Lawrence (left) trying on Selim’s clothes.  

In the introductory chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935, pp 39-40) Lawrence recalled a visit in 1912 with Dahoum to the Qasr of Ibn Wardan, a 6^th Century Byzantine castle built by Justinian I near Hama in northern Syria (Sattin, 2024, pp 164-165 provides an earlier version of the story).

The common base of the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose’.

But at last Dahoum drew me: ‘Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all’, and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. ‘This,’ they told me, ‘is the best: it has no taste.’ My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.

The Canadian poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen, wrote a set of poems about T. E. Lawrence. In one she recounts the visit to the Qasr of Ibn Wardani. The poem ends

                                          We call
this room the sweetest of them all,

You said.

            And I thought: Because there is nothing here.

I knew then that you possessed nothing of me, and I
             possessed nothing of you, Dahoum.
You were wealthy and stuffed with a wondrous nothing
             that filled the room and everything around.

You looked into my eyes, the windows to my soul,
             and said that because they were blue
You could see right through them, holes in my skull,
             to the quiet powerful sky beyond.

While he was in Carchemish, Lawrence began writing a book entitled Seven Pillars of Wisdom about the major cities of the Middle East (Aleppo, Beirut, Cairo, Constantinople, Damascus, Smyrna, and Medina). The title comes from Proverbs 9:1:

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars

“Seven” had no specific meaning: it was just considered an auspicious number. Lawrence never completed the book and destroyed the drafts that he had written. He was later to use the title for his memoir of the Arab Revolt.

Soon after the war began, Lawrence enlisted and served in Cairo as an intelligence officer. Dahoum was given a stipend to stay at Carchemish to watch over the archeological site. Their halcyon days in northern Syria came to an end.

Lawrence dedicated Seven Pillars of Wisdom to S. A. He never explained who this was but almost everyone now agrees that it was Selim Ahmed (see Knightley & Simpson, 1969, pp 184-188, for reasoning). The book is prefaced with a poem to S. A. that begins

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
     and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house
     that your eyes might be shining for me
                                                          When we came.  

Dahoum died of typhus in 1918 before the Arab and British forces reached Damascus. Lawrence appears to have found this out in one of his trips behind the enemy lines. The epilogue to Seven Pillars of Wisdom begins

Damascus had not seemed a sheath for my sword, when I landed in Arabia: but its capture disclosed the exhaustion of my main springs of action. The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we reached Damascus.

Selim Ahmad was the private passion driving Lawrence as he led the Arab forces in their search for freedom.   

 

The Beginnings of the Arab Revolt

In June, 2016, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, rebelled against Ottoman rule in the Hejaz (the western region of the Arabian Peninsula). By July his forces had captured the holy city of Mecca and the port of Jeddah. However, the Turks repulsed the Arabs when they tried to take Medina. The British hoped that the Arab Revolt would pin down Ottoman troops, and thereby assist the British in their advance into Palestine. In correspondence with Hussein, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, made vague assurances of support for a self-governing Arabia from Palestine to the Indian Ocean and from Aleppo to Aden. The British likely thought that Husein’s revolt would not succeed, and that they would therefore not be required to fulfil their promises. Nevertheless, they sent Captain T. E. Lawrence to be a liaison officer with Hussein in October 1917. He identified Hussein’s son, Faisal bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi, as the best leader of the Arab forces. Together they gathered together warriors from other tribes, and received supplies from the British in the Red-Sea ports of Yanbu and Weijh.

Faisal suggested that it would be much more comfortable for Lawrence to wear Arab clothes (see photograph on right):     

Suddenly Feisal asked me if I would wear Arab clothes like his own while in the camp. I should find it better for my own part, since it was a comfortable dress in which to live Arab-fashion as we must do. Besides, the tribesmen would then understand how to take me. The only wearers of khaki in their experience had been Turkish officers, before whom they took up an instinctive defence. If I wore Meccan clothes, they would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might slip in and out of Feisal’s tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting about on the ground; and the Arab things, which I had learned to manage before the war, were cleaner and more decent in the desert. Hejris [Faisal’s slave] was pleased, too, and exercised his fancy in fitting me out in splendid white silk and gold-embroidered wedding garments which had been sent to Feisal lately (was it a hint?) by his great-aunt in Mecca (Lawrence, 1935, p 126).

The following photograph shows the Arab forces at Yanbu with Faisal at the head and Lawrence (in his new white robes) on a camel behind him.

 

Aqaba

In early 1917, Lawrence convinced Auda Abu Tayeh, known as the “Desert Falcon”, to join the Arab Revolt. Auda was the leader of the Howeitat, a Bedouin tribe in the western part of the Arabian desert. Auda, Sharif Nasr of Syria, Lawrence, and a group of about 50 fighters undertook an arduous journey from Wejh north into the desert. This journey was a clandestine route toward the port of Aqaba. If the Turks noted the Arabian forces, they would likely believe that they were headed further north toward Amman or Damascus. As thy came out of the desert, they attracted many local Arabs to their cause so that their numbers swelled to several hundred. They then turned toward the southwest, crossed the railway and attacked Aqaba. The map below shows the Arab route in purple. The port was impregnable from the sea – the British Royal Navy had unsuccessfully tried to take the city earlier in the war. However, it was not well defended from a land attack. Led by Auda and Lawrence, the Arab forces captured Aqaba in July 2017. The attack on Aqaba was one of the great scenes in David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. For the film, the town was recreated on a beach in Spain:

 

After the capture of Aqaba, Lawrence and a few Arab companions rode by camel across the Sinai desert to Suez (dotted purple line on the map). He arranged for the British Navy to send money and supplies to Aqaba and to take the prisoners of war back to Egypt.

The British had not suggested that Lawrence urge the Arabs to capture Aqaba. Lawrence was acting on his own recognizance. The British likely wanted the Arab Revolt to stay confined to the southern regions of the Hejaz. The victory at Aqaba was crucial to the success of the Arab Revolt. Thenceforth, British could supply the Arabs as they moved northward toward Damascus.

 

The illustrations below show photographs of a flag bearer at the actual battle of Aqaba, and of Lawrence on his camel after the victory.  

After returning to Aqaba from Egypt, Lawrence spent time in Wadi Rum with Faisal, who had come to join the forces of Auda in Aqaba. Wadi Rum was soon to serve as the base for the armored cars that the British supplied to aid the Arabs. The following photographs show the striking granite and sandstone cliffs around the Wadi and a spring that Lawrence found.

Lawrence (1935, p 355) described the spring:

From this rock a silver runlet issued into the sunlight. I looked in to the spout, a little thinner than my wrist, jetting out firmly from a fissure in the roof, and falling with that clean sound into a shallow, frothing pool, behind the step which served as entrance. The walls and roof of the crevice dripped with moisture. Thick ferns and grasses of the finest green made it a paradise just five feet square. Upon the water-cleansed and fragrant ledge I undressed my soiled body, and stepped into the little basin, to taste at last a freshness of moving air and water against my tired skin. It was deliciously cool. I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream, and rub the travel-dirt away.

In Aqaba the Arab factions consolidated into a formidable fighting force. The main leaders of the Arab Revolt are illustrated below (photos from Arab Revolt website):

Asraq

After Aqaba was taken, Lawrence and the Arab forces moved to the north. Beginning in late 1917 Lawrence used the ruins of Qasr al Asraq about 100 km east of Amman as a desert base for attacking the Hejaz Railway and the Turkish troops that tried to keep it open.

The oasis of Asraq had been used since Roman times, though the present ruins date from 1237 CE when ‘Izz ad-Din Aybak built a fortress there using basalt stone. Lawrence was particularly impressed by the huge stone doors in the gatehouse. Though each door weighed more than a ton they still swung shut:

The door was a poised slab of thick basalt, a foot thick, turning on pivots of itself, socketed into threshold and lintel. It took a great effort to start swinging and at the end went shut with a clang and crash which made tremble the west wall of the old castle (Lawrence, 1935, p 436)  

Asraq was an oasis that the northern end of the Wadi Sirhan, the ancient trading route between Syria and Dumat-al Jandal in Arabia. Lawrence was fascinated by the site and its relation to the ancient (5^th– and 6^th Century CE) Syrian kingdoms of Ghassan and Hira:

Then the blue fort on its rock above the rustling palms, with the fresh meadows and shining springs of water, broke on our sight. Of Azrak, as of Rumm, one said ‘Numen inest’. Both were magically haunted: but whereas Rumm was vast and echoing and God-like, Azrak’s unfathomable silence was steeped in knowledge of wandering poets, champions, lost kingdoms, all the crime and chivalry and dead magnificence of Hira and Ghassan. Each stone or blade of it was radiant with half-memory of the luminous, silky Eden, which had passed so long ago. (Lawrence, 1935, p 414).

The following illustration shows some recent photographs from the site:

The following are two of Lawrence’s own photographs from his time in Asraq: one showing the explosion of a mine on the Hejaz Railway near Deraa and one showing the fort at Asraq:

 

The Incident in Deraa

The crucial episode in Lawrence’s account of the Arab Revolt in Seven Pillars of Wisdom happened in Deraa in late November, 1917. According to Lawrence (1935, Chapter 80), he went there dressed in Arab clothes together with Faris, an elderly Arab, to reconnoiter the approaches to the railway station. He was arrested by a Turkish soldier (who ignored his companion), and taken to the barracks. There he was cleaned up and, in the evening, presented to the Turkish governor (or ‘Bey’), who called him beautiful and fondled him. Lawrence vehemently rejected these advances, and was sent out for a beating to teach him “everything.” After a horrific whipping and a beating that apparently progressed to rape, Lawrence was taken back to the governor, who waved him off as “too torn and bloody for his bed.” After his wounds were treated, Lawrence was left alone. He escaped and made his painful way back to Asraq. The following passages describing his experience in Deraa are from Chapter 80 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935):

To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I had prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together. Somewhere in the place a cheap clock ticked loudly, and it distressed me that their beating was not in its time. I writhed and twisted, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless. After the corporal ceased, the men took up, very deliberately, giving me so many, and then an interval, during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, and play unspeakably with me. This was repeated often, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. Always for the first of every new series, my head would be pulled round, to see how a hard white ridge, like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke, with a bead of blood where two ridges crossed. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry, but while my will ruled my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness choked my utterance. …

I remembered the corporal kicking with his nailed boot to get me up; and this was true, for next day my right side was dark and lacerated, and a damaged rib made each breath stab me sharply. I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One giggled with amusement. A voice cried, ‘Shame, you’ve killed him’. Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black: while within me the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang. By the bruises perhaps they beat me further: but I next knew that I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a leg as though to split me apart: while a third man rode me astride. It was momently better than more flogging.

Lawrence concluded the account by stating that

the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.

The incident was not mentioned in the early biographies (Thomas, 1924, Graves, 1927) and was omitted from Revolt in the Desert (Lawrence, 1927). Lidell Hart (1934) describes the beating but makes no mention of rape.

Richard Meinertzhagen (1959, pp 31-33) reported a conversation with Lawrence in 1922:

He went on to describe the indecency and degradation he suffered at the hands of the homosexual Turks. He did not intend to publish the true account of this incident as it was too degrading, ‘had penetrated his innermost nature’ and he lived in constant fear that the true facts would be known. He had been seized, stripped and bound; then sodomized by the governor of Deraa, followed by similar treatment by the Governor’s servants. After this revolting behaviour he had been flogged.

Meinertzhagen reported seeing scars on Lawence’s back: Lawrence attributed these wounds to being dragged across barbed wire in a camel accident. Unfortunately, the veracity of Meinertzhagen’s report of his encounter with Lawrence has been questioned (Lockman, 1995).

When putting together the first version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922, Lawrence wrote to his publisher Edward Garnett

If that Deraa incident whose treatment you call severe and serene (the second sounds like a quaint failure to get my impressions across, but I know what you feel) had happened to yourself you would not have recorded it. I have a face of brass perhaps, but I put it into print very reluctantly, last of all the pages I sent to the press. For weeks I wanted to burn it in the manuscript: because I could not tell the story face to face with anyone, and I think I’ll feel sorry, when I next meet you, that you know it. The sort of man I have always mixed with doesn’t so give himself away. (Lawrence, 1938, p 358)

In a later letter to Charlotte Shaw in March 1924, Lawrence wrote

About that night. I shouldn’t tell you. because decent men don’t talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days with my self-respect … which wouldn’t. hasn’t, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I gave away the only possession we are born into the world with — our bodily integrity. Its an unforgivable matter, an irrecoverable position: and it’s that which has made me forswear decent living, and the exercise of my not-contemptible wits and talents. (Lawrence, 2000, p 70).  

What actually happened in Deraa is not known. In the play Ross by Terence Rattigan (1960), the Turkish governor recognizes Lawrence. He instigates the beating in order to break the spirit of the man, something he considers preferable to making him a martyr. Though this is an intriguing speculation, it remains just that.

David Lean’s 1962 movie followed Lawrence’s account but showed only the beating. Jeremy Wilson’s careful and exhaustive biography (1989) accepts that what Lawrence reported actually happened. Other episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom accord reasonably well with the historical record despite occasional exaggerations. For example, the camel ride from Aqaba to Suez was an impressive feat but it actually took longer than Lawrence described. 

Lawrence’s recounting of the event in Deraa is overwrought. Some things could not have happened the way they were described. Lawrence could not have seen the effects of the whip on his back. The Bey in Deraa at that time was not known to be a homosexual: according to Lawrence James (1990. p 213), he appears to have been more of a womanizer. Some biographers (Barr, 2008) have therefore speculated that the episode was imagined. Desmond Stewart (1977, p 244) suggested that Lawrence’s report was a “transubstantiation” of a sadomasochistic relationship with Sharif Ali ibn al Hussein, but there is no evidence for this. Aldington (1955) accused Lawrence of exaggerating his military exploits, but still chose to accept that he was tortured and raped at Deraa (see Crawford, 1998, for how Aldington’s book was denigrated by supporters of Lawrence). Korda’s biography Hero (2010) quotes from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and comments on the beating and the rape (p 349):

There seems no good reason why Lawrence would have invented the incident – on the contrary, it seems like the kind of thing that he would have suppressed, had he not been determined to tell the whole truth even when it was distasteful and damaging to him. For he does not strain himself to come out of it with credit; it is not just his body but his spirit that was broken, and much of what happened in 1918 and what became of Lawrence later, after the war, would be incomprehensible except for Deraa.

Later in his life, Lawrence submitted himself to ritual beatings as a form of penance (Knightley & Simpson, 1969, pp 219-254; Simpson, 2008, p 286-299). However, we do not know if this type of activity predated Deraa, or occurred as a result of his experience there. My personal opinion is that Deraa was the beginning of Lawrence’s masochism.

The Deraa episode is so striking that it requires interpretation. That he was tortured and raped during his captivity there makes sense with the strange and broken life that Lawrence was to lead after the war. This was likely why he included it in his book – as explanation and exculpation.

 

The Road to Damascus

While the Arab forces were harrying the Turks in the inland desert, General Edmund Allenby led British and Commonwealth forces across Sinai and into Palestine. The campaign was a marvel of logistics since the forces had to be constantly supplied with water, food and ammunition through a desert region with no railways. After several major battles with Turkish and German troops, Allenby prevailed and Jerusalem surrendered on December 9, 2017. Two days later, Allenby entered the city through the Jaffa Gate. He came on foot to show appropriate reverence for the holy city. This was the first time that Jerusalem had not been under Muslim rule since 1247.

The following illustration shows a photograph of Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem and a 1918 portrait of the general by James McBey.

In February of 1918 Lowell Thomas, an American journalist met Lawrence in Jerusalem. The two men intrigued each other. On Lawrence’s invitation, Thomas came to Aqaba, bringing with him the camera man Henry Chase. Over the next several months Thomas and Chase reported Lawrence’s exploits in the desert. The film clips and slides later formed the basis for a multimedia show “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia” that toured America and England in the years following the war. The name and the legend of “Lawrence of Arabia” derives mainly from Thomas. Lawrence was ambivalent about his relationship to Thomas (Crawford & Berton, 1996). On the one hand he was fascinated by fame; on the other he wanted anonymity. Lawrence did not mention Thomas in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The illustration below (from Thomas, 1924) shows a photograph of the two of them in Aqaba in March 1918, and Lowell’s portrait of Lawrence in London in 1919.  

As the Arab forces grew in strength and experience, they became able to face the Turks in fixed battles as well as guerilla attacks. Their first main encounter was at Tafileh just south of the Dead Sea in January 1918. After multiple attacks, retreats and counter-attacks, the Arabs prevailed. The surviving Turks were pursued toward the railway:

As we turned back it began to snow; and only very late, and by a last effort did we get our hurt men in. The Turkish wounded lay out, and were dead next day. It was indefensible, as was the whole theory of war: but no special reproach lay on us for it. We risked our lives in the blizzard (the chill of victory bowing us down) to save our own fellows; and if our rule was not to lose Arabs to kill even many Turks, still less might we lose them to save Turks. (Lawrence, 1935, p 482)

In September 1918, the Arabs and Turks met at Tafas just north of Deraa. The Turkish troops had just massacred all the inhabitants of the village – men, women and children – as they retreated from Deraa. Tallal, one of the Arabs fighting with Lawrence, was from the village.  

Tallal had seen what we had seen. He gave one moan like a hurt animal; then rode to the upper ground and sat there a while on his mare, shivering and looking fixedly after the Turks. I moved near to speak to him, but Auda caught my rein and stayed me. Very slowly Tallal drew his head-cloth about his face; and then he seemed suddenly to take hold of himself, for he dashed his stirrups into the mare’s flanks and galloped headlong, bending low and swaying in the saddle, right at the main body of the enemy.

It was a long ride down a gentle slope and across a hollow. We sat there like stone while he rushed forward, the drumming of his hoofs unnaturally loud in our ears, for we had stopped shooting, and the Turks had stopped. Both armies waited for him; and he rocked on in the hushed evening till only a few lengths from the enemy. Then he sat up in the saddle and cried his war-cry, ‘Tallal, Tallal’, twice in a tremendous shout. Instantly their rifles and machine-guns crashed out, and he and his mare, riddled through and through with bullets, fell dead among the lance points.

Auda looked very cold and grim. ‘God give him mercy; we will take his price.’ He shook his rein and moved slowly after the enemy. We called up the peasants, now drunk with fear and blood, and sent them from this side and that against the retreating column. (Lawrence, 1935, pp 631-632)

On Lawrence’s orders, the Arabs took no prisoners that day. Lawrence had become an instrument of bloody war, and all compassion was lost in the frenzy of revenge.   

Damascus finally surrendered on October 1, 2018, The British and Commonwealth troops allowed the Arab forces to enter the city first. The war was won but the politics had only just begun:

We passed to work. Our aim was an Arab Government, with foundations large and native enough to employ the enthusiasm and self-sacrifice of the rebellion, translated into terms of peace. We had to save some of the old prophetic personality upon a substructure to carry that ninety per cent of the population who had been too solid to rebel, and on whose solidity the new State must rest.

