Works that make the most immediate as well as the most lasting impact on undergraduates, I have found, usually have a magic, mythological, or intensely emotional aspect, along with a choreographic energy or clarity. Here is a quick overview of objects from the Western tradition that have proved consistently effective, as assessed by student performance on midterm and final exams. Among ancient artifacts, the bust of Queen Nefertiti, with its strange severity and elegance; the monumental Hellenistic sculpture group of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being strangled by serpents; and the Varvakeion Athena, our small Roman-era copy of the colossal, chryselephantine statue of the armed Athena from the Parthenon. The latter in particular, with its dense iconography of coiled serpent, winged Victory, triple-crested helmet, and aegis with gorgon’s head medallion, seems to burn its way into student memory.
Images from the Middle Ages, aside from elegant French Madonnas and Notre Dame’s gargoyles and flying buttresses, have proved less successful in my experience than the frankly carnal images of the Italian Renaissance. A dramatic contrast can be drawn between Donatello’s sinuously homoerotic, bronze David and his late, carved-wood Mary Magdalene, with its painful gauntness and agonized posture of repentance. Two standards never lose their power in the classroom: Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, where the nude goddess of love stands in the dreamy S-curve of a Gothic Madonna, and Leonardo’s eerie Mona Lisa, with its ambiguous lady, barren landscape, and mismatched horizon lines. From Michelangelo’s huge body of work, the deepest response, independent of the students’ religious background, has been to his marble Pietà, where a ravishingly epicene dead Christ slips from the lap of a heavily shrouded, strikingly young Mary, and second to a surreally dual panel in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Temptation and Fall: on one side of the robust tree wound by a fat, female-bodied serpent, sensual Eve reaches up for the forbidden fruit, while on the other, an avenging angel drives the anguished sinners out of paradise.
Because of its inherent theatricality, the Baroque works resoundingly well with undergraduates. Paramount exhibits are Bernini’s designs for St. Peter’s Basilica: the serpentine, 95-foot-high, bronze pillars of the Baldacchino (canopy) over the main altar; or the elevated chair of St. Peter—wood encased in bronze and framed by a spectacular Glory, a solar burst of gilded beams. Next is Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel in Rome’s Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, with its opera-box stage setting, flamboyant columns of multicolored marble, and over the altar the wickedly witty marble-and-bronze sculpture group, Ecstasy of St. Teresa, where spiritual union and sexual orgasm occur simultaneously.
Nineteenth-century Romantic and realist painting offers a staggering range of image choices. Standouts in my classes have included the following: Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, a grisly intertwining of the living and the dead, bobbing on dark, swelling seas against a threatening sky. Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, inspired by a Byron poem, with its swirl of luxury and butchery around the impassive king of Nineveh, who has torched his palace and capital. Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (chronicling a disaster Turner witnessed in 1834), where nature conquers politics and the Thames itself seems aflame. (Of several views in this series, the version owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art is the best because most panoramic.) Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, a penetrating study of social class and exploitation amid the din and glitter of modern entertainment: we ourselves, thanks to a trick mirror, become the dissolute, predatory boulevardier being waited on by a wistful young woman lost in the harsh night world of the city.
Twentieth-century art is prolific in contrasting and competitive styles but less concerned with the completeness or autonomy of individual images. Two exceptions are Picasso’s still intimidatingly avant-garde Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with its brothel setting, contorted figures, and fractured space, and second, his monochrome mural, Guernica, the most powerful image of political protest since Goya, a devastating spectacle of fire, fear, and death. Also unfailingly useful are Hollywood glamour stills from the 1920s to the 1950s, which are drawn from a slide collection that I have helped build at the University of the Arts since 1990. I view these suave portrait photos, with their formal poses and mesmerizing luminosity, as true works of art in the main line of Western culture.
But an education in images should not simply be a standard art-survey course—though I would strongly defend the pedagogical value of survey courses, which are being unwisely marginalized or dismantled outright at many American colleges. Thanks to postmodernism, strict chronology and historical sweep and synthesis are no longer universally appreciated or considered fundamental to the graduate training of humanities professors. But chronology is crucial if we hope, as we must, to broaden the Western curriculum to world cultures. To maintain order, the choice of representative images will need to be stringently narrowed. I envision a syllabus based on key images that would give teachers great latitude to expand the verbal dimension of presentation, including an analysis of style as well as a narrative of personal response. I will give three examples of prototypical images for my proposed course plan. They would play on students’ feeling for mystery yet ground them in chronology and encourage them to evaluate historical evidence. The first example is from the Stone Age; the second from the Byzantine era; the third from pre-Columbian Central America.
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Among and sometimes boldly on the prehistoric paintings of animals found in the caves and rock shelters of southern France and northern Spain are eerie stenciled hands captured in circles of color (Fig. 1). Powdered minerals—white, black, brown, red, violet, or yellow—were mixed with water and blown by the unknown artist through a reed or hollow bone over his or her own hand. At the Castillo cave complex in Santander, Spain, is the so-called Frieze of Hands, a series of forty-four stenciled images—thirty-five left hands and nine right. In some cases, as at the Gargas cave in the French Pyrenees, mutilated hands appear with only the stumps of fingers. It is unclear whether the amputation was the result of frostbite or accident or had some ritual meaning of root, primal power.
