Crome

Late Afternoon on Norwich River by John Crome


A late master-work from the great master of the Norwich School of artists John Crome. (1768-1821).

I believe that the Castle Museum, Norwich  acquired this art-work in the 1980's. The vibrancy of colour here is truly amazing; Crome found inspiration from simple urban water scenes. There's a couple of other great works which are located at New Mills, Norwich by Crome just as stunning as this, if less detailed.

By all accounts the rivalry between the Crome family of artists and the Stannard family, notably the brothers Alfred and Joseph Stannard was intense. This was due to John Crome snubbing the youthful prodigy Joseph Stannard's requests for painting lessons from the self-taught master.

Crome himself is reputedly to have uttered on his death-bed something like, 'Hobbema, Hobbema, how I have loved you,' which true or not, reveals the influence which the Dutch 17th century masters had upon the leading players in the Norwich School.

Now here's the puzzle. If this work is dated 1818-20 and Stannard saw it, there may be an artistic pun going on here. For if you take a really close look at the foreground in Stannard's Thorpe Water Frolic (elsewhere on this blog) it too depicts a small child trailing a toy boat from the stern of a boat. Is this quite specific allusion by Stannard to this painting  sour grapes or homage or tribute to a late master or self-election to the Mantle of leader of the Norwich School of Painters?

Tetramorph

Although many Christians stubbornly refuse to believe it, there is astrological symbolism in the Bible! This is simply due to the fact that the Hebrew people absorbed some of the astrological beliefs of the ancient Babylonian civilization when held in captivity in Babylon. The Hebrew people were liberated by the conqueror of Babylonia the Persian Shah, Cyrus.

Astrological symbolism occurs in the prophet Ezekiel's vision-

As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle. Ezekiel 1:10.

Its interesting to note that the great winged beasts of the Babylonian are a composite of beasts and human. The better-known Egyptian Sphinx is another example of a four-fold mixture of beasts and human likeness. Saint John in the 27th and only book of prophecy in the New Testament, re-iterates Ezekiel's vision thus-

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 4:7

One notable interpretation of this frequently found symbol throughout various civilizations, notes of its pre-Christian origins-

The Ancients in their wisdom had drawn from the riddle of the Sphinx four basic rules for conduct of human life -knowledge with the human brain; will with the lion's strength; daring (or lifting oneself) with the bold strength of the eagle's wings; silence with the powerful concentrated bulk of the bull.

Although the astrological schemata differs fractionally from the prophet Ezekiel and John's vision in its usage of the far-less well-known creature, the scorpion, to represent one quarter of the 'Fixed Cross' of Astrology, the Tetramorph quarternity is still a remarkable example of syncretism in religion, that is the over-lapping and adoption of one schemata by a differing belief-system.

Often the figure of Christ is depicted at the heart of the Tetramorph, as a Pantokrater, that is, an omnipotent Ruler over All.  The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung explains why-

He (Christ) holds an important position midway between the two extremes, man and God, which are so difficult to unite. ..He is lacking in neither humanity nor in divinity, and for this reason he was long ago characterized by totality symbols, because he was understood to be all-embracing and to unite all opposites. The quaternity of the Son of Man,indicating a more differentiated consciousness, was also ascribed to him (via Cross and tetramorph. (CW 10:692)

As for whether early Christians knew that John's vision referenced back to Ezekiel which itself originated from Babylonian astrological symbolism; one can only presume it be nothing other than an act of knowingly supplanting one set of religious symbols over another.

It was in fact the early Church Father Saint Jerome who is credited as first nominating the symbols of Bull, Eagle, Angel and Lion to the four Gospel authors.  Jerome's selection of the so-called 'Fixed Cross' of Astrology, (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius) as emblematic 'Logo's' to the 4 Gospels is a superb example of syncretism , that is, how belief systems overlap and are adopted by newer beliefs, often entirely different from their sources.

However, in the final analysis the quaternity symbol the Tetramorph can never be fully explained or exhausted; for as a symbol, it will always transcend interpretative attempts.The original definition of a symbol, as a tally of two halves, helps our understanding here; for Man only ever holds one half of the broken coin, tally stick or object used for identification, recognition or completeness, the other, 'invisible and missing half' of the symbolon, is held by God.

Illustrations from the Book of Kells, circa 8th CE, Babylonian Lion and (top) a 13th CE Ivory Casket

The Lady of Shallot

Slowly filling the Aquarium with water!

This time pure gothic fantasy inspired by Tennyson's poem, John Waterhouse's 'The Lady of Shallot'. It's the kind of romantic image which as a teenager one enthusiastically frames in dark mahogany, wanting to be devoutly married to and live with every day, after seeing it in all its glory at the Tate.

All reproductions of paintings invariably are pale imitations of experiencing oil on canvas in the flesh; however, one chemical rite-de-passage, long ago, entangled in fascination at its rich detail, I distinctly heard the heavy flap of the gorgeous tapestry, the splutter of a candle guttering in the breeze and caught the zip of a swallow flitting past eye!

From its imposing size and presence in the Tate Gallery, Waterhouse's famous painting is the canvas which launched a thousand adolescent minds to delve further into the Pre-Raphaelite world of an idealized Arthurian world of myth and legend, languid heroines and Victorian social comment. One can almost hear the Gothic lamentations of a chanteuse such as Nico in the air as the heroine glides to a watery death!