Rebels, especially successful rebels, were of necessity bad subjects and worse governors. Feisal’s sorry duty would be to rid himself of his war-friends, and replace them by those elements which had been most useful to the Turkish government. (Lawrence, 1935, p 649)

Faisal arrived a few days after the surrender of Damascus and met with General Allenby:

They were a strange contrast: Feisal, large-eyed, colourless and worn, like a fine dagger; Allenby, gigantic and red and merry, fit representative of the Power which had thrown a girdle of humour and strong dealing round the world. (Lawrence, 1935, p 660)

Lawrence was exhausted. The following photograph shows him in Damascus. Once Feisal had arrived to take over the politics of government, Lawrence asked Allenby for leave to return to London.

 

Aftermath

With peace came politics. Fromkin’s 1989 book on the creation of the modern Middle East takes as its title, A Peace to End All Peace, a quotation from Lord Wavell who had served under Allenby, and was present at the Paris Peace Talks (1919-20):

After ‘the War to end War’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’

In the Middle East, the politics of power soon came into conflict with the ideals of freedom and justice. In the correspondence between McMahon and Hussein in 1916, the Arabs had been promised an independent state that stretched across the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. However, the British had not thought that the Arab Revolt would be successful. They had therefore arranged with France, in an agreement negotiated by the diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in 1916, to divide up the Ottoman Empire between them. And in 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, had also promised the Jews that they could find a “national home” in Palestine. And so, at the Paris Peace Conference (1920), Britain was given a mandate over Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and France was given a similar mandate over Lebanon and Syria.

Arab leaders were granted titular kingships: Faisal bin Al-Hussein in Syria, and Abdullah bin Al-Hussein in Jordan. After Faisal rejected the French claim for a mandate in Syria in 1920, French forces invaded and Faisal was exiled. In 1921, the British arranged for Faisal to become king of Iraq. He remained king until his death in 1933. Abdullah was king of Jordan until his assassination in 1951. The Hashemites continue to this day as the royal family of Jordan. Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi was recognized as the king of Hejaz. His eldest son, Ali bin Al-Hussein, remained in Hejaz as his heir. However, the Hashemites were soon challenged by Ibn Saud (1875-1953), who in 1932 unified most of the Arabian Peninsula into Saudi Arabia.

In the first few years after the war, Lawrence was celebrated as a hero. He and Faisal had their portraits painted by Augustus John in 1919:

Initially, Lawrence enjoyed his new fame. He began to write his memoir of the Arab Revolt, worked in the Foreign Office, served as an adviser to Secretary of State Winston Churchill, and attended the Peace Conferences in Paris. However, he soon became deeply depressed by the ongoing politics. He believed that he had betrayed his Arab friends. He felt guilty and longed for penance and anonymity.

In August, 1922, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force as a simple aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross. He wrote about the grueling and demeaning period of basic training in The Mint (posthumously published in 1955). The title likened the experience of raw recruits being converted into useful soldiers to the stamping out of coins from blank metal.

After his identity was disclosed, Lawrence changed his alias to T. E. Shaw (likely from his friendship with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw) and enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps in 1923. He transferred back to the Royal Air Force in 1925 and served until 1935 in various locations. The photograph at the right shows him in 1928 at an air force base in Miranshah in what is now Pakistan, a lonely man in a desolate landscape 

In 1923, he had purchased a forester’s cottage (Clouds Hill) in Dorset near the Bovington Camp, where he served in the Tank Corps. Furnished with books and music, the cottage became his refuge. He returned to live there after leaving the Royal Air Force in 1935.

 

Lawrence continued to write through all these years of anonymity. He put together a limited publication (only 8 copies) of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1922. Writing the memoir caused much anxiety and grief. An early version of the book was lost while changing trains at Reading station in 1919, and much of it had to be completely rewritten (Meyers, 1973). The book was not formally published until after his death in 1935. However, Lawrence issued an abbreviated version of the book, Revolt in the Desert, in 1927. He also wrote a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 1932. An anthology of the poems he had enjoyed, Minorities (1971), and The Mint (1955) were published posthumously.

 

The Death of a Hero

Lawrence loved the experience of speed. He bought his first Brough SS100, the fastest production motorcycle in the world, in 1922, and over the years before his death owned six more models of the motorcycle, which he called Boanerges (“son of thunder,’ the name that Christ gave to his disciples, the brothers James and John). The fifth of these motorcycles (1927) is illustrated above. In Chapter 16 of The Mint (written in 1929 but not published until after his death), he describes racing on his motorcycle with an airplane:

Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’ straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.

Like arrows the tiny flies pricked my cheeks: and sometimes a heavier body, some house-fly or beetle, would crash into face or lips like a spent bullet. A glance at the speedometer: seventy-eight. Boanerges is warming up. I pull the throttle right open, on the top of the slope, and we swoop flying across the dip, and up-down up-down the switchback beyond: the weighty machine launching itself like a projectile with a whirr of wheels into the air at the take-off of each rise, to land lurchingly with such a snatch of the driving chain as jerks my spine like a rictus.

Once we so fled across the evening light, with the yellow sun on my left, when a huge shadow roared just overhead. A Bristol Fighter, from Whitewash Villas, our neighbour aerodrome, was banking sharply round. I checked speed an instant to wave: and the slip-stream of my impetus snapped my arm and elbow astern, like a raised flail. The pilot pointed down the road towards Lincoln. I sat hard in the saddle, folded back my ears and went away after him, like a dog after a hare. Quickly we drew abreast, as the impulse of his dive to my level exhausted itself.

The next mile of road was rough. I braced my feet into the rests, thrust with my arms, and clenched my knees on the tank till its rubber grips goggled under my thighs. Over the first pot-hole Boanerges screamed in surprise, its mud-guard bottoming with a yawp upon the tyre. Through the plunges of the next ten seconds I clung on, wedging my gloved hand in the throttle lever so that no bump should close it and spoil our speed. Then the bicycle wrenched sideways into three long ruts: it swayed dizzily, wagging its tail for thirty awful yards. Out came the clutch, the engine raced freely: Boa checked and straightened his head with a shake, as a Brough should.

On May 13, 1935, Lawrence had a fatal accident while riding his motorcycle from Bovington Camp to his cottage Clouds Hill. He was not driving at great speed: the inquest found that his motorcycle was in second gear when it crashed, a gear with a top speed of 38 mph. However, Lawrence had suddenly came upon two boys cycling on the narrow road: he braked, skidded, and lost control. He was thrown over the handlebars and his head struck the road. Comatose, he was taken to the hospital at Bovington Camp. Lawence never regained consciousness and died on May 19. Hugh Cairns, a young Australian neurosurgeon from Oxford, came to consult on his case. Later in his life, Cairns investigated the epidemiology of concussion and promoted the use of crash helmets for motorcyclists (Hughes, 2001)  

 

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Lawrence was deeply impressed by the power of the desert. In his introductory chapters to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he discussed how the desert had been the source for three of the world’s great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He remarked on the Semitic people (p 39):

Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.

It was significant that this wrack of fallen religions lay about the meeting of the desert and the sown. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law by the parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set on fire. To the thinkers of the town the impulse into Nitria [one of the earliest Christian monastic communities, located in the Egyptian desert] had ever been irresistible, not probably that they found God dwelling there, but that in its solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them.

The desert provided the context to what happened to Lawrence in Arabia. The faith he sought, fought for, and ultimately lost was freedom. Swedenborg (1789, pp 59-60) had described freedom as the second of the great laws that man lives by:

The first law, that man from sense and perception shall have no other knowledge than that he is endowed with life, but shall still acknowledge that the goods and truths originating in love and faith, which he thinks, wills, speaks, and does, are not from himself but from the Lord, presupposes the second, that man has freedom, and that it is also to appear as his own.

The opening paragraphs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom provide the essence of Lawrence’s story:

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery, manacled ourselves together in its chain-gang, bowed ourselves to serve its holiness with all our good and ill content. The mentality of ordinary human slaves is terrible – they have lost the world – and we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overmastering greed of victory. By our own act we were drained of morality, of volition, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.

Jim Norton provides a reading of these words:

Jeffrey Myers (2016, pp 114-115) summarizes the life of Lawrence and the importance of the events described in Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) is the story of Lawrence’s growth in personal and political awareness. The meaning of the book is determined by the juxtaposition of his psychological needs and the pattern of historical events, by the conflict between the man who acts and the conditions of his action. Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt combined self-discipline with freedom and power, and his devotion to the higher cause of a ‘holy war’ enabled him to define his identity. But for Lawrence this self-discovery was destructive rather than enlightening. He gradually realized that he had been transformed from a man who had once valued each human life and had given himself in the service of freedom, to one who had been caught up in a repellent and fascinating slaughter and had lost his idealism. When he was tortured and raped at Deraa, this insight deepened into the horrible realization that he had achieved sexual pleasure from physical pain.

The Deraa experience completely destroyed his elaborately constructed network of defences and exposed his all-too-human vulnerability, broke his spirit and extinguished the possibilities of creative freedom. This crucial moment — what Erik Erikson calls ‘The Event’, or culmination and turning point of a man’s experience — dramatizes the central opposition of body and will, and forms the core of Seven Pillars as well as of Lawrence’s life.

Lawrence’s post-war career — his political activities, the composition of Seven Pillars, the enlistment in the ranks, the flagellations and even the suicidal motorcycle rides — followed inevitably from the events described in the book.

As a visual summary of his life, we can consider two portrait sketches of Lawrence by Augustus John, one at the height of his fame in 1919 and one from the period of anonymity in 1929

 

References

Aldington, R. (1955). Lawrence of Arabia: a biographical enquiry. Collins.

Barr, J. (2006). Setting the desert on fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain’s secret war in Arabia, 1916-18. Bloomsbury.

Crawford, F. D. (1998). Richard Aldington and Lawrence of Arabia: a cautionary tale. Southern Illinois University Press.

Crawford, F. D., & Berton, J. A. (1996). How well did Lowell Thomas know Lawrence of Arabia? English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 39(3), 298-318.

Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and responsibility. W. W. Norton

Fromkin, D. (1989). A peace to end all peace: creating the modern Middle East, 1914-1922. André Deutsch.

Graves, R. (1927). Lawrence and the Arabs. Jonathan Cape.

Hughes, J. T. (2001). Lawrence of Arabia and Hugh Cairns: crash helmets for motorcyclists. Journal of Medical Biography, 9(4), 236–240.

James, L. (1990). The golden warrior: the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Knightley, P., & Simpson, C. (1969). The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia. Nelson.

Korda, M. (2010). Hero: the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Harper.

Lawrence, T. E. (1910, publicly printed 1936). Crusader castles. Golden Cockerel Press (also reprinted by Folio Society, 2010).

Lawrence, T. E. (1922, edited by Wilson, J., & Wilson, N., 2003). Seven pillars of wisdom: a triumph: the complete 1922 text. Castle Hill.

Lawrence, T. E. (1927). Revolt in the desert. Garden City Publishing (Doubleday, Doran).

Lawrence, T. E. (1932). The Odyssey of Homer. Oxford University Press.

Lawrence, T. E. (1935). Seven pillars of wisdom, a triumph. Garden City Publishing (Doubleday, Doran).

Lawrence, T. E. (edited by D, Garnett, 1938). The letters of T. E. Lawrence. Jonathan Cape.

Lawrence, T. E. (1955). The mint: a day-book of the R.A.F. depot between August and December 1922, with later notes by 352087 A/c Ross. Jonathan Cape.

Lawrence, T. E. (1971). Minorities: Good poems by small poets and small poems by good poets. Jonathan Cape.

Lawrence, T. E. (edited by J. Wilson & N. Wilson, 2000). T. E. Lawrence: correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw. Castle Hill Press.

Lean, D. (dir., 1962, DVD 2003). Lawrence of Arabia. Columbia Pictures.

Liddell Hart, B. H. (1934). T. E. Lawrence: in Arabia and after. Jonathan Cape.

Lockman, J. N. (1995). Meinertzhagen’s diary ruse, false entries on T. E. Lawrence. Cornerstone Publications.

MacEwen, G. (1982). The T.E. Lawrence poems. Mosaic Press/Valley Editions.

Meinertzhagen, R. (1959). Middle East diary, 1917-1956. Thomas Yoseloff

Meyers, J. (1973). The revisions of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 88(5), 1066–1082.

Meyers, J. (2016). Chapter VIII. T. E. Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In Homosexuality and literature: 1890-1930. (pp 114-130). Bloomsbury. 

Rattigan, T. (1960). Ross. Hamish Hamilton.

Sattin, A. (2015). The young T. E. Lawrence. W. W. Norton & Company.

Simpson, A. R. B. (2008). Another life: Lawrence after Arabia. Spellmount.

Stewart, D. (1977). T. E. Lawrence. Hamish Hamilton.

Swedenborg, E. (1760, posthumously published, 1789, anonymously translated, 1867). The Athanasian Creed. New Jerusalem.

Thomas, L. (1924). With Lawrence in Arabia. Century Co.

Wilson, J. (1989). Lawrence of Arabia: the authorised biography of T.E. Lawrence. Heinemann.

In May 1889, following several psychotic episodes in Arles, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum at the monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He stayed there for just over a year. Despite several further episodes of severe depression and madness, van Gogh was incredibly prolific during this period, producing about 150 paintings, among them Starry Night.

Madness in Arles

Vincent van Gogh left Paris and settled in Arles in February, 1888. Profoundly affected by the quality of the light and vividness of the colors, he changed his style of painting, banishing the shadows of his earlier work. He had become fascinated by the Japanese woodblock prints that he had bought in Paris, and was intrigued by the new techniques of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and Emile Bernard (1868-1941) in Pont Aven, who were beginning to using flat colors within clearly defined outlines (a technique later called “cloisonnism” from the procedure of melting enamels onto a surface within compartments defined by small metal strips). Most importantly he began to heighten his colors – to paint what he felt as much as what he saw. He combined these new approaches – flat colors, clear outlines, heightened hues – with the thick impasto and broad brushstrokes of earlier Dutch painting to develop his own unique style.    

In October 1888, Gauguin came to stay with van Gogh in Arles. They shared the small Yellow House on the Place Lamartine in Arles that van Gogh had rented and decorated with the financial support of his younger brother Theo (1857-1891), an art-dealer in Paris. Vincent wanted to establish a “Studio of the South” where painters could create art appropriate to the modern age. Both Gauguin and van Gogh had very definite ideas about the future of art and they did not always agree. In particular, van Gogh wanted to paint directly from nature whereas Gauguin wanted to paint from memory and imagination (a process he called “abstraction”). They argued.

On December 23, 1888, Gauguin threatened to leave. Van Gogh became psychotic. In his madness he cut off his left ear with a razor, and presented this bloody object to a young prostitute. The following was the next day’s newspaper report (Bailey, 2016, p 157)

Hier soir, un individu se présentant à la porte de la maison de tolérance no. 1, sonnait er remettait à la femme, qui vint lui ouvrir, une oreille pliée dans un morceau de papier, lui disant «Tenez, cela vous servira.» Il s’en alla ensuite. Je vous laisse à penser l’étonnement et l’effroi dut avoir cette femme en trouvant une oreille dans ce papier. La police faisant peu après sa ronde, eut connaissance du fait … et at été sur les traces de cet étrange personage. Ce matin, M. le commissaire central et son secrétaire se sont transportés au domicile d’un peintre hollandaise nommé Vincent, place Lamartine, et ont appris par la bonne qu’elle avait trouvé ce matin un rasoir ensanglanté sur la table et a trouvé ensuite l’artiste peintre couché dans son lit avec une oreille coupée et dans un état assez grave. M. le commissaire central l’a fait transporté à l’hôpital.

[Yesterday evening, an individual presented himself at brothel no. 1, rang the bell and handed to the woman, who came to open the door, an ear folded into a piece of paper, saying “Here, this will be useful to you.” He then left. I leave you to imagine the astonishment and fear this woman must have felt when she found an ear within the paper. The police patrol coming by the brothel soon afterwards were made aware of what had happened … and were soon on the trail of this strange character. This morning, the Chief of Police and his secretary went to the home of a Dutch painter named Vincent on Place Lamartine, and learned from the maid that she had just found a bloody razor on the table. They then discovered the painter lying in bed with an amputated ear and in serious condition from loss of blood. The Chief of Police had him taken to hospital.]

Van Gogh was treated in the hospital at Arles. Theo van Gogh came down from Paris to check on his brother. Gauguin took the train back to Paris and the two artists never saw each other again. The following illustration shows van Gogh’ self-portrait (F527) from January 1889. This and later paintings are identified by their Faille number (Faille & Hammermacher, 1970; Feilchenfeldt, 2013) The portrait was painted using a mirror thud making it appear as if his right ear was amputated rather than his left. In the background is one of van Gogh’s Japanese prints: Geishas in a Landscape by Sato Torakiyu (1870s)

Over the next few months van Gogh suffered from two other bouts of severe madness for which he was hospitalized. His neighbors petitioned the police that le foux roux (the red-headed madman) not be allowed to return to the Yellow House. Finally, he agreed to be admitted to the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Theo arranged to pay for his treatment there, and a kindly Protestant minister accompanied him to his new home.   

No one knows what caused van Gogh’s psychotic episodes. A recent symposium (Bakker et al., 2016) discussed many possible causes but came to no conclusion. Some of the problems in making a diagnosis so long after the patient died are discussed by ter Berg et al. (2012) and Voskuil (2020). The doctors who treated him in Arles and in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence thought that he suffered from a type of epilepsy that manifested itself in mental changes rather than physical convulsions. This disorder presently goes by the name of “temporal lobe epilepsy” (Blumer, 2002). Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy experience attacks of confusion and automatic behavior. Between these attacks, the patient may be depressed. 

To my mind, van Gogh’s periods of madness were more likely due to “bipolar disorder” (Carota et al., 2005), previously known as “manic-depressive illness.” Many other creative artists have suffered from this disorder (Jamison, 1993; Johnson et al., 2012; Ludwig, 1995). Such a diagnosis would explain von Gogh’s episodes of overwhelming depression. His remarkable productivity when not depressed could be attributed to periods of hypomania.

 

The Asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole

Saint-Rémy-de Provence is located about 20 km south of Avignon in the region called Bouches-du-Rhône (“mouths” of the Rhône – where the river empties into the Mediterranean Sea).

South of Saint-Rémy are a striking set of low limestone mountains called Les Alpilles, wherein the medieval Princes of Les Baux (from Provençal, bauç, a rocky spur), allegedly descended from the magus Balthasar, built their castle. In the early 19^th Century, the mineral bauxite (a source of aluminum) was discovered and mined there.

The region near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence has been inhabited for millennia. Greeks and then Romans lived in a town called Glanum, located about one kilometer south of modern Saint Rémy. The most striking remnants of Roman times are Les Antiques: a triumphal arch and a mausoleum for the Julii family, both dating from the 1^st century CE.

The modern town of Saint-Rémy was named after Saint Remigius who converted the Francs to Christianity in the 5^th Century CE. In the 11^th Century, a Benedictine monastery was built near the site of Glanum (Duret, 2021), taking its name from the most prominent of the Roman ruins: Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. The Romanesque monastery is renowned for its square bell tower and the peacefulness of its cloister. In 1605, the monastery was ceded to the Strict Order of St. Francis of Assissi. Over the years, these monks began to construct the adjacent hospital buildings and to care for the mentally disturbed. After the French Revolution (1789-99), the monastery was secularized. The asylum was taken over by private interests, but continued to care for mentally disturbed patients, albeit using nuns rather than monks. At the time of van Gogh’s hospitalization, the asylum was directed by Théophile Peyron, a retired naval doctor. Treatment was based on kindness and therapeutic baths.