(Fig. 1) Prehistoric stenciled handprint on the wall of the cave of Pech Merle at Cabrerets (c. 25,000–16,000 B.C.), in the Midi-Pyrénées region of southern France
These disembodied hands left on natural stone 25,000 years ago would make a tremendous impression on students who inhabit a clean, artificial media environment of hyperkinetic cyber images. The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the Web, or alters and deletes text files. Middle-class students raised in a high-tech, service-sector economy are several generations removed from the manual labor of factories or farms.
The saga of the discovery of the cave paintings can also show students how history is written and revised. The first cave found, at Altamira in northern Spain, was stumbled on by a hunter and his dog in 1868. The aristocratic estate owner, an amateur archaeologist, surveyed the cave but did not see the animals painted on the ceiling until, on a visit in 1879, his five-year-old daughter looked up and exclaimed at them. Controversy over dating of the paintings was prolonged: critics furiously rejected the hypothesis of their prehistoric origin and attributed them to forgers or Roman-era Celts. The discoveries of other cave paintings in Spain and the Dordogne from the 1890s on were also met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Funding for the early expeditions had to come from Prince Albert of Monaco. The most famous cave of them all, Lascaux, was found in 1940 by four adventurous schoolboys who tipped off their schoolmaster. Thus children, with their curiosity and freedom from preconception, have been instrumental in the revelation of man’s primeval past.
Cave paintings re-create a subsistence world where human beings’ very survival was at stake—a situation that can come again in war or after severe
climatological change. Was the stenciled prehistoric hand a tribal badge or a symbol of possession and control over the painted animals?—whose real-life originals constituted a critical food supply in the Ice Age. Cave paintings usually follow strict realism: minutely varied species of horses, deer, bison, and mammoths, delicately painted with improvised brushes of grass or fur, can be identified. The fragility yet willed strength of human power symbolized by the stenciled hand is suggested by the sheer size of animals depicted. For example, seventeen images of the long-horned steppe bison (Bison priscus) appear in the cave at Lascaux: speedy climbers and leapers, they were 6'6" in height at their hump. If one were trapped or speared, it could provide up to 1,500 pounds of meat for an extended family. The fierce, prehistoric aurochs, whose descendants include the ox and the Spanish fighting bull, were of even greater size, sometimes weighing over 2,800 pounds. There are fifty-two aurochs depicted on the walls at Lascaux: one is eighteen feet long.
(Fig. 2) Byzantine icon of Christ Redeemer (c. 1393–94) by the icon-painter John Metropolitos, Gallery of Art, Skopje, Macedonia
The prehistoric hand, whether personal signature or communal avowal of desire, is clearly a magic image with copious later parallels. It might be juxtaposed with other upraised hands, such as the gesture of peace and blessing made by Buddha and Jesus or the signal of formal address (ad locutio, representing the power of speech) of Roman orators and generals, as in the restored Prima Porta statue of Augustus Caesar or Constantine’s fragmentary colossus in the Capitoline Museum. There is a constellation of associations with the “speaking” hand movements of South Asian dance, called mudra in India and even more intricately refined in classical Khmer dance (aspara) in Cambodia. Then there are the operatic gestures of fear and awe made by wind-blown saints in Baroque art as well as folk motifs of the magic hand, such as the archaic Mediterranean charm with two fingers extended, still worn by Italians to ward off the malocchio (evil eye).
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My second exemplary image is the Byzantine icon, in an early medieval style that survives in Eastern rite or Greek and Russian Orthodox churches (Fig. 2). It was born in the great capital of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople (modern Istanbul). In late-medieval and early Renaissance Italy, this style was called la maniera greca, the Greek manner or style. Insofar as Byzantine religious art is commonly reproduced on Christmas cards and museum-shop curios, the Byzantine style remains part of contemporary culture in Europe and North America. The classic icon is a rather stern, even glowering image of Jesus, Mary, or a saint set against a gold or blue background. It may be a mosaic panel bonded to a church wall or dome or a portable image painted in shiny egg tempera on wood. Icons were paraded in cities on feast days and carried into battle to protect the armies.
The figure in icons is always static and seen in strict frontality (in contrast to cave paintings, where animals are depicted only in profile). Space is compressed, and composition is shallow, with the figure pressed against the picture plane. Even when a floor is shown, figures seem to hover. The human dimension is inconsequential. The Byzantine emperor and his queen, clad in heavy brocade robes studded with jewels and pearls, may appear but primarily as a conduit to the divine. Usually floating somewhere in the image is a vertical or horizontal strip of Greek letters, a sacred name or fragment of Scripture. This elegant black calligraphy, outlined against gold, presents words as magic. It seems to show sound soaring through the air—a ritual incantation, an abstract idea being transformed into words. The Byzantine icon, therefore, is an ideal marriage of word and picture. Church and basilica, with their architecturally embedded images, were living books for the masses. The soaring Byzantine domes emblazoned with the enthroned Virgin or Christ Pantocrator (“Ruler of All”) recall the painted ceiling of Lascaux’s Great Hall of the Bulls, a rotunda that has been called “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory.”