The Librarian

Finished reading, 'The Magic Circle of Rudolph II , Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague', by Peter Marshall recently. Rudolph II was a great patron of the arts, including the painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593); who in turn was an influence upon the Czech animation film-maker Jan Svankmajer; nor forgetting the great Quay brothers and their fabulous film, The Piano-tuner of Earthquakes. Perhaps you get to look like this from reading just a few too many books!

Akhnaten

.Just been listening to a recording of the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten, which I first heard way back in 1989. It must also have been around 88/89 that  attended the roughly-sketched Glass opera, 'The making of the Representative for Planet 8', which is based upon a novella by Doris Lessing and performed at the Coliseum by the E.N.O. A work which contains some of the motifs of a far better-known composition by Glass, his Violin Concerto (1989). Can't wait to hear it performed at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival by the Russian State Orchestra with the violinist Chloë Hanslip playing.

I was fortunate enough to return to the Coliseum in 2006 to hear and see the spectacle 'Satagrayha', the second in a cycle of three operas Glass composed in the 1980's.The dark colouration of the orchestral tone in Akhnaten is due to the fact that violins are totally absent from the string orchestra. There's a fair battery of percussion instruments and a synthesizer in the scoring though. Now the work sounds not so much of the flesh-pots and opulence of ancient Egypt as of the decade of plenty and excess, the 1980's. Still stirring stuff, especially in the dance sequence and the memorable 'Hymn to to Sun' sung by the counter-tenor Pharaoh. Its text which bears some resemblance to Psalm 104..The sacred text quoted is from the Pyramid texts of the Old Kingdom, and is recited early on in the opera.

Opened are the double doors of the horizon
Unlocked are its bolts
Clouds darken the sky
 The stars reign down
The Constellations stagger
The bones of the hell hounds tremble
The porters are silent
When they see this king
Dawning as a soul
Men fall
Their name is not
Seize thou this king by his arm
Take this king to the sky
That he die not on earth
Among men
He flies who flies
This king flies away from you Ye mortals
He is not of the earth
He is of the sky
He flaps his wings like a zeret bird
He goes to the sky
He goes to the sky
On the Wind.

In modern times, it was Sigmund Freud who first proposed that Hebraic monotheism may have been adopted by Moses from the 'heretical' Pharaoh Akhnaten; the Egyptian Pharaoh who replaced the crowded pantheon of gods with worship of the solar disc, Aten, the Sun, effectively established the world's first, if short-lived, monotheism. Akhnaten lived circa 1350 B.C but the dates for Moses are far less certain. Some have proposed that Moses lived under the reign of Rameses II but there's good archaeological evidence to suggest that Moses and the Exodus are of an earlier era and therefore acquainted with Aknaten's revolutionary monotheism. Freud's break-away 'disciple', Carl Jung explains the influence Egyptian theology made upon Christianity theology thus-

The Osiris cult offers an excellent example. At first only Pharaoh participated in the transformation of the god, since he alone "had an Osiris"; but later the nobles of the Empire acquired an Osiris too, and finally this development culminated in the Christian idea that everyone has an immortal soul and shares directly in the Godhead. In Christianity the development was carried still further when the outer God or Christ gradually became the inner Christ of the individual believer, remaining one and the same though dwelling in many. - C.W. Vol.9 part 1: 229

The book to read on Philip Glass' trilogy of operas is 'Opera on the Beach', Faber and Faber 1988

Bembine Tablet of Isis

The Jesuit scholar of comparative religion, Athanasius Kircher  (1602-80) was the author of the three door-step sized tomes Oedipus Egypticus (Rome 1652-56) which were a favourite read of Sir Thomas Browne.

Browne alludes to Kircher's vast work which reproduces a copper-plate illustration of the Bembine Table, twice in his 1658 Discourse The Garden of Cyrus

Though he that considereth........ the crosse erected upon a pitcher diffusing streams of water into two basins, with sprinkling branches in them, and all described upon a two-footed Altar, as in the Hieroglyphicks of the brazen Table of Bembus will hardly decline all thought of Christian signality in them.

We shall not affirm that from such grounds, the Egyptian Embalmers imitated this texture yet in their linnen folds the same is observable among their neatest Mummies, in the figures of Isis and Osyris, and the Tutelary spirits in the Bembine Table.

Unfortunately for Kircher's and Browne's Egyptology, the Bembine Tablet has long since been identified as a syncretic Roman work dating from circa 250 CE and its not, as both antiquarians believed, a work originating from ancient Egypt. The best examples of art-work in Kircher's books can be found at this blog-page.

Hazel-nut Vision

I came across a book somewhere (I'll find it soon promise) which proposed that Shakespeare knew of Julian's famous hazel-nut vision because Prince Hamlet alludes to it. There's also the suggestion that Julian was a member of the Beguine order, a continental religious community which had only one Community based in England at Norwich. Finally found the Shakespeare quote of Prince Hamlet and nutshell image!

'O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space - were it not I have bad dreams'. (Act 3: Scene 2).

There's also a Sir Thomas Browne 'nutshell' image, an imagery in essence of essence worth quoting here-

And since instructions are many, hold close unto those whereon the rest depend. So may we have all in a a few, and the Law and Prophets in a Rule, the Sacred Writ in Stenography, and the Scripture in a Nut-shell. (Christian Morals 3:4)

Here's Julian of Norwich's famous 'nutshell' vision-

At the same time, our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting......In this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, 'What can this be?' And the answer came to me, 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was,'It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God'.