Since there were very few patients, van Gogh was allowed both a second-story bedroom with a barred window facing east over the wheatfield, and a ground-floor painting-studio that looked out onto the enclosed hospital garden. The following illustration is an aerial view of the monastery taken from the east sometime in the 1940s (adapted from Bailey, 2018, 2019). The town of Saint-Rémy is outside the photo to the right (north) and Les Baux is to the left (south)  

The following illustration shows a view of the monastery as seen from the northeast, as painted by van Gogh in October 1889 (F803). This painting for a while belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. Below that is a recent photograph of the monastery church and cloister as viewed from the southeast.

When van Gogh arrived at the asylum he would have entered through the main door of the hospital. The following illustration shows the view from the vestibule to the enclosed garden in a painting by van Gogh (F1530, October, 1889) and in a modern photograph (Bailey, 2019).  

The following is an ink drawing of the fountain in the garden that is visible through the vestibule door (F1531, May 1889) made soon after van Gogh arrived.

 

Irises

During his first weeks at the asylum, van Gogh was limited to the hospital grounds, but was allowed to paint in the hospital garden. He felt comfortable in the asylum and hoped that his stay there might cure his madness. He wrote a letter to his new sister-in-law Joanna van Gogh-Bonger on May 9, 1889 (Jansen et al., 2009, 772):

Although there are a few people here who are seriously ill, the fear, the horror that I had of madness before has already been greatly softened.

And although one continually hears shouts and terrible howls as though of the animals in a menagerie, despite this the people here know each other very well, and help each other when they suffer crises. They all come to see when I’m working in the garden, and I can assure you are more discreet and more polite to leave me in peace than, for example, the good citizens of Arles.

It’s possible that I’ll stay here for quite a long time, never have I been so tranquil as here and at the hospital in Arles to be able to paint a little at last. Very near here there are some little grey or blue mountains, with very, very green wheatfields at their foot, and pines.

One of the earliest paintings from his stay in the asylum was Irises (May 1889, F608)

The painting owes much to the Japanese art that van Gogh had become fascinated by in Paris. In an 1888 letter to Theo, he had praised the Japanese way of seeing the importance of simple things

If we study Japanese art, then we see a man, undoubtedly wise and a philosopher and intelligent, who spends his time — on what? — studying the distance from the earth to the moon? — no; studying Bismarck’s politics? — no, he studies a single blade of grass.

But this blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants — then the seasons, the broad features of landscapes, finally animals, and then the human figure. He spends his life like that, and life is too short to do everything.

Just think of that; isn’t it almost a new religion that these Japanese teach us, who are so simple and live in nature as if they themselves were flowers? (Jansen et al., 2009, 686):

One particular painting which van Gogh probably saw in reproduction, is a screen with a field of irises displayed on a gold background by Ogata Korin (1658-1716):

Although the iconography is similar, the style of van Gogh’s painting is distinctly his own:

Korin’s paintings seem slick, precious, almost delicate, next to Vincent’s fleshy, jostling flowers. Van Gogh reinforced objects with bold outlines, but his thick application of paint gave the surface a tangible, almost sculptural, rather than graphic, quality. (Helvey, 2009, p 122)

One of the fascinating aspects of van Gogh’s Irises is the isolated white flower in the upper left. Helvey (2009) proposes that this is an Iris albicans as opposed to the other Iris germanica flowers, rather than a mutation (as might be the pale blue flower on the right). As such it would be much like van Gogh, a “stranger on the earth.” This quotation (from Psalm 119: 18-19) is from a sermon that a younger van Gogh gave in his days as a preacher; it provides the title for Lubin’s 1972 biography of the painter.

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.
I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.

Van Gogh’s Irises was sold at auction in 1987 for what was then a record price for a painting: 49 million dollars. However, the stock market crashed and the buyer defaulted. Rather than putting the painting up for auction again (and having it not reach the same price), Sotheby’s arranged for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to acquire it in a private purchase.

One year later, in May 1890, when the irises were again in bloom, just before leaving the asylum, van Gogh painted Bouquet of Irises (F680). The background pink of the original painting has faded over the years:

 

The Wheatfield

Van Gogh’s bedroom at the asylum looked out over a wheatfield. In the distance beyond the wall enclosing the field were the Alpilles. Van Gogh remarked on the view in a letter to Theo in late May, 1889:

Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective in the manner of van Goyen, above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory. (Jansen et al., 2009, 776)

Jan van Goyen (1596-1656) was a Dutch painter of landscapes and seascapes. Van Gogh is referring to his characteristic “perspective” which used a low horizon and paid great attention to the sky and clouds. Van Gogh was different: he seldom used a low horizon for his paintings, his bright colors were the opposite of the highly restricted palette of browns, greys, ochres and greens used by van Goyen, and his brushstrokes were bold rather than fine.

The following is one of his first paintings of the wheatfield (May 1889, F720). The wheat was growing well and beginning to turn from green to gold. Although some have proposed that the view was painted from his window, I suggest that he set up his easel at the edge of the field looking southeast. This would allow him to show the wildflowers at the edge of the field in the foreground:

In mid July, 1889, van Gogh suffered a severe relapse and was unable to work for over a month. After returning to some semblance of normality, he completed several versions of the harvest in the wheatfield. In a letter to Theo from early September (Jansen et al., 2009, 800) he described the scene

Work is going quite well – I’m struggling with a canvas begun a few days before my indisposition. A reaper, the study is all yellow, terribly thickly impasted, but the subject was beautiful and simple. I then saw in this reaper – a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day to reach the end of his toil – I then saw the image of death in it, in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. So if you like it’s the opposite of that Sower I tried before. But in this death nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.

Van Gogh is comparing the painting to a study that he had made in Arles in 1888 of François Millet’s 1850 painting of The Sower. He was to make other copies in early 1890 at the asylum.  

In 1902, one version of these harvest paintings (September 1889, F619) was the first work of Van Gogh to be purchased and displayed in a museum: the Folkwang Museum, originally in Hagen and now in Essen, Germany (Lloyd et al., 2007, p 41).

After the harvest was over, van Gogh continued to paint the wheatfield. The following illustration shows a painting of the field during rain from November, 1889 (F650). Van Gogh was familiar with the convention in Japanese woodblock prints of using slanting lines to represent rain. In 1887 in Paris, he had made a copy of Hiroshige’s 1857 Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake  (Pickvance, 1986, p 139).

Rilke (1907, p 56) remarked about the painting 

But now rain, rain: exhaustive and noisy like in the country, without any other sounds in between. The round edge of the wall in the monastery garden is full of mosses and has spots of an utterly luminous green, much as I have never seen.

 

In a letter to Emile Bernard (Jansen et al., 2007, 822) described another painting of the wheatfield (November 1889, F737) now newly planted with winter-wheat, illustrated below:

Another canvas depicts a sun rising over a field of new wheat. Receding lines of the furrows run high up on the canvas, towards a wall and a range of lilac hills. The field is violet and green-yellow. The white sun is surrounded by a large yellow aureole. In it, in contrast to the other canvas, I have tried to express calm, a great peace.

The painting is wonderfully tranquil. This contrasts with van Gogh’s inner feelings at the time. In this regard it is worthwhile to consider the “other painting” to which he contrasts it. This View of the Monastery Garden (November, 1889, F659) is one that he describes extensively in a letter to Emile Bernard:

A view of the garden of the asylum where I am, on the right a grey terrace, a section of house, some rosebushes that have lost their flowers; on the left, the earth of the garden — red ochre — earth burnt by the sun, covered in fallen pine twigs. This edge of the garden is planted with large pines with red ochre trunks and branches, with green foliage saddened by a mixture of black. These tall trees stand out against an evening sky streaked with violet against a yellow background. High up, the yellow turns to pink, turns to green. A wall — red ochre again — blocks the view, and there’s nothing above it but a violet and yellow ochre hill. Now, the first tree is an enormous trunk, but struck by lightning and sawn off. A side branch thrusts up very high, however, and falls down again in an avalanche of dark green twigs.

This dark giant — like a proud man brought low — contrasts, when seen as the character of a living being, with the pale smile of the last rose on the bush, which is fading in front of him. Under the trees, empty stone benches, dark box. The sky is reflected yellow in a puddle after the rain. A ray of sun — the last glimmer — exalts the dark ochre to orange — small dark figures prowl here and there between the trunks. You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called ‘seeing red’. And what’s more, the motif of the great tree struck by lightning, the sickly green and pink smile of the last flower of autumn, confirms this idea. (Jansen et al., 2007, 822)

 

Cypresses

In June 1889 van Gogh was allowed to travel outside the limits of the asylum, usually in the company of one of the hospital’s orderlies. He took his easel and paints into the surrounding countryside. Several drawings and paintings from that early summer period portray some of the striking cypress trees near the asylum. Van Gogh noted his new fascination with the cypress trees in a letter to Theo (Jansen et al., 2007, 783):

The cypresses still preoccupy me, I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them.

It’s beautiful as regards lines and proportions, like an Egyptian obelisk.

And the green has such a distinguished quality.

It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine.

Now they must be seen here against the blue, in the blue, rather.

The following painting (June, 1889, F717) made just before his relapse, portrays a large cypress, linking the gold of the wheatfield to the blues of the Alpilles and the stormy sky. 

 

Starry Night

The most famous of van Gogh’s paintings from Saint-Rémy, Starry Night, was painted in mid-June, 1889 (F612), following a profound experience of the night stars, and just before his July madness. Unlike most of van Gogh’s paintings, this was not done directly from nature, but rather from memory and imagination – using the technique that Gauguin had called abstraction, and that van Gogh had argued so strongly against in Arles. He did not paint this in the bedroom where he had experienced the stars, but in the ground-floor studio. Images from recent paintings that were drying in the studio – of the wheatfield with the Alpilles in the background and of the cypress trees near the asylum – are combined with his memory of the night sky. The town portrayed in the foreground is likely not Saint-Rémy – the church steeple is too prominent, the town is not clearly visible from the hospital, and van Gogh made no other similar paintings. Most critics have suggested that the painting portrays a memory: “a Dutch village inserted into a Southern landscape” (Pickvance, 1986, p 103)

The band of light blue and white above the horizon probably represents the approaching dawn. The moon at the right is surrounded by an intense yellow glow. The bright white star to the left of center is probably Venus, the morning star, also known as Phosphorus or light bringer (Boime, 1984). The sky and the milky way appear to move in tumultuous waves. The central swirling pattern in the sky may have a source in the famous Hokusai’s 1831 woodblock print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Bailey 2018, p 81) Like Hokusai’s wave, van Gogh’s sky crests and tumbles toward the slopes of the Alpilles.

For van Gogh, the stars represented the gateways to eternity. The following is from a letter to Theo in July 1888 Jansen et al., 2007, 638):

Painters — to speak only of them — being dead and buried, speak to a following generation or to several following generations through their works. Is that all, or is there more, even? In the life of the painter, death may perhaps not be the most difficult thing.

For myself, I declare I don’t know anything about it. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream.

Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France.

Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train. So it seems to me not impossible that cholera, the stone, consumption, cancer are celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones.

To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.

Erickson (1998) suggests that the three main compositional elements of the painting – the village scene, the cypress and the sky – represents different aspects of van Gogh’s religious beliefs.  The village likely means the conventional religion that he tried to follow in his youth. Erickson points out that

While every house glows with yellow light under the brilliance of the starry sky, the church remains completely dark (pp 170-171). 

The flame-like cypress tree may represent mankind’s aspirations beyond this mortal life. Cypresses have long been associated with death and van Gogh felt that death was the gateway to eternity. Since the cypress is what ties the earth to the sky, perhaps he could experience the infinite through nature rather than religion. The starry sky itself represents the Infinite.    

 

Beyond the Asylum

In the autumn of 1889, after recuperating from his prolonged bout of madness, van Gogh began to travel again in the countryside around the asylum. The illustration below shows the stone quarry (October, 1889, F635). The quarry near Saint-Rémy had provided stone for the building of the Greco-Roman city of Glanum, but by Vincent’s time had long fallen into disuse.

Van Gogh’s quarry paintings are intriguing since from 1890 to 2000 Paul Cézanne created a series of paintings of the Bibemus quarry near Aix-en-Provence some 75 km southeast of Saint- Rémy, e.g. La carrière de Bibémus (1895). Both painters were intrigued by the different planar surfaces and by the subtle alterations in their color with the direction of the light. The main differences between the painters are that van Gogh’s planes are more clearly outlined, and Cézanne’s brushwork is much less defined.

Another theme for the autumn of 1889 were the olive groves near the asylum. The following is one of many paintings of olive trees, with the southern sun and the Alpilles in the background (November, 1889, F710). The trees are dancing to the rhythms of the sunlight. By the time van Gogh was painting the sun, it had itself moved from when he started to paint and the blue shadows on the ground that he had painted first are no longer properly aligned. This painting thus records the passage of time as well as of the existence of the olive groves. Another interesting feature of this particular painting is that all the colors appear heightened except for the light green color of the olive tree foliage which van Gogh has precisely delineated.

 

Portraits

After recuperating from his summer madness, van Gogh painted three self-portraits in September 1889. Two of these are shown below (F626 and F525).

The portrait on the left shows the painter wearing a smock and holding a palette and brushes. This is a convention long used by painters and Van Gogh had likely seen a print of Rembrandt in a similar pose: the Self-portrait with Two Circles (1665) now at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath in London. Rembrandt, however, gazes directly at the viewer whereas van Gogh looks off into the distance.

The orange-white colors of the head contrast strikingly with a dark blue and violet background that recalls the swirling sky of Starry Night. Orange and blue are classic complementary colors. From bright orange to dark blue also show a high contrast in brightness. The blue of the eyes ties everything together. Van Gogh described the portrait to Theo in a letter

One I began the first day I got up, I was thin, pale as a devil. It’s dark violet blue and the head whiteish with yellow hair, thus a colour effect. (Jansen et al., 2007, 800).

Another similar portrait, much less effective, was completed at about the same time with a pale blue background. Finally van Gogh painted a small self-portrait after he had shaved his beard. He wondered to Theo whether he should send this to his mother to show how well he had recuperated from his madness. He seemed unaware of how profoundly sad he appears: with raised internal eyebrows and down-turning mouth corners. He looks apologetically at the viewer. According to Pickvance (1986) this is probably van Gogh’s last self-portrait.

Van Gogh also produced striking portraits of the head orderly at the hospital Charles-Elzéard Trabuc and his wife, Jeanne Lafuye Trabuc (September 1889, F629 and F231). Rilke was able to see the first portrait in a dealer’s storage room in Paris (1907, p 56):

An elderly man with a short-cropped, black-and-white mustache, sparse hair of the same color, cheeks indented beneath a broad skull; the whole thing in black and white, rose, wet dark blue, and an opaque bluish white – except for the large brown eyes.

Van Gogh remarked about the orderly in a letter to Theo

He was at the hospital in Marseilles through two periods of cholera, altogether he is a man who has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death, and there is a sort of contemplative calm in his face.

It makes a rather curious contrast with the portrait I have done of myself, in which the look is vague and veiled, whereas he has something military in his small quick black eyes.

His comments to Theo about the wife were unkind, although the painting, itself, is more sympathetic.

She is a faded woman, an unhappy, resigned creature of small account, so insignificant that I have a great longing to paint that dusty blade of grass. I have talked to her sometimes when doing some olive trees behind their little house, and she told me then that she did not believe I was ill (Jansen et al., 2007, letters 800 and 801)

 

Studies of Earlier Artists

During the autumn of 1889 and early in 1890, van Gogh produced numerous studies of the works of Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Gustave Doré (1832-1883) (Naifeh, 2021). All of the copies were based on black-and-white reproductions, with van Gogh seeking to add extra levels of meaning to the images by means of color. One of his most successful copies was based on a Pièta by Eugène Delacroix. The original painting from about 1850 was small and dark, but lithographic reproductions, mirror-reversed by the printing process, were very popular. The following illustration shows the original image, the lithograph, and van Gogh’s copy (September, 1889, F630)

Van Gogh uses his favorite colors, blue and yellow. The blue may point to eternity and the yellow, like the sunrise that it promises, may represent hope. The colors are as unnatural as the posture of the dead Messiah. Van Gogh gave Christ beard as orange as his own. He was looking toward his own death and resurrection.

 

At Eternity’s Gate

In December, 1889 and in the early months of 1890, van Gogh suffered three more relapses into madness. During each of there periods he was unable to paint for several weeks. His hopes of getting better in the asylum began to wane.

After the last attack, in April 1890, van Gogh painted a color-study of one his own early lithographs, based on a drawing he had made in1882 of an elderly pensioner in an almshouse in the Hague. He told Theo about that drewing:

It seems to me that a painter has a duty to try to put an idea into his work. I was trying to say this in this print—but I can’t say it as beautifully, as strikingly as reality, of which this is only a dim reflection seen in a dark mirror—that it seems to me that one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of ‘something on high’ in which Millet believed, namely in the existence of a God and an eternity, is the unutterably moving quality that there can be in the expression of an old man like that, without his being aware of it perhaps, as he sits so quietly in the corner of his hearth. At the same time something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms. … This is far from all theology—simply the fact that the poorest woodcutter, heath farmer or miner can have moments of emotion and mood that give him a sense of an eternal home that he is close to. (Jansen et al. 2007, 288).

The original drawing (F997 and the color study (F701) are shown below. The painting became known as At Eternity’s Gate.

In May of 1890, van Gogh left the asylum in Saint-Rémy. Theo arranged for him to stay in Auvers-sur-Oise. About 25 km northwest of Paris. There he was able to paint productively once again. However, he remained depressed and finally committed suicide by shooting himself with a revolver in July 1890. Other versions of how he died have been proposed (Naifeh and Smith, 2011; Schnabel, 2019), but suicide seems most likely. His brother Theo died 6 months later in January, 1891, most likely from the effects of tertiary syphilis. Theo’s wife Joanna van Gogh-Bonger (1862-1925) took care of van Gogh’s paintings and letters, and nurtured the posthumous fame of her brother-in-law (Luijten, 2019). A 2023 list of the 100 paintings attaining the highest prices ever at auction has 9 paintings by van Gogh, a number only exceeded by Picasso’s 14.

 

The Afterlife of the Paintings

Although van Gogh was only able to sell one painting during his lifetime, in the years following his death his work slowly began to exert an immense effect on other artists. Throughout his life, van Gogh attempted to portray the full meaning of the world he experienced. His paintings were directly based on what he saw, but he tried to add his intense emotional response to the visual by heightening the colors and by using powerful brushstrokes. After his death, other artists began to use these techniques

Van Gogh’s work thus became the direct precursor of the Expressionist Movement in modern art (Lloyd et al., 2007). Expressionist paintings characteristically portray the emotional response to what the artist sees. Such art is subjective rather than objective, spiritual rather than worldly, creative rather than derivative.

Furness (1973, p. 4) remarked

Many critics point to the use of the word ‘expressionist’ to designate the particular intensity of the work of those painters who strove to go beyond impressionism, beyond the passive registration of impressions towards a more violent, hectic, energetic creativity such as is found above all in van Gogh. The dissolution of conventional form, the abstract use of colour, the primacy of powerful emotion – above all the turning away from mimesis herald a new consciousness and a new approach in painting, which literature was to follow.