The glittering Byzantine icon seizes student attention: its aggressive stare forces us to stare back. It also provides an excellent entrée to long, tangled lines of cultural history. Until the late nineteenth century, Byzantine art was dismissed as a degenerate or barbarous form of classical art. The ornate Byzantine style actually originates in the luxurious ostentation of the ancient pagan Near East—notably the great capitals of Alexandria and mercantile Antioch. The figures in Byzantine icons exist as head and hand: if the bodies seem stiffly imprisoned or encased in their robes, perhaps it’s because their distant ancestors were Egyptian mummies. The watchful, wary eyes of Byzantine icons, which seem to drill through and see past the viewer, descend from mummy masks of Roman-era Egypt, such as those found in a Hawara cemetery in the Fayum oasis southwest of Cairo. These vividly painted encaustic (wax) portraits, set into linen body wrappings, show only the dead’s bustlike head and shoulders. The individualism of Fayum faces descends from Roman culture, with its stress on realistic portraiture. Stone busts—originally clay death masks—of Roman ancestors were kept in the family atrium and carried in procession once a year. The Fayum figures’ enlarged, almost bulging eyes and dilated pupils (sometimes described as “haunting” or “insomniac”) reflect the mystical importance of the eye, identified with the god Horus, in Egyptian culture. The soulfulness of the Fayum portraits, whose originals were urban sophisticates in an anxious period of social change, survives in the ascetic faces of Byzantine saints: Osiris’ promise of resurrection and eternal life has become Christ’s.
The subject of Byzantine icons is inextricable from that of iconoclasm—the destruction of images because of their alleged solicitation to idolatry. Nothing could be more relevant to the dominance of images in our celebrity culture, which strives to turn us all into pagan idolators. Suspicion of or hostility to images persists in the American Puritan tradition, which surfaced at both extremes of the political spectrum in the 1980s: first, in the attempted legal suppression of sex magazines, including mainstream Playboy and Penthouse, by anti-pornography feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon; and second, in the attack by Christian conservatives on the National Endowment for the Arts for funding blasphemous, homoerotic, or sadomasochistic photographs by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe. Literal iconoclasm was undertaken in Afghanistan in 2001 when the Taliban ordered the pulverizing by artillery fire of ancient colossi of Buddha, carved out of a cliff at Bamian.
Iconoclasm originates in the Old Testament’s prohibition of making pictures—called “graven images” or “idols” in the Ten Commandments—of God, man, or animal. In Judeo-Christianity and its ancillary descendant, Islam (which forbids depiction of the figure in mosques), God is pure spirit and cannot be reduced to material form. During the bitter debate about this issue in early Christianity from the second century on, pagan image-making often won out, thanks to the momentum of Mediterranean cultural tradition. Protestant reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin were severe critics of the image-intoxicated style of late-medieval Roman Catholicism. There was smashing of church statues and stained-glass windows in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout Northern Europe, as there also was in England after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and during Cromwell’s Puritan Revolution. The austere, white Protestant church in the seventeenth-century neoclassical style of Christopher Wren (the fount of American church design) is a temple to reason, with no images to distract the worshippers from Holy Scripture, the word of God.
Hence the battle in Western culture between word and picture can be traced over 2,500 years. The first outbreak of iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire occurred in 726 A.D.: when Leo III, the emperor and pope, ordered that a beloved icon of Christ be removed from its place above the Chalke Gate, the main entrance to the imperial palace, there was a violent riot by women, whose leader was later martyred and canonized as St. Theodosia. An edict by Leo four years later reinforced his ban on the use of the figure in church art because images, in his view, were being blasphemously worshipped. Leo’s son, the emperor Constant
ine V, convened a council in 754 that institutionalized iconoclasm; he attacked the monasteries and persecuted iconodules (venerators of icons). Many icons were destroyed outright: mosaic images were hacked from the walls and crosses put in their place. Women, particularly among the imperial family, were fervent iconodules. The banning of images in Byzantium lasted, with several breaks, for over a century until the restoration of the icons in 843, after the death of the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos, the prior year.
Portable icons were carried along medieval trade routes into Russia. At the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, many of the city’s precious objects were dispersed even further into Russia and Italy. There was long controversy among Russian theologians about whether the iconostasis (from eikonostasion, medieval Greek for “shrine”), a partition or picture screen separating the altar from the nave in an Orthodox church, detracted attention from the Holy Eucharist as the center of the Christian service. The modern Orthodox iconostasis consists of fold-out screens with stacked registers (rows) of gilt wooden images of Christ, the Virgin, archangels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists, and other saints, which the faithful read like posters. It resembles a modern newsstand, with its linear array of glossy magazine covers featuring celebrities and pop stars. A little area facing the front door in Russian Orthodox homes—krasnyi ugolok, the “red or beautiful corner”—was devoted to icon display. Bowing and crossing themselves, visitors saluted the icons even before greeting the host. Once again we detect female influence, since it was Russian women, who could not be ordained as priests, who created and tended the icon corners.
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