Two of the early groups that followed the expressionist ideals of van Gogh were Die Brücke (the bridge) which was founded in Dresden in 1905 and included Erich Heckel, Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Der Blaue Reiter (the blue rider) which originated in Munich 1911, and counted Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, and Gabriele Münter among its members.  

Van Gogh also had a significant effect on 20^th-Century philosophy (Nichols, 2018). The existentialists looked to expressionism as a way to transcend the confining limits of reality. For Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

existence is always incomplete and contradictory and thus points toward something that can complete and unify its paradoxes, that is, the transcendent (Longtin Hansen, 2018).

Art can act as a means to understand the transcendent:

Art acts as a cipher by revealing the deeper reality: it seems to imitate things that occur in the world, but it makes them transparent. (Jaspers, 1932, p 172)

Existentialism insists that we have the freedom to create ourselves in a world without rules; artists like van Gogh create for us a way to experience that world.

 

References

Bailey, M. (2016). Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence. Frances Lincoln (Quarto Publishing).

Bailey, M. (2018). Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum. White Lion (Quarto Publishing).

Bailey, M. (2019). Living with Vincent Van Gogh: the homes and landscapes that shaped the artist. White Lion (Quarto Publishing).

Bailey, M. (2021). The illustrated Provence letters of Van Gogh. Batsford (Pavilion Books).

Bakker, N., Jansen, L., & Luijten, H. (Eds) (2020). Vincent van Gogh: a life in letters. 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.

Blumer, D. (2002). The illness of Vincent van Gogh. American Journal of Psychiatry, 159(4), 519–526.

Boime, A. (1984). Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a history of matter and a matter of history. Arts Magazine, 59(4), 86–103.

Borg, M. ter, & Trenité, D. K.-N. (2012). The cultural context of diagnosis: the case of Vincent van Gogh. Epilepsy & Behavior, 25(3), 431–439.

Carota, A., Iaria, G., Berney, A., & Bogousslavsky, J. (2005). Understanding van Gogh’s night: Bipolar Disorder1. In Bogousslavsky, J., & Boller, F. (Eds) Neurological disorders in famous artists. (pp. 121–131). Karger.

Duret, E. (2021). Un asile en Provence: La maison Saint-Paul à Saint-Rémy du XVIIIe au début du XXe siècle. Presses Universitaires de Provence.

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

Faille, J. B. de la, & Hammacher, A. M. (1970). The works of Vincent van Gogh: his paintings and drawings [by] J.-B. de la Faille. (Revised, augmented and annotated edition of the original 1928 version). Meulenhoff International.

Feilchenfeldt, W. (2013). Vincent van Gogh: the years in France: complete paintings 1886-1890. Philip Wilson (I. B. Tauris).

Furness, R. S. (1973). Expressionism. Routledge.

Helvey, J. (2009). Irises: Vincent van Gogh in the garden. J. Paul Getty Museum.

Jamison, K. R. (1993). Touched with fire: manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. Free Press.

Jansen, L., Luijten, H., & Bakker, N. (Eds) (2009). Vincent Van Gogh: the letters; the complete illustrated and annotated edition. (6 volumes). Thames & Hudson. Letters can be accessed at the website. Selections from the letters are in Bakker et al (2020) and Bailey (2021).

Jaspers, K. (1932, translated by E. B. Ashton, 1971). Philosophy Volume 3. University of Chicago Press.  

Johnson, S. L., Murray, G., Fredrickson, B., Youngstrom, E. A., Hinshaw, S., Bass, J. M., Deckersbach, T., Schooler, J., & Salloum, I. (2012). Creativity and bipolar disorder: Touched by fire or burning with questions? Clinical Psychology Review, 32(1), 1–12.

Lloyd, J., Peppiatt, M., Bridgewater, P., Peters, O., & Stolwijk, C. (2007). Van Gogh and expressionism. Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Longtin Hansen, R. (2018). Immanent transcendence in the work of art. Jaspers and Heidegger on Van Gogh. In D. P. Nichols (Ed.). Van Gogh among the philosophers: painting, thinking, being. (pp 137-158). Lexington Books.

Lubin, A. J. (1972). Stranger on the earth: a psychological biography of Vincent van Gogh. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Ludwig, A. M. (1995). The price of greatness: resolving the creativity and madness controversy. Guilford Press.

Luijten, H. (2019, translated by L. Richards, 2022). Jo van Gogh-Bonger: The Woman who Made Vincent Famous. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Mullins, E. (2015). Van Gogh: the asylum year. Unicorn Press Ltd.

Naifeh, S. (2021). Van Gogh and the artists he loved. Random House

Naifeh, S., & Smith, G. W. (2011). Vincent van Gogh: the life. Random House.

Nichols, D. P. (Ed.). (2018). Van Gogh among the philosophers: painting, thinking, being. Lexington Books.

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

Rilke, R. M. (1907, translated by J. Agee, 2002). Letters on Cézanne. North Point Press.

Schnabel, J (Dir.) (2019). At eternity’s gate. Lions Gate Entertainment.

Voskuil, P. (2020). Vincent van Gogh and his illness: a reflection on a posthumous diagnostic exercise. Epilepsy & Behavior, 111, 107258

 

 

Conventional histories of art mention few female painters. As Germaine Greer famously pointed out in her 1979 book The Obstacle Race, this is more related to their lack of opportunity in a patriarchal and misogynistic society than to any lack of talent (see also Nochlin, 1971; 1988). Greer pointed to a “magnificent exception” to the rule that female painters do not become renowned: Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), a baroque painter, whose images continue to fascinate us with their conception and shock us with their power.   

 

Life (Barker, 2022; Siciliano, 2017)

Artemisia was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639), a painter working in Rome. Her mother died when she was 12 years old. Artemisia was not given any formal schooling, and only learned to write as an adult. However, she displayed a talent for painting and she helped her father with his work.

Orazio’s skill was in the depiction of the human figure. He initially collaborated with Agostino Tassi, an expert in perspective: Orazio would supply the figures for Agostino’s landscapes. Later Orazio became influenced by Caravaggio (1571-1610), imitating the dramatic lighting of his younger colleague, and, like him, using real models for his subjects. At the age of 17 years, Artemisia produced her first major work, Susanna and the Elders (1610), “a signal statement by a young female artist declaring her skill, knowledge, and gender” (Simon, 2017).

A year later, in May 1611, she was raped by Agostino Tassi. When Tassi refused to marry her, her father brought charges against him for violating his family’s honor (Cohen, 2000). During the 7-month trial, Artemisia was examined under torture. The judges found Agostino guilty and exiled him from Rome, though the sentence was never carried out. In 1613, Orazio Gentileschi arranged for his daughter to marry the painter Pierantonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi, and the couple moved to Florence.

In Florence, Artemisia became a successful painter. She enjoyed the patronage of the Medici family and became friends with Galileo Galilei. She became the first woman artist to be accepted as a member of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. She learned to read and to write. During her period in Florence she produced two versions of what was to become her most famous painting: Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614). Her husband was unable to produce any work of note, and their relations became strained. Artemisia entered into a passionate affair with Francesco Maria Maringhi, a rich nobleman.

Artemesia returned to Rome in 1620. At that time, she became friends with the French painter Simon Vouet (1590-1649), who completed a striking portrait of Artemisia around 1625 (Locker, 2015, p 129). Hanging on a gold chain around Artemisia’s neck is a medallion with an image of the Mausoleum of Helicarnassus. This tomb, constructed by Artemisia for her husband Mausoleus in 350 BCE, became one of the wonders of the world. Artemisia Genitileschi had been named after the ancient queen. Although many of the statues that adorned the tomb are now in the British Museum, nothing remains of the building which slowly crumbled under the effect of repeated earthquakes. The portrait shown below with an enlargement of the medallion, and a sketch of the Mausoleum. 

 

In 1626 Artemisia moved to Venice in search of patronage. However, after a few years she moved on to Naples where she lived for the rest of her life, except for a brief visit to England in 1638 where she help her father Orazio with the decoration of the Queen’s House in Greenwich. At that time, she likely painted the Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting which entered the collection of Charles I of England. In Naples Artemisa was one of a group of baroque painters who produced large canvases for the city’s many churches. She likely died during the outbreak of plague in Naples in 1656.

 

Susanna and the Elders

The story of Susanna and the Elders is recounted in Chapter 13 of the Book of Daniel. Although earlier parts of Daniel are considered canonical by all Christian Churches, Protestants consider the later parts to be apocryphal, useful for edification but not divinely inspired.

According to the story the beautiful Susanna is surprised while bathing in her garden by two lecherous elders. They ask that she lie with them. If not, they threaten to accuse her of adultery with a young man, something that would be punishable by death. Susanna refuses their blackmail, the elders bring their false charges before a court, and Susanna is condemned to death. However, a young Daniel interrupts the proceedings, and examines the two elders separately. Unable to keep to a consistent story, the elders contradict themselves. One says that the adultery occurred under an oak tree and the other describes it as under a mastic tree. The difference in size between the two trees clearly demonstrates that they are lying. Susanna is vindicated and the elders are condemned to death for bearing false witness.

The story has been represented many times. The visual depiction of the nude Susanna being ogled and set upon by the lecherous old men is deeply disconceting. The story is meant to demonstrate the evils of lechery, but the painting presents a beautiful naked female for the enjoyment of the viewer. In this context, Artemisia’s 1610 painting is perhaps salutary. Susanna is obviously discomforted by the attentions of the elders. The image invokes more pity than lust.

The men in Artemesia’s painting are younger than the elders of the story (Bel, 2005). The dark-haired man is not much older than Susanna. One wonders whether the two men may not represent Tassi and Orazio, or Tassi and his friend Cosimo Quorli. The painting predates the rape but Tassi was likely bullying Artemisia long before the final rape.   

The painting shows Susanna seated on a stone bench. The usual treatment of this subject places her in a garden. Orazio and Artemisia both lacked talent for landscapes and gardens. Some have suggested that Tasso was supposed to mentor Artemisia in the principles of landscape and perspective. In which case, the bare bench perhaps states that Artemisia refused his teachings as well as his sexual advances.

The center of the painting shows an anxious tangling of arms. Susanna’s gesture may have derived from the Michelangelo’s painting of the Expulsion from Eden in the Sistine Chapel (1510). The painting is shown below together with the detail from Michelangelo.      

In 1998, the American artist Kathleen Gilje meticulously recreated Artemisa’s 1610 painting of Susanna and the Elders. She then produced an x-ray of her copy which revealed pentimenti of an earlier version of the picture: Susanna screaming with a knife in her hand. Everything is disturbed. The violence is transferred from the rapist to the victim. Though, like the pentimenti it was never realized. 

Artemesia painted many versions of Susanna and the Elders. The following is one from 1652. This Susanna is more composed than in the earlier painting. She is less afraid of the elders’ advances and rebukes them for their lechery. 

Judith and Holofernes

The Book of Judith is another scripture considered apocryphal by the Protestant churches. It recounts how the beautiful widow Judith arrays herself in all her finery and goes with her maid Abra to the camp of Holofernes, the Assyrian general besieging the Israelite city of Bethulia. She promises to help the Assyrians take the city. Holofernes is struck by Judith’s beauty and invites her to dine in his tent. After he becomes drunk, Judith decaptitates him with his own sword. Juditha and her maid and return to Bethulia with the severed head. The Israelites display the head upon the walls of their city. The Assyrians become demoralized and flee.

In the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, representations of Judith were used to depict the courage of the people who rise up against tyranny. The following illustration shows Donatello’s 1460 sculpture (above left), Caravaggio’s 1602 painting (below left), Cristofano Allori’s 1613 painting (above right) and Artemesia’s 1613 painting (below right).

Artemesia’s first depiction of Judith Slaying Holofernes shown on the previous page was likely painted in 1612-13 just after Artemesia’s rape and during the trial of Tassi. It is impossible not to see it as a response to her violation. Artemisia’s painting certainly derives in part from Caravaggio’s but differs from this earlier representation in its realistic violence of the slaying. Judith and Abra have to work together to overcome Holofernes, who is dangerous even though he is drunk.

Artemesia painted a second version of Judith Slaying Holofernes in Florence. Although usually dated to 1620, Whitlum-Cooper (in Treves et al, 2020) proposes that it was painted early in her stay in Florence, probably using a tracing of the original painting. The main difference between the paintings is in the spurting of the blood as the sword cuts through Holofernes’ carotid artery. Drops of blood stain the bosom of Judith and the bodice of her dress.

The following are comments by Germaine Greer (1979, pp 189-191):

The painting depicts an atrocity, the murder of a naked man in his bed by two young women. They could be two female cut-throats, a prostitute and her maid slaughtering her client whose up-turned face has not had time to register the change from lust to fear. The strong diagonals of the composition all lead to the focal point, the sword blade hacking at the man’s neck from which gouts of blood spray out, mimicking the lines of the strong arms that hold him down, even as far as the rose-white bosom of the murderess.
The excuse for such portrayal is, of course, the apocryphal story of Judith and Holofernes, which might equally well justify the portrayal of Jewish beauty (as it did for Rembrandt) or of a mistress’s careless cruelty (as it did in the luscious version of Cristofano Allori). Artemisia Gentileschi’s choice of depicting the act of decapitation itself had been made before, by Elsheimer and of course by her father’s erstwhile friend, Caravaggio.
Artemisia’s treatment of the same subject clearly refers to Caravaggio’s painting, but in no spirit of emulation; rather she has decided to outdo her predecessor. The composition is swung around and tightened into a terrible knot of violence. The tension away from the act which divides Caravaggio’s canvas is abandoned, for all the interest centres upon the ferocious energy and application of dark, angry Judith, who plies her sword like a peasant woman slaughtering a calf, in a claustrophobic oval of light filled with restless see-saw movement. There is no concession to decorative effect in the composition: the warm transparency of Artemisia’s palette and her delicate chasing of linear effects, the rippling of the tufted hem of the bed-covering, the tinkle of blood against Judith’s jewelled forearm, the sprouting of Holofernes’ hair through her ropy fingers, are all expressions of callousness. The spectator is rendered incapable of pity or outrage before this icon of violence and hatred, while he is delighted by such cunning.

About a year later, in 1614, Artemesia produced a more subtle painting of Judith and her Maidservant (illustrated below) The painting represents a moment after the slaying of the Assyrian general as Juditha and Abra are about to leave the tent. They hear a noise and stop. Judith puts her hand upon the shoulder of her maid to reassure her. They must wait until everything returns to silence before escaping from the Assyrian camp. Treves (2020) remarks

Judith’s gesture of resting the sword on her shoulder has been read as a sign of victory and justice. But it is also a subtle reminder of the weight of the general’s weapon, and the blade’s dangerous proximity to Judith’s exposed neck call to mind the decapitation that has just taken place. The sword’s pommel is placed prominently towards us and refers to the recently committed brutality: its shrieking head recalls the screams of Holofernes

Another fascinating detail is Judith’s hairpin which appears to be an onyx cameo representing a warrior-guardian. Garrard (2020, p 149) points out that the shawl draped round Abra’s hips alludes to the expressive drapery on the back of Donatello’s statue of Judith. Artemesia would have been well aware of Donatello’s late masterpiece. which was displayed in the Loggia dei Lanza on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.   

Mary Magdalene

In 1616 or 1617, Artemesia painted a sumptious Conversion of the Magdalene. The painting was likely commissioned by Maria Maddalena the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, in honor of her namesake saint.

Mary is wearing a magnificent yellow silk dress. Yellow was one of Artemesia’s favorite colors. She may have learned how to portray yellow silk from Cristofano Allori, whose Judith (illustrated earlier) is also arrayed in shining yellow.

Mary Magdalene was an important subject for Artemesia. As Garrard (2020, pp 114-5) notes

Artemisia was well aware, and savvy Florentines could also have known, that Mary Magdalene’s story broadly matched her own; a woman whose identity is stamped with a sexualized past turns a corner and takes up a new, respectable life.

In the painting, Mary sits at a table and pushes away a mirror, a symbol of vanity. On the mirror is written Optimem Partem Elegit: “She chooses the better part” (Christiansen & Mann, 2001). Since Artemesia admitted at her rape-trial that she had not learned to write, these words and the signature on the back of the Magdalene’s chair may have been added by an assistant (Christiansen & Mann, 2001). The quotation comes from Jesus’ reply to Martha who complained that her sister Mary was not helping with the housework:

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: 40-42)

The passage is difficult to interpret. Most commentaries suggest that Jesus is commending Mary for considering the spiritual rather than the physical. One cannot live by bread alone. However, the skeptic might side with Martha and suggest that one also cannot live without bread.

The jar at Mary’s feet represents the ointment with which an unnamed sinful woman anointed the feet of Jesus:

And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment
And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. (Luke 7: 37-38).

Commentators have conflated Mary Magdalene with this sinful woman and with Mary the sister of Martha.    

Self Portraits

Artemesia produced many self-portraits and many of the heroines in her history paintings are in part versions of herself. We can appropriately bid farewell to Artemisia with the beautiful Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, a bravura display of her ability to capture a person at a moment of time. One wonders whether the tiny head suspended on the chain around her neck makes reference to Holofernes.

In recent years the contributions of female artists have become more and more recognized (Hessel, 2023; Morrill et al., 2019; Pollock,2013). Several recent exhibitions have highlighted the work of Artemisia Gentileschi (e.g., Christiansen and Mann, 2001; Treves et al., 2020). Artemisa remains one of the great painters, regardless of her gender.

 

References

Bal, M. (Ed.) (2005). The Artemisia files: Artemisia Gentileschi for feminists and other thinking people. University of Chicago Press. (especially the chapter Grounds for Comparison by the editor)

Barker, S. (2022). Artemisia Gentileschi. Getty Publications.

Bennett, B. A., & Wilkins, D. G. (1984). Donatello. Phaidon.

Christiansen, K., & Mann, J. W. (2001). Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cohen, E. S. (2000). The trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: a rape as history. Sixteenth Century Journal, 31(1), 47–75.

Garrard, M. D. (2020). Artemisia Gentileschi and feminism in early modern Europe. Reaktion Books.

Greer, G. (1979). The obstacle race: the fortunes of women painters and their work. Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Hessel, K. (2023). The story of art without men. W. W. Norton

Locker, J. (2015). Artemisia Gentileschi: the language of painting. Yale University Press.

Locker, J. (2017). Artemisia Gentileschi: the literary formation of au unlearned artist. In S. Barker, Ed. Artemisia Gentileschi in a changing light. (pp 89-101). Harvey Miller (Brepols).

Morrill, R., Elderton, L., & Wright, K. (Eds.). (2019). Great women artists. Phaidon.

Nochlin, L. (1971). Why are there no great women artists? In Gornick, V., & Moran, B. (eds.). Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness. Basic Books.

Nochlin, L. (1988). Women, Art and Power & Other Essays. Harper Collins.

Pollock, G. (2013). Differencing the canon: feminism and the writing of art’s histories. Taylor and Francis.

Siciliano, G. (2019). I know what I am: the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi. Fantagraphics Books.

Simons, P. (2017). Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the Context of Counter-Reformation Rome. In S. Barker, Ed. Artemisia Gentileschi in a changing light. (pp 41-57). Harvey Miller (Brepols).

Treves, L., Barker, S., Cavazzini, P., Cropper, E., Whitlum-Cooper, F., Solinas, F., & Keith, L. (2020). Artemisia. Yale University Press.

 

According to the book of Genesis, Yahweh created Adam and Eve to live in the Garden of Eden. He commanded them on pain of death not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, Eve was convinced by the Serpent to eat of the tree, and she in turn convinced Adam to do the same. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. The interpretation of this myth has led to the Christian idea that humanity is forever tainted by “Original Sin,” and that our only hope for immortality is through the sacrifice of Christ which offers redemption from sin and entry into eternity to those who believe in him. The concept of Original Sin has become dangerously ingrained in Christian thinking, and needs reworking,   

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

The book of Genesis contains two narratives of the creation. In the second (Genesis 2:4-25), attributed to a writer/editor called J (Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990), Yahweh created Adam by breathing into a lump of earth, and placed him in a garden in Eden. He then grew the trees of the garden:

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2: 9)

Yahweh enjoined Adam not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (Genesis 2: 16-17)

J then tells how God created Eve as a companion for Adam, and narrates the story of man’s fall from innocence (Genesis 3: 1-24). Eve was asked by the Serpent whether she and Adam must not eat from any of the trees of Eden:

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. (Genesis 3: 2-3)

The Serpent convinces her that eating of the Tree of Knowledge would actually open her eyes to the divine knowledge of good and evil. The interaction between Eve and the Serpent is the subject of many paintings, among which is the tempera painting of William Blake (1800) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This and the subsequent illustrations are derived from the Blake Archive:

Eve ate the fruit and gave some to Adam who likewise ate. Yahweh quickly realized how Adam and Eve had disobeyed him.

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 22-24)

The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is depicted in an 1808 watercolor by William Blake which was to illustrate the ending of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). In this telling of the story, the archangel Michael leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise:

         For now, too nigh
The Arch-Angel stood; and, from the other hill
To their fixed station, all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as evening-mist
Risen from a river o’er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the labourer’s heel
Homeward returning. High in front advanced,
The brandished sword of God before them blazed,
Fierce as a comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan air adust,
Began to parch that temperate clime; whereat
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain; then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Though Milton’s words portray the gravity of what has happened to Adam and Eve, they are also touched with hope. They had each other; their eyes were open; they could learn to survive; perhaps they might even thrive. The world was all before them.

The story of Adam and Eve and how they disobeyed Yahweh’s commandment not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has been retold again and again in the years since it was first written down in Judeo-Christian scripture (Greenblatt, 2017). In the Christian world it led to the idea of “Original Sin” (Boyce, 2015): because of the transgression of Adam and Eve, all human beings are doomed to die, unless they accept Christ as their savior.

One or Two Trees?

Yahweh’s prohibition and Eve’s words to the Serpent suggest that there is only one special tree in the garden: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. One is therefore tempted to re-examine the first mention of the two trees. The conjunction between them may be translated both as “and” and as “that is to say”. Thus, the Tree of Life, may just be another name for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and Genesis 2:9 might read

the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, that is to say, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

However, when Yahweh condemned Adam and Eve for their transgression, he did so lest they also partake of the Tree of Life and become immortal. Those supporting the existence of only one special tree in Eden have suggested that perhaps the word translated as “also” might actually mean “again.” The issues about one or two trees have been discussed by Makowiecki (2021) and Zevelt (2013, Chapter 7).   

My preferred interpretation is that there is only one special tree, that eating of that tree opens the mind to knowledge, and that, if our knowledge becomes great enough, we might somehow become immortal.

Good and Evil

The phrase “good and evil” needs two important explications. The first is that it is an example of a merism, “a figure of speech in which opposite extremes imply everything between them” (Robinson, 2024, p 77). When we say that we searched “high and low” we mean that we searched everywhere. The Bible makes frequent use of the device: the expression “heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) includes everything between; “evening and morning” (Genesis 1:5) means the whole day (including afternoon and night); “alpha and omega” (Revelations 22: 13) means the complete alphabet of existence. Thus, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of all knowledge characterized by the extremes of good and evil.

The second point of explication concerns the word translated as “evil.” The original Hebrew word can mean both “bad” and “evil” (Kass, 2003, p 63, see also Speiser, 1964, and Rosenberg & Bloom, 1990). Both are value judgements. However, we often conceive of “evil” as pain and suffering that is intentionally rather than naturally caused. Thus, though murder is considered evil, an earthquake is not. However, this distinction becomes fuzzy if we believe the natural world to be controlled by divine intentions. Arnold (2008, p 64) points out that God created both good and evil. In the words of God proclaimed through his prophet Isaiah:   

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. (Isaiah, 45: 7)

According to our definitions of “evil” and “bad,” knowledge of good and bad could then refer to everything, whereas knowledge of good and evil is primarily concerned with moral judgements (Hartmann, 2002, Chapter V; Laird, 2014, Chapter V). I much prefer to interpret the story of Eden in the latter sense. A moral judgement combines an assessment of what we perceive with a decision about what we should do in the light of the predicted consequences. Morality requires a consciousness of a self that can control one’s actions, or in religious terms, a soul that has free will. The very act of disobeying is an exercise of such free will.

When the eyes or Adam and Eve were opened by the knowledge of good and evil, the first thing that they noted was their shame at being naked. This combines self-consciousness with the idea that one should not unnecessarily incite the lust of others. 

Kass (2004, p 68) sums up his discussion of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad:

The knowledge prohibited is autonomous knowledge of how to live, found in or procured from one’s own garden (nature), based on human experience of the visible world. The opposite of obedience, it is the kind of knowledge that is implicit in the act of violating a prohibition, indeed, in any act of choosing for oneself.

He goes on to say that this knowledge may not be sufficient for us to behave as we should. We also require rules such as the Ten Commandments to instruct us how to live:

But this autonomous knowledge of good and bad is not true knowledge of good and bad; human beings on their own will not find true knowledge of how to live. This must be supplied by what is later called revelation.

I find myself agreeing with his initial statements and disagreeing with those that follow. The commandments were not miraculously revealed to us by Moses: that story is as mythical as the story of Eden. Rather these rules were proposed on the basis of how human beings had learned to live with each other.

Original Sin

Though it is not directly discussed in the Bible, Talmudic and Christian interpretations of the disobedience of Adam and Eve led to the idea that all their descendants were afflicted with their Original Sin and that this explains our mortality and our suffering (Boyce, 2015; Greenblatt, 2017, Chapters 5 and 6; Zevit, 2013, Chapter 1). The apostle Paul wrote

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned (Romans 5: 12)

Paul proclaimed that Christ died to save us from this fate, and that belief in him can lead to eternal life. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) was the great champion of Original Sin. He argued against the teachings of an English theologian Pelagius (354-413 CE), who proposed that human beings are not born innately sinful, but rather free to choose between good and evil:

Day by day, hour by hour, we have to reach decisions; and in each decision, we can choose good or evil. The freedom to choose makes us like God: if we choose evil, that freedom becomes a curse; if we choose good, it becomes our greatest blessing.

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they were exercising their freedom of choice … Before eating the fruit they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit they acquired this knowledge, and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom: by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions. (both quotations from Pelagius are in Boyce, 2015, p 15)

The story of Eden can thus be interpreted as Adam and Eve deciding not to remain in blissful innocence. They could have stayed in the garden, obeyed Yahweh’s commandment and led a life of simplicity and comfort. Instead, by eating of the tree of knowledge they gained insight into the complexities of a life independent of Yahweh’s care, a life wherein they made their own decisions rather than just accepting what Yahweh commanded. Their act of disobedience was an assertion of their freedom. 

However, Augustine prevailed over Pelagius. At the Synod of Carthage (418CE), Original Sin became one of the essential doctrines of the Christian Church (Denzinger, 2012, p 223). This was unfortunate. Thinking of humanity as being free to choose, as being able to learn to do what is good, is far more productive than simply considering humanity as doomed to die. 

Freedom to Choose

The story of Adam and Eve is not a realistic story of human origins. However, myths often contain true ideas about human nature. During our evolution, human beings gained a special kind of knowledge. We became conscious of ourselves as beings able to decide freely among possible actions on the basis of the good or evil these actions might entail. We also learned that with freedom comes responsibility. We must not act just for our own good for also for the good of others.

On this note I would like to conclude with a third image from the work of William Blake: Rose Albion (1795). We do not know exactly what Blake was depicting. A common interpretation is that the image represents man (or more specifically, England) freed from the shackles of materialism. It might also represent the more general idea of humanity as free to choose.

References

Alter, Robert. (2004). The five books of Moses: a translation with commentary. W.W. Norton & Co.

Arnold, B. T. (2009). Genesis. Cambridge University Press (The New Cambridge Bible Commentary).

Boyce, J. (2015). Born bad: original sin and the making of the Western world. Counterpoint Press.

Denzinger, H. (2012). Compendium of creeds, definitions, and declarations on matters of faith and morals (P. Hünermann, H. Hoping, R. L. Fastiggi, & A. E. Nash, Eds.; 43rd ed.). Ignatius Press.

Greenblatt, S. (2017). The rise and fall of Adam and Eve. W.W. Norton & Company.

Hartmann, N. (1932, reprinted 2002) Moral Phenomena. Transaction Publishers.

Kass, Leon. (2003). The beginning of wisdom: reading Genesis. Free Press.

Laird, J. (2014). A study in moral theory. Routledge.

Makowiecki, M. (2021). Untangled branches: the Edenic tree(s) and the multivocal WAW. Journal of Theological Studies, 71(2), 441–457.

Robinson, M. (2024). Reading Genesis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rosenberg, J., & Bloom, H. (1990). The book of J. Grove Weidenfeld.

Speiser, E. A. (1964). Genesis: introduction, translation, and notes. Doubleday (Anchor Bible).

Zevit, Z. (2013). What really happened in the Garden of Eden? Yale University Press.

 

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Du Fu (712-770 CE) was a poet during a time of great political upheaval in China. He was born near Luoyang and spent much of his young adulthood in the Yanzhou region, finally settling down to a minor official position in Chang’an, the imperial capital. In 755 CE, An Lushan, a disgruntled general, led a rebellion against the Tang dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee Chang’an (modern Xian), and chaos reigned for the next eight years. For more than a year Du Fu was held captive in Chang’an by the rebels. After escaping, he made his way south, living for a time in a thatched cottage in Chengdu, and later at various places along the Yangtze River. His poetry is characterized by an intense love of nature, by elements of Chan Buddhism, and by a deep compassion for all those caught up in the turmoil of history. This is a longer post than usual. I have become fascinated by Du Fu.

Failing the Examinations

Du Fu (Tu Fu in the Wades Gilles transliteration system, the family name likely deriving from the name of a pear tree) was born in 712 CE near Luoyang, the eastern capital of the Tang Dynasty (Hung, 1952; Owen, 1981). The following map (adapted from Young, 2008, and Collet and Cheng, 2014) shows places of importance in his life:

Du Fu’s father was a minor official. His mother appears to have died during his childhood, and Du Fu was raised by his stepmother and an aunt. Du Fu studied hard, but in 735 CE he failed the jenshi (advanced scholar) examinations. No one knows why: politics and spite may have played their part. He spent the next few years with his father who was then stationed in Yanzhou,

Du Fu met Li Bai (700-762 CE) in 744 CE. Despite the difference in their ages, the two poets became fast friends. However, they were only able to meet occasionally, their lives being separated by politics and war.

Du Fu attempted the jenshi examinations again in 746, and was again rejected. Nevertheless, he was able to obtain a minor position in the imperial civil service in Chang’an. This allowed him to marry and raise a small family.

Taishan

We can begin our examination of Du Fu’s poetry with one of the early poems written during his time in Yanzhou: Gazing on the Peak (737 CE). The peak is Taishan (exalted mountain), located in Northeastern China. Taishan is one of the Five Great Mountains (Wuyue) of ancient China. Today one can reach the summit by climbing up some 7000 steps (see illustration on the right), but in Du Fu’s time the climb would have been more difficult. The following is the poem in printed Chinese characters (Hànzì) and in Pinyin transliteration:   

The poem is in the lǜshī (regulated verse) form which requires eight lines (four couplets), with each line containing the same number of characters: 5- or 7-character lǜshī are the most common. Each line is separated into phrases, with a 5-character line composed of an initial 2-character phrase and a final 3-character phrase.  The last words of each couplet rhyme. Rhyme in Chinese is based on the vowel sound. Within the lines there were complex rules for the tonality of the sounds (Zong Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 8; Wai-lim Yip, 1997, pp 171-221). These rules do not always carry over to the way the characters are pronounced in modern Chinese. The following is a reading of the poem in Mandarin (from Librivox).

Chinese poetry is directed at both the ear and the eye, and fine calligraphy enhances the appreciations of a poem. Ding Qian has written out Du Fu’s Wàng yuè in beautiful cursive script (going from top down and from left to right):

The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 2):

gaze/behold     mountain

Daizong (ancient name for Taishan)      then      like      what
Qi      Lu (regions near Taishan)     green/blue     never     end
create     change     concentrate     divine     beauty
Yin     Yang (Taoist concepts of dark and light)     cleave     dusk     dawn
heave     chest     birth     layer     cloud
burst     eye     enter      return      bird
soon     when     reach     extreme     summit
one     glance     all     mountain     small.

And this is the English translation of Stephen Owen (2008, poem 1.2):

Gazing on the Peak

And what then is Daizong like? —
over Qi and Lu, green unending.
Creation compacted spirit splendors here,
Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn.
Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud;
splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering.
Someday may I climb up to its highest summit,
with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are

The interpretation of the poem requires some knowledge of its allusions. In the fourth line, Du Fu is referring to the taijitu symbol of Taoism (illustrated on the right) that contrasts the principles of yin (dark, female, moon) and yang (light, male, sun). Du Fu proposes that Taishan divides the world into two ways of looking. Some have suggested that the taijitu symbol originally represented the dark (north) side and the light (south) side of a mountain, and this idea fits easily with the poem.

All translators have had difficulty with the third couplet (reviewed by Hsieh, 1994). My feeling is that Du Fu is noticing layers of clouds at the mountain’s upper reaches – the chest if one considers the mountain like a human body – and birds swooping around the peaks – where the eye sockets of the body would be. However, it is also possible that Du Fu is breathing heavily from the climb and that his eyes are surprised by the birds. Perhaps both meanings are valid, with Du Fu and the mountain becoming one. Du Fu may have been experiencing the meditative state of Chan Buddhism, with a mind was “wide-open and interfused with this mountain landscape, no distinction between subjective and objective” (Hinton, 2019, p 6). One might also consider Du Fu’s mental state: at the time he wrote this poem he had just failed the jenshi exams. This might have caused some breast-beating and tears, as well as his final resolve to climb the mountain and see how small all his problems actually were.

The last couplet refers to Mencius’ description of the visit of Confucius to Taishan (Mengzi VIIA:24):

He ascended the Tai Mountain, and all beneath the heavens appeared to him small. So he who has contemplated the sea, finds it difficult to think anything of other waters, and he who has wandered in the gate of the sage, finds it difficult to think anything of the words of others.

Zhang’s Hermitage

During his time in Yanzhou Du Fu visited a hermit named Zhang near the Stonegate Mountain, one of the lesser peaks near Taishan. Zhang was likely a follower of the new Chan Buddhism, which promoted meditation as a means to empty the mind of suffering and allow the universal life force to permeate one’s being. Buddhism first came to China during the Han dynasty (206BCE – 220CE). Since many of the concepts of Buddhism were similar to those of Taoism, the new religion spread quickly (Hinton, 2020). A type of Buddhism that stressed the role of meditation began to develop in the 6^th Century CE, and called itself chan, a Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit dhyana (meditation). In later years this would lead to the Zen Buddhism of Japan. There are many allusions to Buddhism and especially to Chan ideas in Du Fu’s poetry (Rouzer, 2020; Zhang, 2018)

Du Fu reportedly wrote the following poem on one of the walls of Zhang’s hermitage. The poem is a seven-character lǜshī. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 1.4) and in pinyin:

The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 22):

inscribe      Zhang     family      recluse      house     

spring      mountain     absence      friend      alone      you      search
chop      tree      crack     crack      mountain    again     mystery
creek     pathway     remnant       cold      pass       ice      snow
stone       gate      slant     sun      reach     forest     place
no       desire      night      know      gold      silver     breath/spirit
far     injure     morning     see      deer     deer       wander
ride     burgeon     dark     thus      confuse     leave      place
facing     you      suspect     this     drift      empty     boat.

And this is a translation by Kenneth Rexroth (1956):

Written on the Wall at Chang’s Hermitage

It is Spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echos
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

Notable in the poem is the idea of wú (third character) which can be translated as “absence, nothing, not” (Hinton, 2019, p 24) This is an essential concept of Chan Buddhism – the emptying of the mind so that it can become a receptacle for true awareness. The third and fourth characters of the first line might be simply translated as “alone (without a friend),” but one might also venture “with absence as a companion” or “with an empty mind.” This fits with the image of the empty boat at the end of the poem.

Zheng Qian, a drinking companion of Li Bai and Du Fu, suggested the idea of combining poetry, painting and calligraphy. The Emperor was impressed and called the combination sānjué (three perfections) (Sullivan, 1974). Li Bai and Du Fu likely tried their hand at painting and calligraphy but no versions of their sānjué efforts have survived. The Ming painter and calligrapher Wang Shimin (1592–1680 CE) illustrated the second couplet of Du Fu’s poem from Zhang’s hermitage in his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts now at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The An Lushan Rebellion

Toward the end 755 CE, An Lushan, a general on the northern frontier rebelled against the empire and captured the garrison town of Fanyang (or Jicheng) located in what is now part of Beijing. Within a month the rebels captured Luoyang. The emperor and much of his court fled Chang’an, travelling through the Qinling Mountains to find sanctuary in the province of Shu. The city of Chang’an fell to the rebels in the middle of 756 CE.

Below is shown a painting of Emperor Ming-Huang’s Flight to Shu. Though attributed to the Tang painter Li Zhaodao (675-758 CE), this was actually painted in his style several hundred years later during the Song Dynasty. Shu is the ancient name for what is now known as Sichuan province. This masterpiece of early Chinese painting is now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Two enlargements are included: the emperor with his red coat is shown at the lower right; at the lower left advance members of his entourage begin climbing the mountain paths.

The rebellion lasted for eight long years. The northern part of the country was devastated. Death from either war or famine was widespread. Censuses before and after the rebellion suggested a death toll of some 36 million people, making it one of the worst catastrophes in human history. However, most scholars now doubt these numbers and consider the death toll as closer to 13 million. Nevertheless, it was a murderous time.

Moonlit Night

At the beginning of the rebellion, Du Fu managed to get his family to safety in the northern town of Fuzhou, but he was himself held captive in Chang’an. Fortunately, he was not considered important enough to be executed, and he finally managed to escape in 757 CE. The following shows a poem from 756 CE in characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.18), pinyin transcription, and character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:

Vikam Seth (1997) translated the poem keeping the Chinese rhyme scheme: the last character rhymes for all four couplets:

Moonlit Night

In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill
With sadness for my children, who can’t think
Of me here in Changan; they’re too young still.
Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.
In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our window-sill?

Alec Roth wrote a suite of songs based on Vikam Seth’s translations of Du Fu. The following is his setting for Moonlit Night with tenor Mark Padmore:

David Young (2008) provides a free-verse translation:

Tonight
in this same moonlight
my wife is alone at her window
in Fuzhou
I can hardly bear
to think of my children
too young to understand
why I can’t come to them
her hair
must be damp from the mist
her arms
cold jade in the moonlight
when will we stand together
by those slack curtains
while the moonlight dries
the tear-streaks on our faces?

The poem may have been written or at least conceived during the celebration of the full moon in the autumn. Families customarily viewed the moon together and Du Fu imagines his wife viewing the moon alone. The mention of the wife’s chamber in the second line may refer to either her actual bedroom or metonymically to herself as the inmost room in Du Fu’s heart (Hawkes, 1967). David Young (2008) remarks that this may be “the first Chinese poem to address romantic sentiments to a wife,” instead of a colleague or a courtesan.  

David Hawkes (1967) notes the parallelism of the third couplet:

‘fragrant mist’ parallels ‘clear light,’ ‘cloud hair’ parallels ‘jade arms,’ and ‘wet’ parallels ‘cold’

Spring View

Spring View (or Spring Landscape), the most famous poem written by Du Fu in Chang’an during the rebellion, tells how nature persists despite the ravages of effects of war and time. Subjective emotions and objective reality become one. The character wàng (view, landscape) can mean both the act of perceiving or what is actually perceived. In addition, it can sometimes mean the present scene or what is to be expected in the future (much like the English word “prospect”). The illustration below shows the text in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.25), in pinyin and in a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hawkes, 1967, Alexander, 2008, and Zong-Qi Cai, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from the website associated with How to Read Chinese Poetry (ZongQi-Cai, 2008, poem 8.1):

The next illustration shows the poem as written by three calligraphers. All versions read from top down and from right to left. On the left is standard script by Anita Wang; on the right the calligraphy by Lii Shiuh Lou is gently cursive. At the bottom the calligraphy by an anonymous calligrapher is unrestrained: it accentuates the root of the growing grass (8^th character) and the radicals that compose the character for regret/hate (16^th character) fly apart.

The following are two translations, the first by David Hinton, which uses an English line of a constant length to approximate the Chinese 5-character line (2020a):

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains
continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.

Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now
a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry’s thinned my hair to such white
confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

A second translation, with preservation of the rhyme scheme and phrasal structure, is by Keith Holyoak (2015)

       The state is in ruin;
yet mountains and rivers endure.
       In city gardens
weeds run riot this spring.

       These dark times
move flowers to sprinkle tears;
       the separations
send startled birds on the wing.

       For three months now
the beacon fires have burned;
       a letter from home
would mean more than anything.

       I’ve pulled out
so many of my white hairs
       too few are left
to hold my hatpin in!

The second couplet has been interpreted in different ways. Most translations (including the two just quoted) consider it as representing nature’s lament for the evil times. For example, Hawkes (1967) suggests that “nature is grieving in sympathy with the beholder at the ills which beset him.” However, Michael Yang (2016) proposes that “In times of adversity, nature may simply be downright uncaring and unfriendly, thereby adding to the woes of mankind.” He translates the couplet

Mourning the times, I weep at the sight of flowers;
Hating separation, I find the sound of birds startling.

The last two lines of the poem refer the hair-style of the Tang Dynasty: men wore their hair in a topknot, and their hats were “anchored to their heads with a large hatpin which passed through the topknot of hair” (Hawkes, 1967). Most interpreters have been struck by the difference between the solemn anguish of the poem’s first six lines, and the self-mockery of the final couplet (Hawkes, 1967, p 46; Chou, 1995, p 115). This juxtaposition of the tragic and the pitiable accentuates the poet’s bewilderment.

The Thatched Cottage

Disillusioned by the war and by the politics of vengeance that followed, Du Fu and his family retired to a thatched cottage in Chengdu, where he lived from 759-765. A replica of this cottage has been built there in a park celebrating both Du Fu and Chinese Poetry:  

Many of the poems that Du Fu wrote in Chengdu celebrated the simple joys of nature. He often used isolated quatrains to find parallels between his emotions and the world around him. This brief form called juéjù (curtailed lines) was widely used by his colleagues Li Bai (701–762) and Wang Wei (699–759). The form consists of two couplets juxtaposed in meaning and rhyming across their last character (Wong, 1970; Zong-Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 10). The following poem (Owen, 2008, poem 9.63) describing willow-catkins (illustrated on the right) and sleeping ducks gives a deep feeling of peace. These are the Chinese characters and pinyin transcription followed by the character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):  

grain    path    poplar/willow    blossom    pave    white    carpet
little    stream    lotus    leaves    pile    green    money
bamboo    shoot    root    sprout    no    person    see
sand    on    duckling    beside    mother    sleep

The following translation is by Burton Watson (2002):

Willow fluff along the path spreads a white carpet;
lotus leaves dot the stream, plating it with green coins.
By bamboo roots, tender shoots where no one sees them;
on the sand, baby ducks asleep beside their mother.

Shui Chien-Tung provided the following calligraphy for the poem (Cooper, 1973). He used aspects of the ancient scripts (circles, curves and dots) in some of the characters to give a sense of simplicity and timelessness. The illustration shows the calligraphy of the poem on the left and the evolution of the characters yáng (willow, poplar) and fú (duck) on the right. 

Another quatrain from Chengdu describes a night scene on the river. The following shows the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 13.61), in pinyin, and in a character-by-character translation (mine):

This is the translation by J. P. Seaton (Seaton & Cryer, 1987):

The River moves, moon travels rock,
Streams unreal, clouds there among the flowers.
The bird perches, knows the ancient Tao
Sails go: They can’t know where.

As the river flows by, the moon’s reflection slowly travels across the rocks near the shore. The water reflects the clouds between the lilies. A bird on a branch understands the nature of the universe. A boat passes, going home we know not where.

The poem conveys a sense of the complexity of the world where reflections and reality intermingle, a desire to understand the meaning of our life, and a fear that time is passing and we do not know where it will take us. All this in twenty characters. Such concision is extremely difficult in English. An attempt:

River and rocks reflect the moon
and clouds amid the lilies
resting birds understand the way
sails pass seeking home somewhere.

The following shows a painting by Huang Yon-hou to illustrate the poem. This was used as the frontispiece (and cover) of the book Bright Moon, Perching Bird (Seaton & Cryer, 1987). On the right is calligraphy of the poem by Mo Ji-yu.

Above the Gorges

In 765 CE Du Fu and his family left Chengdu and travelled eastward on the Yangtze River. The region of Luoyang had been recently recovered by imperial forces and Du Fu was perhaps trying to return home (Hung, 1952). He stayed for a while in Kuizhou (present day Baidicheng) at the beginning of the Three Gorges (Qutang, Wu and Xiing).

While there Du Fu wrote a series of meditations called Autumn Thoughts (or more literally Stirred by Autumn). This is the second of these poems in Chinese characters and in pinyin:

A character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008) is:

Kui  prefecture  lonely  wall  set  sun  slant
Every  rely  north  dipper  gaze  capital  city
Hear  ape  real  fall  three  sound  tear
Sent  mission  vain  follow  eight  month  raft
Picture  ministry  incense  stove  apart  hidden  pillow
Mountain  tower  white  battlements  hide  sad  reed-whistle
Ask  look  stone  on  [Chinese wisteria]  moon
Already reflect islet before rushes reeds flowers

The following is Stephen Owen’s translation (Owen, 2008 poem 17.27):

On Kuizhou’s lonely walls setting sunlight slants,
then always I trust the North Dipper to lead my gaze to the capital.
Listening to gibbons I really shed tears at their third cry,
accepting my mission I pointlessly follow the eighth-month raft.
The censer in the ministry with portraits eludes the pillow where I lie,
ill towers’ white-plastered battlements hide the sad reed pipes.
Just look there at the moon, in wisteria on the rock,
it has already cast its light by sandbars on flowers of the reeds.

The poem is striking in the difference between the first three couplets and the last. At the beginning of the poem Du Fu is feeling regret that he is not in Chang’an which is located due north of Kuizhou (in the direction of the Big Dipper which points to the North Star). Owen notes that “There was an old rhyme that a traveler in the gorges would shed tears when the gibbons cried out three times.” The eighth month raft may refer to another old story about a vessel that came every eight months and took a man up to the Milky Way. Owen commented on the third couplet that “The “muralled ministry” is where were located the commemorative portraits of officers, civil and military, who had done exceptional service to the dynasty.” Incense was burned when petitions were presented. The final couplet disregards all the preceding nostalgia and simply appreciates the beauty of the moment.

The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated this final couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts.

Later in Kuizhou, Du Fu entertained a librarian named Li who was returning north to take up an appointment in Chang’an. The following is the beginning of a poem (Owen, 2008, poem 19.34) describing Li’s departure in Chinese characters and in pinyin:

A character-by-character translation is:

blue/green    curtain    white    boat/raft    Yizhou    arrive
Wu    gorge    autumn    waves    heaven/sky    earth/ground    turn (around)
stone/rock    leave/exit    fall    listen    maple    leaf    down
scull/oar    swing    carry    point    chrysanthemum    flower     open/blume

The following is Stephen Owen’s translation:

When the white barge with green curtains came from Yizhou,
with autumn billows in the Wu Gorges, heaven and earth were turning.
Where rocks came out, from below you listened to the leaves of maples falling,
as the sweep moved back and forth you pointed behind to chrysanthemums in bloom.

The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated the second couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts. The painting shows the bright red leaves of the maples. In front of the riverside house one can see the multicolored chrysanthemums that Li is pointing to. Harmony exists between the wild and the cultivated.

On the River

After his sojourn in Kuizhou, Du Fu and his family continued their journey down the Yangtze River. However, the poet was ill and was unable to make it beyond Tanzhou (now Changsha) where he died in 770 CE. No one knows where he is buried. In the 1960’s radical students dug up a grave purported to be his to “eliminate the remaining poison of feudalism,” but found the grave empty.

One of Du Fu’s last poems was Night Thoughts While Travelling. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 14.63) and in pinyin (Alexander, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:

Holyoak (2015) provides a rhymed translation:

      The fine grass
by the riverbank stirs in the breeze;
      the tall mast
in the night is a lonely sliver.

      Stars hang
all across the vast plain;
      the moon bobs
in the flow of the great river.

      My poetry
has not made a name for me;
      now age and sickness
have cost me the post I was given.

      Drifting, drifting,
what do I resemble?
      A lone gull
lost between earth and heaven.

Kenneth Rexroth (1956) translates the poem in free verse:

Night Thoughts While Travelling

A light breeze rustles the reeds
Along the river banks. The
Mast of my lonely boat soars
Into the night. Stars blossom
Over the vast desert of
Waters. Moonlight flows on the
Surging river. My poems have
Made me famous but I grow
Old, ill and tired, blown hither
And yon; I am like a gull
Lost between heaven and earth.

The following shows the poem in calligraphy with three styles. On the left the poem is written in clerical script, in the center in regular script and on the right is unrestrained cursive script. All examples were taken from Chinese sites selling calligraphy.

Changing Times

During the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) the role of literature, and poetry in particular, in society changed dramatically (Owen, 2011):

In the 650s, literature was centered almost entirely in the imperial court; by the end of the era literature had become the possession of an educated elite, who might serve in government, but whose cultural life was primarily outside the court.

During Du Fu’s lifetime, poetry became no longer a part of the ancient traditions; rather it began to be concerned with the present and with the personal. Lucas Bender (2021) describes the traditional role of poetry in a society following the precepts of Confucianism:

Most people … would be incapable on their own of adequately conceptualizing the world or perfectly responding to its contingency, and therefore needed to rely on the models left by sages and worthies. Many of these models were embodied in texts, including literary texts, which could thus offer an arena for ethical activity. Poetry, for example, was understood to offer models of cognition, feeling, and commitment that would ineluctably shape readers’ understanding of and responses to their own circumstances. One way of being a good person, therefore, involved reading good poetry and writing more of it, thereby propagating the normative models of the tradition in one’s own time and transmitting them to the future. (p 317)

Du Fu found himself bewildered by the state of the world. He sought to convey this confusion rather than explain it:

Du Fu doubts the possibility of indefinitely applicable moral categories. The conceptual tools by which we make moral judgments, he suggests, are always inherited from a past that can – and, in a world as various and changeable as ours has proven to be, often will – diverge from the exigencies of the present. As a result, not only are our values unlikely to be either universal or timeless; more important, if we pay careful attention to the details of our experience, they are unlikely to work unproblematically even here and now. (Bender, 2021, p 319)

The complexity of Du Fu’s poetry – the difficulty in understanding some of his juxtapositions – becomes a challenge. The past provides no help in the interpretation. We must figure out for themselves what relates the mountain, the clouds and the poet’s breathing in the first poem we considered. And in the last poem we must try to locate for ourselves the place of the gull between heaven and earth.

 

References

Alexander, M. (2008). A little book of Du Fu. Mark Alexander. (Much of the material in the book is available on Chinese Poems website).

Bender, L. R. (2021). Du Fu transforms: tradition and ethics amid societal collapse. Harvard University Asia Center.

Chan, J. W. (2018). Du Fu: the poet as historian. In Zong-Qi Cai. (Ed.) How to read Chinese poetry in context: poetic culture from antiquity through the Tang. (pp 236-247). Columbia University Press.

Chou, E. S. (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: literary greatness and cultural context. Cambridge University Press.

Collet, H., & Cheng, W. (2014). Tu Fu: Dieux et diables pleurant, poèmes. Moundarren.

Cooper, A. R. V. (1973). Li Po and Tu Fu. Penguin Books.

Egan, R. (2020). Ming-Qing paintings inscribed with Du Fu’s poetic lines. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp 129-142). Hong Kong University Press

Hawkes, D. (1967 revised and reprinted, 2016). A little primer of Tu Fu. New York Review of Books.

Hinton, D. (1989, expanded and revised 2020a). The selected poems of Tu Fu. New Directions.

Hinton, D. (2019). Awakened cosmos: the mind of classical Chinese poetry. Shambhala.

Hinton, D. (2020b). China root: Taoism, Ch’an, and original Zen. Shambhala 

Holyoak, K. (2015). Facing the moon: poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. Oyster River Press.

Hsieh, D. (1994). Du Fu’s “Gazing at the Mountain.” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 16, 1–18.

Hung, W. (1952, reprinted 2014). Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press

Owen, S. (1981). Tu Fu. In S. Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang. (pp 183-224). Yale University.  

Owen, S. (2010). The cultural Tang (650–1020). In Chang, K. S., & Owen, S. (Eds). The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 1, pp. 286–380). Cambridge University Press.

Owen, S., (edited by P. W. Kroll & D. X. Warner, 2016). The poetry of Du Fu. (6 volumes). De Gruyter. (Available to download in pdf format.)

Rexroth, K. (1956). One hundred poems from the Chinese. New Directions.

Rouzer, P. (2020). Refuges and refugees: how Du Fu writes Buddhism. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp. 75-92). Hong Kong University Press.

Seaton, J. P., & Cryer, J. (with calligraphy by Mo Ji-yu, and painting by Huang Yon-hou, 1987). Bright moon, perching bird: poems of Li Po and Tu Fu. Wesleyan University Press.

Seth, V. (1997). Three Chinese poets: translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. Phoenis.

Sullivan, M. (1974). The three perfections: Chinese painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Thames and Hudson.

Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). (2020). Reading Du Fu: nine views. Hong Kong University Press.

Zhang, Y. (2018). On 10 Chan-Buddhism images in the poetry of Du Fu. Studies in Chinese Religions, 4(3), 318–340.

Wai-lim Yip. (1997). Chinese Poetry, Duke University Press.

Watson, B. (2002). The selected poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press.

Wong, S. S. (1970) The quatrains (Chüeh-Chü 絕句) of Tu Fu. Monumenta Serica, 29, 142-162

Yang, M. V. (2016). Man and nature: a study of Du Fu’s poetry. Monumenta Serica, 50, 315-336.

Young, D. (2008). Du Fu: a life in poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.

Zong-Qi Cai (2008). How to read Chinese poetry: a guided anthology. Columbia University Press. (audio files are available at website).

 

 

This post describes some of the events that occurred in Ronda, a town in southern Spain, during the summer of 1936. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Anarchists quickly took control of the town, and murdered many supporters of the Nationalist cause. Two months later, advancing Nationalist forces captured Ronda, and drove most of its people from their homes. Those that refused to leave suffered bloody reprisals. These events quickly became mythic rather than historic. In one story, the Anarchists had murdered the town’s Falangists by having them beaten to death in the town’s plaza and then thrown into the canyon that cuts through the center of the town. Ernest Hemingway recounted this version in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, most historians now agree that this never happened.  

Ronda

Ronda is one of the most beautiful of the pueblos blancos (“white towns”) perched on the inland hills of Andalusia. The name comes from the buildings that were white-washed to protect them from the heat of the sun. Through the center of Ronda runs the Guadalevin River, which has carved through the limestone cliffs a steep-walled canyon, el tajo, reaching depths of more than 100 meters. The most striking bridge over the river is the Puente Nuevo constructed in 1793 at the point where the canyon opens into the huge valley know as la caldera (cauldron) The following illustration shows the bridge viewed from the West (left) and from the Southeast (right).

The large building just to the north of the bridge used to be Ronda’s casa consistorial (town hall) where the ayuntamiento or local council met. In the 1990s this was converted into a parador (state-owned luxury hotel). The following illustration shows the old city hall with its arcades facing the large town square. On the far left can be seen a low wall looking over the canyon.

Ronda has many other luxury hotels. The Hotel Reina Victoria, a summer resort for the English stationed in Gibraltar, was built on the cliff overlooking la caldera in 1906. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed there for several months in the winter of 1912-1913. The gardens beside the hotel have a commemorative statue of Rilke gazing out over valley (shown below in a photograph by Bryan Appleyard).

In Ronda, Rilke continued working on a set of poems that would not be complete until ten more years had passed – the Duino Elegies. He was also able to compose several poems about Spain. In the third part of a poem called The Spanish Trilogy he praised the peasants he could see in the valley, hoping that he might become as attuned to the universe as a simple shepherd:

Langsamen Schrittes, nicht leicht, nachdenklichen Körpers,
aber im Stehn ist er herrlich. Noch immer dürfte ein Gott
heimlich in diese Gestalt und würde nicht minder.
Abwechselnd weilt er und zieht, wie selber der Tag,
und Schatten der Wolken
durchgehn ihn, als dächte der Raum
langsam Gedanken für ihn.

slow stepping, not light-footed, his body lost in thought,
but splendid when he stands still. A God might
secretly take his form and not be any the lesser.
By turns he tarries and continues on like the day itself
and the shadows of the clouds
pass through him, as if the vast space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.
(translation Paul Archer)

The poetry is beautiful. However, one cannot help but wonder about how shepherd felt looking up toward the hotel on the cliff. And whether this young shepherd would participate in the revolution some twenty years later.

As well as the canyon and its bridge, Ronda is famous for its plaza de toros (bullring) which was built in 1785. The bullring is seen in the upper left of the aerial view of Ronda in the following illustration:

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) first visited Ronda in 1923 and became enamored of its site and of the bullfights (Buckley, 1997). In his 1932 book on the traditions of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, he remarked

There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you are only going to see one and that is Ronda.

Hemingway visited Spain during the Civil War, although at that time he could not visit Ronda, which was controlled by the Nationalists. He returned to Ronda many times in the 1950s. For the bullfights, and for the memories.

 

The Spanish Civil War

In 1931, the Spanish king was deposed and a new government was proclaimed: the Second Spanish Republic, the first having lasted for less than two years (1873-1874) before being aborted by a military coup. The governing coalition of the Second Republic was composed of many separate and feuding parties, among them Anarchists, Communists, Republicans and Catalonian Separatists. The right-wing opposition contained parties favoring the Monarchy or the Catholic Church. The Falangist party, a fascist organization was founded in 1933 in response to the new republic.

The government had to deal with multiple problems

• much of the land was owned by the aristocrats, who managed large tracts of land (latifundia), and who treated the peasants as slaves
• the military was far larger and more powerful than necessary for a country that had long ago lost its empire
• the church sided with the generals and the aristocrats, for they were the source of their power and wealth
• the new industries, run by a small number of capitalists, exploited the workers who made the factories run, and who were organizing into unions
• the police force – the Guardia Civil – mainly existed to support the landed aristocrats and the capitalists.

The course of the Second Republic was extremely turbulent. The government reduced funds for the military, and closed down the military academy in Zaragoza, run by General Franciso Franco. Strikes occurred and these were put down with excessive force. Attempts to take land away from the latifundista were unsuccessful. The government tried to restrict the role of the church in the educational system. Many of the poor, urged on by anarchists and communists, attacked the church. In 1933, Pope Pius XI published an encyclical Dilectissima Nobis (“Dear to us”) specifically deploring the anti-clerical violence in Spain.

In the election of January,1936, the left-wing parties in the Popular Front won a majority against a coalition of the right-wing parties named the National Front. Many have suggested that the election was rigged to some extent, and the voting was followed by much violence. Manuel Azana Diaz (1880-1940), who had served in various positions in the preceding government, became the president of the newly elected Republican government.

In July 1936, General Emilio Mola, supported by General Franciso Franco, called for a coup to end the republic and to return the nation to its previous form. The leftist parties reacted by calling for a Revolution of the workers. The country descended into anarchy. The Nationalists (or Rebels) were able to take control the north of the country, but the Republicans (or Loyalists) held off the coup in the south and in the major cities. The Civil War had begun (Thomas, 1961; Graham, 2005: Payne, 2012).

The governments of Germany and Italy immediately provided assistance to the Nationalists, and Russia came in on the side of the Republicans. England and France decided that they should not intervene in the internal politics of Spain. However, volunteers from these and many other countries (even Germany and Italy) began to organize the International Brigades to fight with the Republicans: among them were the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States and the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade from Canada.

Soon after the coup was declared, Franco borrowed planes from Italy and Germany and transported troops from North Africa to shore up the Nationalists in Seville, a Catholic stronghold. The regions of the country controlled by the Nationalists (blue) and the Republicans (white) in July, 1936) are shown in the following map (derived from Preston, 2012, p 658): 

From Seville, General Franco sent troops northward to join up with the Nationalists besieging Madrid. Another key point in the fighting was near Teruel, where Nationalist soldiers were attempting to advance to the sea to cut off Barcelona from Madrid. Franco also sent troops eastward to relieve the city of Granada.

Mola died in a plane crash in June of 1937, and General Franciso Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975) became the supreme leader (el caudillo) of the Nationalist forces. The following illustration shows the leaders of the two sides. On the left is a modernist stone statue of Manuel Azena by José Noja and Pablo Serrano that was not erected until 1979. On the right is a bronze equestrian statue of Francisco Franco by José Capuz Mamano initially cast in 1964. Various versions of this statue were erected in several of the major cities of Spain.

The following figure shows propaganda posters from both sides of the civil war. On the left is a poster stating “No Pasareis” (You shall not pass). This slogan and its variant “No Pasaran” (They shall not pass) was used by the Republicans throughout the war. The Communist politician Dolores Ibarruri Gomez (also known as La Pasionara – the passionate one) used the latter version in a famous speech urging on the defenders of Madrid in November 1936. The Republican poster comes from the two parties that were the mainstay of the Popular Front: the CNT (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo) and the FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica). The right poster is from the Falangists. In the background are the four red arrows held together by a yoke, the Spanish version of the fasces (bundle of rods) of the Italian Fascists. Superimposed is a hand on a rifle. The call is “To arms – Homeland, Bread and Justice.”

Events in Ronda during 1936ca)

Soon after the military coup was declared in July, 1936, members of the CNT took control in Ronda and many of the small towns in Andalusia. Members of the Guardia Civil and many local Nationalist leaders were executed. Similar outbreaks of violence occurred in many regions of Spain. This “red terror” was not condoned by the Republican Government, which had difficulty controlling its many factions.

Once the Nationalists had shored up control of Seville, Franco placed the bloodthirsty General Queipo de Llano in command of retaking Southern Spain. After Granada was relieved, the Nationalists returned to the other cities of Andalusia. Reaching Ronda in September, 1936 they quickly subdued the town, and took bloody revenge. Those killed by the Nationalists far outnumbered those who had been murdered in the summer (Preston, 2012).

Exactly what had happened in Ronda during these early months of the war was not clear. The Nationalists declared that the anarchists had murdered several hundred people and thrown them over the cliff. This claim was used to justify their reprisals.

Many of the townspeople left Ronda and fled to Malaga, but this city soon fell to the Nationalists in February 1937. Republicans in Malaga were rounded up and shot. The Nationalists boasted that they executed more Republicans in seven days than the Republicans had killed in the seven months they were in control of the city (Preston, 2012, p 177).

Most of the citizens of Malaga, together with a few surviving Republican soldiers, then tried to reach Almeria along the coastal road – walking, riding donkeys and hanging onto rickety vehicles for a distance of about 200 km. These refugees were strafed and bombed by planes, and shelled by Nationalists warships. The number of people killed in what became known as the Malaga-Almeria Massacre was over 3000. The Canadian physician Norman Bethune used the few vehicles available to him to help the refugees travel to Almeria (Stewart, R., & Majada Neila, 2014), but this had little effect. The following photograph shows the refugees:

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway came to Spain toward the end of 1937 to produce a documentary film on the Civil War – The Spanish Earth – to help raise money for the Republicans. The photograph below shows him in the Republican trenches at Teruel (low center) together with the filmmaker Joris Ivens (high center).

After the Spanish Civil War ended in1939, Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel based on what he had heard about the violence perpetrated by both sides during the conflict. The following illustration shows some of the covers used by various editions of the book, the original on the left:

The epigraph to the novel is from John Donne’s Meditations upon Emergent Occasions (1624) The quotation ends with:

any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

The novel’s central character is Robert Jordan, an American Professor of Spanish, and an explosives expert, now a volunteer serving with the Republicans. In the spring of 1937, he is ordered to blow up a mountain-bridge to prevent Nationalist forces from Segovia from reaching Madrid. For this task he recruits the help of a band of Republican guerillas, led by Pablo and his woman Pilar. Jordan falls in love with Maria, a beautiful young woman serving as the band’s cook. Maria’s father, the Republican mayor of Valladolid, and her mother had been executed by the Nationalists early in the war. She herself had her head shaved, and was raped and imprisoned, before finally escaping to the mountains.

One evening, Pilar tells Jordan and Maria what had happened in Ronda at the beginning of the war. Pablo, the leader of the local anarchists in the town, had captured the barracks of the Guardia Civil and executed all the guards. He had also rounded up the main supporters of the Nationalists and imprisoned them in the city council. Pilar describes the center of the town (see preceding illustrations):  

The town is built on the high bank above the river and there is a square there with a fountain and there are benches and there are big trees that give a shade for the benches. The balconies of the houses look out on the plaza. Six streets enter on the plaza and there is an arcade from the houses that goes around the plaza so that one can walk in the shade of the arcade when the sun is hot. On three sides of the plaza is the arcade and on the fourth side is the walk shaded by the trees beside the edge of the cliff with, far below, the river. It is three hundred feet down to the river.

Pilar then describes how the town square was set up for the execution of the fascists:

Pablo organized it all as he did the attack on the barracks. First he had the entrances to the streets blocked off with carts though to organize the plaza for a capea. For an amateur bull fight. The fascists were all held in the Ayuntamiento, the city hall, which was the largest building on one side of the plaza. It was there the clock was set in the wall and it was in the buildings under the arcade that the club of the fascists was.

Pablo organized the peasants and workers who had gathered in the square:

He placed them in two lines as you would place men for a rope pulling contest, or as they stand in a city to watch the ending of a bicycle road race with just room for the cyclists to pass between, or as men stood to allow the passage of a holy image in a procession. Two meters was left between the lines and they ex-tended from the door of the Avuntamiento clear across the plaza to the edge of the cliff. So that, from the doorway of the Ayuntamiento, looking across the plaza, one coming out would see two solid lines of people waiting.
They were armed with flails such as are used to beat out the grain and they were a good flail’s length apart. All did not have flails, as enough flails could not be obtained. But most had flails obtained from the store of Don Guillermo Martin, who was a fascist and sold all sorts of agricultural implements. And those who did not have flails had heavy herdsman’s clubs, or ox-goads, and some had wooden pitchforks; those with wooden tines that are used to fork the chaff and straw into the air after the flailing. Some had sickles and reaping hooks but these Pablo placed at the far end where the lines reached the edge of the cliff.

The assembled crowd was told that they must kill the fascists by beating them to death. One of the peasants asked Pilar why, and she reported the following exchange:

“To save bullets” I said. “And that each man should have his share in the responsibility”
“That it should start then. That it should start.” And I looked at him and saw that he was crying. “Why are you crying, Joaquin?” I asked him. “This is not to cry about.”
“I cannot help it, Pilar,” he said. “I have never killed any one.”

One by one, the fascists were led out of the city hall and made their way through the crowd of peasants. One by one, they were beaten and clubbed to death. And one by one, their bodies were cast over the edge of the cliff into el tajo.

This fictional representation of the Anarchist terror in Ronda is extremely powerful. In the novel Hemingway also describes Nationalist atrocities in Valladolid – the summary execution of Maria’s parents and her abuse and rape by the Falangists. This vivid portrayal of the brutality of the war should make us rethink our hatreds. We are all in this life together; we are diminished by the death of any man; the bell tolls for us.  

Later in the novel, Jordan and the guerilla band succeed in blowing up the bridge. but Jordan is severely wounded and unable to move. He convinces that the rest of the band to retreat while he stays to delay the advancing Nationalists. He insists that Maria leave with the guerillas. The novel ends with Jordan trying to stay conscious as the soldiers come closer. Talking to himself, he claims

And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make ⸺  

Hemingway leaves the thought unfinished. The novel ends with an officer of the Nationalist forces riding slowly up toward where Jordan awaits him. 

The book sold well, and in 1943 it was made into a film starring Gary Cooper as Jordan, Ingrid Bergman as Maria, Akim Tamiroff as Pablo and Katina Paxinou as Pilar. The film was an international success, although it was not distributed in France or Germany until after World War II (see posters below). The film received multiple nominations for the Academy Awards, with Katina Paxinou winning for best supporting actress.

The film follows the novel quite closely. When Pilar recounts her tale of what happened in Ronda at the beginning of the Civil War, the movie shows in flashback some of the brutal executions in the plaza:

The bridge that Jordan dynamites just before the end of the movie is as high as the Puente Nuevo in Ronda:

Historical Accounts of the Events in Ronda

The history of The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas was the first major examination of what happened in Spain during the war. The book became a best seller soon after it was published and it has since gone through two revisions and multiple printings:

Thomas discussed the events in Ronda:

In country districts. revolution itself often consisted primarily of the murder of the upper classes or the bourgeoisie. Thus the description, in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, of how the inhabitants of a small pueblo first beat the male members of the middle class and then flung them over a cliff, is near to the reality of what happened in the famous Andalusian town of Ronda (though the work was the responsibility of a gang from Malaga). There, 512 were murdered in the first month of war. (p 263 in 1989 printing)

Other historians have proposed that the Ronda executions described by Hemingway, although based on accounts he had heard, was completely fictional. Buckley (1997) described what happened in Ronda in the Summer of 1936, according to the records maintained in the town hall:

On 19 July 1936 the commander of the small army garrison in Ronda, upon reports of a military uprising in Morocco, went to the Town Hall with a small platoon and demanded that the mayor submit to his authority and publicly announce that the city was under martial law and the army was taking control. The mayor belonged to the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front. He refused to follow the commander’s orders and swiftly disarmed him and his small band of soldiers, heavily outnumbered by the peasant groups beginning to assemble on the plaza outside the town hall. Thus, Ronda remained loyal to the Republican government of Madrid, and did not fall to the fascists until 18 September 1936.
However, it would be would be wrong to assume that during these two months the Republican government in Madrid had any control over the town or its inhabitants. As soon as the reports of a military rising in Africa began to spread, the peasants from neighboring villages poured into Ronda and in effect took control. Although the mayor was nominally in charge, the real power belonged to a “Comite” formed by the peasants themselves, most of whom belonged to CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo), the Anarchist Labor Union.
The task of this committee was three-fold: first, to arrest all persons suspected of having fascist sympathies; second, to insure that food was evenly distributed to all inhabitants (money was outlawed and vouchers with the CNT rubber-stamp were issued); third, to prepare to defend Ronda from a probable attack by fascist troops stationed in Seville.
The word “revolution” immediately comes to mind when we attempt to describe the situation in Ronda in summer 1936. The Secretary’s “Record of Proceedings” for 28 July 1936, preserved in Ronda’s Town Hall, displays revolutionary rhetoric: “[W]e are living through a moment of historic transcendence … the fascist coup has spurred the populace to rise to the last man and to demand social justice . . . a new society is being born, based upon liberty, justice and equality … justice has now become `revolutionary justice’ designed to cleanse the state of all fascist elements as well as to establish the basis for a new social order etc.”

Many priests and supporters of the Nationalist cause were executed. However, these victims were not killed in the plaza, but were driven away from the center of the town and shot. It is difficult to determine the number of those killed, but it was likely much less than the 512 claimed by the Nationalists. None of the bodies were thrown into el tajo. This story seems to have been invented by General Queipo to inflame his troops as they went about their reprisals.

Corbin (1995) considers the story about the executions in the plaza and the casting of the bodies into el tajo as an example of myth-making. Myths have their basis in historical events but the stories become altered in the telling, often to justify the actions of those in power:

Any story of the past has a double construction and a double truth. The truth of the tale told is its historical truth; the truth of its telling is its mythical truth.

The story of the executions by el tajo served the purpose of the Nationalists: it portrayed the class hatred of the anarchists and communists and the violence that they promulgated in the early weeks of the Civil War. This then justified their violent repression. Society must be protected from any recurrence of such revolutionary terror.   

In The Spanish Holocaust (2012) which describes the repression of the Spanish Republicans during and after the Civil War, Paul Preston summarizes the events in Ronda:

Famous for its Roman and Arab bridges and its exquisite eighteenth-century bullring, Ronda had suffered a pitiless repression at the hands of anarchists led by a character known as ‘El Gitano.’ Initially, the CNT committee had maintained a degree of order although churches were sacked and images destroyed, but soon there were murders being carried out by anarchists from Malaga and also by locals. However, there is no substance to the claim, first made by Queipo in a broadcast on 18 August and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, that large numbers of prisoners were killed by being thrown into the tajo. The many rightist victims were shot in the cemetery. Francoist sources claim that victims of the red terror from Ronda and the nearby pueblos of Gaucin and Arriate numbered over six hundred. On 16 September, when Varela took the town, the defenders fled and his forces suffered only three casualties in the assault. His men stopped and interrogated anyone found in streets and shot many of them. Over half of the population fled towards Malaga. Under the new authorities, those of the town’s defenders who had not fled were subjected to a bloody repression and the theft of their property. (p 171)

In the White City

The American poet, Philip Levine, spent time in Spain trying to learn more about the Spanish Civil War and the poets that wrote about it (Levine, 2016). He also wrote about Ronda in a prose-poem entitled In the White City (2009).

From up there—& he points to the bridge high above us—they tossed down the fat barber, the Falangist, to his death. “It is all in the book by the American communist.” “The communist?” I say. Yes, the friend of Fidel Castro, Comrade Hemingway “The tourists come because of your Mr. Hemingway, that is why you are here.” Who can argue with this young, balding lieutenant of the Guardia Civil who has dared to leave his barracks lacking his tricorne & with only a small sidearm? In felt house slippers he stands at ease on the west streets of his town, Ronda, to show me the world. “On those rocks,” he continues, pointing to a ledge half way down the gorge, “he first hits & his belly explodes. Then they rape his beautiful daughter, the film star that is Swedish, & when they have finish they shave her head. That is why we execute them all.” Does he mean that is why in the novel the Nationalists executed them. (I am careful not to say “the fascists”; it is 1965.) “No, no, executed them here, in life or death”—he smiles at his little joke—“up there on the bridge”— & he points again,— “by military firing squad one at a time, properly. That is why the whole town must witness & learn. It is educational.” But, I insist, the death of the Falangist was merely in a novel that made no effort to be true to events, una novela, a fiction, a best seller. The lieutenant enjoys this repartee, he’s amused by my innocence, he shakes his head, he is discreet & patient with this visitor to his ancient city that boasts the first Plaza de Toros in all the world. “You Americans,” and he suppresses his laughter, “you think because he was a famous red he could not tell the truth. They do not give Noble Prizes to liars.”

The poem illustrates how history becomes mixed up with fiction, with movies, and with photographs to form the myths that we remember about the past. Hemingway was not a communist and, though he spent time in Cuba, he was not a friend of Castro (Michaud, 2012). This idea stems from photographs of the two of them together at a fishing competition, the only time they ever met. The character Maria in Hemingway’s novel, played by the Swedish film-star in the movie, was the daughter of a mayor who was executed in the Civil War, but this was in a different town, and the mayor there was a Republican executed by the Nationalists. The poem ends with the idea that fiction written by a winner of the Noble (sic) Prize has to be true.

The following is an etching of the Puente Nuevo in Ronda done by Gary Young for a broadside edition of Levine’s poem.

Epilogue

By the spring of 1938, the Nationalists ultimately made their way to the sea, isolating Barcelona from Madrid. After Franco’s troops marched into Barcelona in January 1939, Manuel Azana was among the thousands of refugees who fled from Barcelona to France. In March, Madrid was taken and Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939, and became the Prime Minister of Spain, continuing in this office until 1973. During and after the war, many thousands of Republicans were executed by the Nationalists in a repression known as the “white terror” or the “Spanish Holocaust” (Preston, 2012). Hemingway’s novel was translated into Spanish as Por quién doblan las campanas, but was not allowed into Spain until 1969. The movie was not shown there until 1978. Hugh Thomas’s history of the war was forbidden in Spain until after the death of Franco in 1975. Today Spain continues to unearth the bodies of those executed during and after the war, and to seek some understanding of the violence and brutality of those days (Anderson, 2017). The myths need to be converted back into history.

References

Anderson, P. (2017). Knowing and acknowledging Spain’s dark Civil War past. Journal of Contemporary History, 52(1), 129–139.

Buckley, R. (1997): Revolution in Ronda: the facts in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway Review, 17(1), 49-57.

Corbin, J. (1995). Truth and myth in history: an example from the Spanish Civil War. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 25(4), 609-625

Graham, H. (2005). The Spanish Civil War: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the afternoon. Scribner.

Hemingway, E. (1940). For whom the bell tolls. Scribner.

Levine, P. (2009). News of the world: poems. Alfred A. Knopf.

Levine, P. (2016). The Spanish Civil War in Poetry. In Levine, P. (edited by Hirsch E., 2016). My lost poets: a life in poetry. (pp 139-163). Alfred A. Knopf.

Michaud, J. (2012). Hemingway, Castro, and Cuba. New Yorker (May 24, 2012).

Payne, S. G. (2012). The Spanish Civil War. Cambridge University Press.

Preston, P. (2012). The Spanish holocaust: inquisition and extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. HarperPress.

Stewart, R., & Majada Neila, J. (2014). Bethune in Spain. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Thomas, H. (1961, revised and enlarged, 1989). The Spanish Civil War. Harper & Row.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was one of the most important American poets of the mid-20^th-Century. He was famous both for his contribution to poetry and for his recurrent attacks of mania. This post reviews his life, comments on some of his poems, and considers the relations between creativity and mood disorders. Madness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with poetry:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, 1, 5-9)

Family Background

Robert Traill Spencer Lowell IV, as his full name suggests, was born to a long line of “Boston Brahmins,” a term that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. coined to describe the an untitled aristocracy with ancestors among the original Protestant colonists who came to New England in the 17^th Century.

The following figure shows part of Lowell’s family tree (Jamison, 2017, pp 39-51; also websites by Wikipedia, Geneanet, and Nicholas Jenkins). The diagram begins with John Lowell (1743-1802), a judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, remembered for authoring Article I of the United States Bill of Rights:

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and inalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.

The Lowell family tree is noteworthy for the incidence of published poets (light blue shading) and mental disturbances (red lettering). In 1845, Lowell’s great-great-grandmother Harriett Bracket Spence was institutionalized for incurable madness in the McLean Asylum for the Insane in Somerville. The hospital later moved to Belmont and became known simply as McLean Hospital (Beam, 2003). Lowell was himself committed there for treatment on several occasions between 1958 and 1967.

Charles Russell Lowell was considered one of the “fireside poets,” a group which included Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant. These were poets whose work was read aloud to the family at the fireside. Amy Lowell became fascinated by Chinese poetry, which she attempted to imitate in brief intensely visual poems, a style that came to be known as “Imagism.” Percival Lowell was an astronomer who falsely believed that the markings he observed on the planet Mars represented a network of canals.

Through his mother, Charlotte Winslow, Lowell was a direct descendent of Mary Chilton (1607-1679), who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. On this father’s side, he could trace their ancestry back to a Percival Lowle (1571-1664), who settled just north of Boston some 20 years after the Mayflower arrived.

Youth

While attending St Mark’s, an Episcopal preparatory school in Southborough, just south of Boston, Lowell was significantly influenced by a young teacher and poet, Richard Eberhart, and decided that poetry was his calling. He spent the summers of 1935 and 1936 with his friends, Frank Parker and Blair Clark, in a rented cottage on Nantucket Island just south of Cape Cod (see map below). There, under Lowell’s domineering direction, the three engaged in an impassioned study of literature and art. Lowell came to be known as “Cal,” a nickname that derived from both the Roman Emperor Caligula and Shakespeare’s character Caliban (Hamilton, 1982, p 20). 

Lowell attended Harvard University but after two years left to study with the poet Allen Tate, finally graduating from Kenyon College in 1940. After graduation, he married Jean Stafford (McConahay, 1986), started graduate studies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, converted from his family’s Protestant religion to Roman Catholicism, and began writing the poems for his first book. These were days of decision. 

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Lowell initially registered for the draft. However, he soon became upset with the Allied policy of “strategic” bombing: attacking civilian targets to undermine morale, as opposed to the “tactical” bombing of military targets. After receiving orders for his induction into the armed forces in 1943, he wrote an open letter to President Roosevelt describing his objections:

Our rulers have promised us unlimited bombings of Germany and Japan. Let us be honest: we intend the permanent destruction of Germany and Japan. If this program is carried out, it will demonstrate to the world our Machiavellian contempt for the laws of justice and charity between nations; it will destroy any possibility of a European or Asiatic national autonomy; it will leave China and Europe, the two natural power centers of the future, to the mercy of the USSR, a totalitarian tyranny committed to world revolution and total global domination through propaganda and violence.
In 1941 we undertook a patriotic war to preserve our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor against the lawless aggressions of a totalitarian league: in 1943 we are collaborating with the most unscrupulous and powerful of totalitarian dictators to destroy law, freedom, democracy, and above all, our continued national sovereignty. (quoted in Hamilton, 1982, p. 89)

Lowell was sentenced as a Conscientious Objector to a year and a day at the Federal Correctional Center in Danbury Connecticut. He was released on parole after 5 months, and spent the rest of his sentence working as a cleaner in the nearby Bridgeport hospital. At the end of this period, his first book, Land of Unlikeness, was published in a limited edition, to encouraging reviews. 

Lord Weary’s Castle

Lowell’s first mainstream book of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle, was published in 1946 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The title comes from an old ballad about the stonemason Lambkin who built a castle for Lord Weary. After the lord refused to pay for the castle, Lambkin murdered the lord’s wife and child. The frontispiece of the book was an engraving of Cain’s murder of Abel by Lowell’s schoolfriend Frank Parker (right). Title and frontispiece both point to humanity’s long history of violence.

  

The first poem in the book is The Exile’s Return:

There mounts in squalls a sort of rusty mire,
Not ice, not snow, to leaguer the Hôtel
De Ville, where braced pig-iron dragons grip
The blizzard to their rigor mortis. A bell
Grumbles when the reverberations strip
The thatching from its spire,
The search-guns click and spit and split up timber
And nick the slate roofs on the Holstenwall
Where torn-up tilestones crown the victor. Fall
And winter, spring and summer, guns unlimber
And lumber down the narrow gabled street
Past your gray, sorry and ancestral house
Where the dynamited walnut tree
Shadows a squat, old, wind-torn gate and cows
The Yankee commandant. You will not see
Strutting children or meet
The peg-leg and reproachful chancellor
With a forget-me-not in his button-hole
When the unseasoned liberators roll
Into the Market Square, ground arms before
The Rathaus; but already lily-stands
Burgeon the risen Rhineland, and a rough
Cathedral lifts its eye. Pleasant enough,
Voi ch’entrate, and your life is in your hands.

The poem is elusive. In their notes to the Collected Poems (2003), Bidart and Gewanter remark on the similarity of some of the poem’s lines to passages in Thomas Mann’s novella Tonio Kröger, first published in 1903. It recounts the return of a young poet to Lübeck, where he (like the author) had grown up. In the opening lines of the novella, Mann remarks that “sometimes a kind of soft hail fell, not ice, not snow” (Neugroschel translation, 2998, p 164). He also describes Tonio’s father as the “impeccably dressed gentleman with the wildflower in his buttonhole.” (p 180). So we should likely place the poem in Lübeck, though I am not sure why Lowell uses the French term Hôtel de Ville to describe its historic city hall (later referred to by its German name Rathaus).

In 1942 Lübeck was one of the first German cities to be strategically bombed by the Allies. The following illustration shows the Market Square and City Hall in a 1906 postcard together with a photograph of the destruction after the bombing. The Allied attack focused on the city center, which had no military significance; the docks (in the upper right of the photograph) were completely spared. 

Lowell’s poem imagines the military occupation of the devastated city. Though there may be hope for some sort of salvation – the lilies probably allude to the Virgin Mary and the Annunciation – the general impression is of the Gates of Hell. The last line quotes from Dante’s Inferno: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (Abandon all hope, you who enter here).   

The most important poem of the book is the seven-part The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket (Axelrod, 2015; Hass, 1977; Remaley, 1976). The poem was written in memory of Lowell’s cousin Warren Winslow, who died in an explosion that sank the destroyer Turner close to Rockaway Point near Coney Island in 1944 (Fender, 1973). The cause of the explosion is not known; it was likely caused by an accident and not by enemy action.   

The full poem is available on the website of the Poetry Foundation. The beginning vividly describes the recovery of the body of a drowned sailor:

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket—
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. 

Madaket is a beach on the Southwestern edge of Nantucket. As noted by Bidart and Gewanter, much of the description of the drowned sailor derives from Thoreau’s The Shipwreck (1864). Warren Winslow’s body was never recovered. Lowell’s poem therefore alludes to all those who died at sea in the war. The poem conveys the violence of such deaths with harsh rhymes, irregular rhythms and the striking enjambment of the fourth line.

The second section of the poem further generalizes the tragedy to all those sailors who have died at sea, like those of the 19^th Century whalers in Melville’s Moby Dick or the Quaker seamen buried in the Nantucket graveyard. The third section reveals how the sailors failed to understand their deaths. They thought that God was on their side, but did not realize that God was in the sea that drowned them or the whale they tried to kill. The next two sections further describe the violence of the whale trade, and by extension the violence of the war that had just come to an end.

Where might we find redemption from the ongoing violence? The sixth and penultimate section of the poem – Our Lady of Walsingham – changes dramatically from the previous sections. In 1061, Richeldis de Faverches, an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, received a vision of the Virgin Mary in Walsingham, a small village in Norfolk. Following the Madonna’s request, she built there a replica of Jesus’s home in Nazareth, and placed a statue of the Virgin with the infant Jesus within. This shrine became one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in Europe. In 1538, during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the shrine and its associated priory were torn down. (A damaged statue of the virgin in the Victoria and Albert Museum may actually be what remains of the Walsingham statue.) In 1897 a new statue (illustrated on the right) was blessed by the pope and placed in the Slipper Chapel, the last station on the original pilgrimage route to Walsingham. In the 20^th Century, Walsingham began to welcome pilgrims again, though now separate Catholic and Anglican sites compete for their visit.      

Lowell looks to find salvation but finds indifference:

Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God: it goes
Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,
Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem
Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

The face of the Virginis indeed “expressionless.” The Latin “there is nothing special nor beautiful about him” is from Isaiah 53:2, which in the Vulgate reads

Et ascendet sicut virgultum coram eo, et sicut radix de terra sitienti. Non est species ei, neque decor, et vidimus eum, et non erat aspectus, et desideravimus eum:

The King James Version translates this verse (and the succeeding three verses) as

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

This is part of Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah, the man of sorrows who will take away our sins. Looking for redemption, the world comes to Walsingham, but the Virgin pays the world no special attention. Our ideas of God being born in human form at Bethlehem and of our salvation through his death on Calvary are human hopes not divine realities. 

The final section of the poem describes the Atlantic Ocean as seen from Nantucket:

The empty winds are creaking and the oak
Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph, 
The boughs are trembling and a gaff 
Bobs on the untimely stroke
Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell 
In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well;  
Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, 
Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:
Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh 
Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers, 
Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil 
You could cut the brackish winds with a knife 
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill. 
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

The poem concludes by remembering how God made man by breathing into his face, and how God later destroyed everyone except Noah and his family in the flood, when huge “combers” (long curling sea waves) covered the earth. The final line likely alludes to the rainbow that God gave as a sign to Noah that he would not flood the Earth again:

And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:
I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. (Genesis 9: 11-13)

The world wars have shown that humanity’s propensity for violence has not improved.  One assumes that God will keep his promise. But at what cost? God will survive but humanity may perhaps extinguish itself.

Madness

After Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell became famous. The following illustrations show photographs of him from youth to maturity:

Lowell published his second book The Mills of the Kavanagh in 1948. In early 1949 he started to become “wound up” (Hamilton, 2003, p 140). While teaching at Yaddo, an artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York, he became unjustifiably paranoid about a communist takeover of the center. By the time he arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, to give a talk in March, he was frankly psychotic. He later remembered his state of “pathological enthusiasm:”

The night before I was locked up, I ran about the streets of Bloomington, Indiana, crying out against devils and homosexuals. I believed I could stop cars and paralyze their forces by merely standing in the middle of the highway with my arms outspread. Each car carried a long rod above its taillight, and the rods were adorned with diabolic Indian or voodoo signs. Bloomington stood for Joyce ‘s hero and Christian regeneration. Indiana stood for the evil, unexorcized, aboriginal Indians. I suspected I was a re-incarnation of the Holy Ghost and had become homocidally hallucinated. To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting. (Memoirs, p 190)

Lowell’s mind was experiencing an overwhelming “flight of ideas.” He suffered from delusions of grandeur. His behavior was irrepressible and reckless. He refused to sleep. Lowell was 6-foot 1-inch tall: when he was psychotic, it was extremely difficult to restrain him (Jamison, 2017, p 83). He was finally subdued by the police, and committed to a psychiatric hospital. This was the first of multiple prolonged hospital stays, most lasting several months, that occurred once every year or two from 1949 to 1968 (Jamison, 2017, pp 112-113). Initially, he was treated with Electro Convulsive Therapy. In the 1960s, when the major tranquilizers became available, his bouts of mania were controlled by chlorpromazine. After 1968, treatment with lithium provided him with some respite from his illness. Yet the mania still occasionally occurred.

Each manic attack was followed by a prolonged period of depression. Lowell attributed his depression to his regret and shame over what had happened when he was psychotic. However, they were likely part and parcel of his bipolar mood disorder. Lowell wrote feverishly during the periods just before he went completely manic, He then revised what he had written during his prolonged periods of depression.

Mania and depression are more common in creative individuals than in normal controls and this association appears most prominent for poets (Andreasen & Canter, 1974; Ludwig, 1995; Andreasen, 2008; Jamison, 2017; Greenwood, 2022). The flight of ideas that characterizes mania can easily lead to novel ways of looking at things. This is especially true during the hypomanic phase that precedes the psychotic break, when some modicum of control remains.

Despite his recurring attacks of mania, Lowell continued to write. In his 1959 book, Life Studies, he examined himself and his family in intimate detail. Rosenthal (1967) used the term “Confessional Poetry” to describe this work. Poets had always tapped into their personal experience to write poetry but until now none had been so unabashedly honest about their failings:

Because of the way Lowell brought his private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems into the poems of Life Studies, the word ‘confessional’ seemed appropriate enough. Sexual guilt, alcoholism, repeated confinement in a mental hospital (and some suggestion that the malady has its violent phase)—these are explicit themes of a number of the poems, usually developed in the first person and intended without question to point to the author himself. … In a larger, more impersonal context, these poems seemed to me one culmination of the Romantic and modern tendency to place the literal Self more and more at the center of the poem.

During the 1950s and 1960s Lowell became the poetic consciousness of the United States, declaiming against its descent into materialism and its waging of unjustified wars. Lowell was one of the lead speakers at the 1967 March on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Norman Mailer describes him at the March:

Lowell had the most disconcerting mixture of strength and weakness in his presence, a blending so dramatic in its visible sign of conflict that one had to assume he would be sensationally attractive to women. He had something untouchable, all insane in its force: one felt immediately that there were any number of causes for which the man would be ready to die, and for some he would fight, with an axe in his hand and a Cromwellian light in his eye. It was even possible that physically he was very strong—one couldn’t tell at all—he might be fragile, he might have the sort of farm mechanic’s strength which could manhandle the rear axle and differential off a car and into the back of a pickup. But physical strength or no, his nerves were all too apparently delicate. Obviously spoiled by everyone for years, he seemed nonetheless to need the spoiling. These nerves—the nerves of a consummate poet—were not tuned to any battering. (Mailer, 1968, pp 53-54)

Final Poems

Lowell’s last book of poetry, Day by Day, came out just after his death from a sudden heart attack in 1977. The penultimate poem in that book is Thanks-Offering for Recovery:

The airy, going house grows small
tonight, and soft enough to be crumpled up
like a handkerchief in my hand.
Here with you by this hotbed of coals,
I am the homme sensuel, free
to turn my back on the lamp, and work.
Something has been taken off,
a wooden winter shadow—
goodbye nothing. I give thanks, thanks—
thanks too for this small
Brazilian ex voto, this primitive head
sent me across the Atlantic by my friend . . .
a corkweight thing,
to be offered Deo gratias
in church on recovering from head-injury or migraine—
now mercifully delivered in my hands,
though shelved awhile unnoticing and unnoticed.
Free of the unshakable terror that made me write . . .
I pick it up, a head holy and unholy,
tonsured or damaged,
with gross black charcoaled brows and stern eyes
frowning as if they had seen the splendor
times past counting . . . unspoiled,
solemn as a child is serious—
light balsa wood the color of my skin.
It is all childcraft, especially
its shallow, chiseled ears,
crudely healed scars lumped out
to listen to itself, perhaps, not knowing
it was made to be given up.
Goodbye nothing. Blockhead,
I would take you to church,
if any church would take you . . .
This winter, I thought
I was created to be given away.

Lowell is describing a small figurine from the northeastern region of Brazil, a gift from his friend Elizabeth Bishop. This was an ex voto (“from a vow”) offering, called milagré in Portuguese. Such objects, were left at a church as thanks to God after recovery from illness. A tiny leg would be left when the arthritis abated, a miniature head after the migraine had ended. The illustration on the right shows a small (4-inch) head (not the one described by Lowell). The poet wonders whether such an offering might serve as thanks now that the  “unshakable terror that made me write” had finally finished. 

  

Epilogue

Lowell’s final poem in the book Day by Day serves as an epilogue to a life distinguished by severe madness and by significant poetry: 

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

At the end of the poem Lowell refers to Vermeer’s 1662 painting Woman Reading a Letter in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Lowell’s prayed to be as accurate in his poetry as Vermeer in his painting. On another level, the painting embodied the tranquility that was so often missing in his life.

References

Andreasen, N. C., & Canter A. (1974). The creative writer: psychiatric symptoms and family history. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 15(2), 123-131.

Andreasen, N. C. (2008). The relationship between creativity and mood disorders. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 10 (2), 251-255.

Axelrod, S. G. (2015). Robert Lowell: Life and art. Princeton University Press. 

Beam, A. (2003). Gracefully insane: the rise and fall of America’s premier mental hospital. PublicAffairs Books.

Fender, S. (1973). What really happened to Warren Winslow? Journal of American Studies, 7(2), 187–190.

Greenwood, T. A. (2020). Creativity and bipolar disorder: a shared genetic vulnerability. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16(1), 239–264.

Hamilton, I. (1982). Robert Lowell: a biography. Random House

Hass, R. (1977). Lowell’s Graveyard. Salmagundi, 37(37), 56–72.

Jamison, K. R. (2017). Robert Lowell: setting the river on fire: a study of genius, mania, and character. Alfred A. Knopf.

Lowell, R. (1946). Lord Weary’s castle. Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Lowell, R. (1977). Day by day. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Lowell, R. (edited by Bidart, F., & Gewanter, D., 2003). Collected poems. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Lowell, R. (edited by Axelrod, S. G., & Kość, G., 2022). Memoirs. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Ludwig, A. M. (1995). The price of greatness: resolving the creativity and madness controversy. Guilford Press.

Mailer, N. (1968). The armies of the night; history as a novel, the novel as history. New American Library.

Mann, T. (translated by Neugroschel, J., 1998). Death in Venice and other tales. Viking.

McConahay, M. D. (1986). ‘Heidelberry braids’ and Yankee “politesse”: Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell reconsidered. Virginia Quarterly Review, 62(2), 213-236.

Remaley, P. P. (1976). The quest for grace in Robert Lowell’s “Lord Weary’s Castle.” Renascence, 28(3), 115–122.

Rosenthal, M. L. (1967). Robert Lowell and ‘Confessional’ Poetry. In Rosenthal, M. L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II, Oxford University Press, pp. 25-78.