The Metamorphosis Exhibition at The National Gallery

The poster for this exhibition, widely publicised, promised an imaginative and lavish collaboration of art forms inspired by three of Titian’s masterpieces, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The lithe, intertwined bodies of two dancers form a dynamic canvas onto which Titian’s Diana and Actaeon is projected. The contours of the bodies evoke the fleshy physicality of Titian’s portrayals, rendering even the serene sky behind the red cloth charged with the erotic sculpting of the toned female stomach. The positioning of the woman’s arms emphasises the gestural shape of Actaeon, while the male dancer’s embrace suggests the erotic tension in Diana’s chastity: his arms both protectively conceal her breasts and encircle her in a cradle of control. The vision of the exhibition is equally inspiring, an exciting interdisciplinary collaboration of modern artists, composers, choreographers and poets, responding to three paintings of 500 years ago.

The concept of Titian’s three paintings being at the heart of this exhibition clearly informed the physical layout: radiating from a diamond-shaped room displaying Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon were six other rooms, with an additional Exhibition Cinema on the way out. However, this implied connectivity was not realised in the works. It seemed that many of the artists called upon had struggled to respond to Titian’s work. Wendy Cope admitted that she wasn’t ‘terribly drawn’ to paintings of mythical scenes (in a video which can be accessed via the exhibition website) while Ofili felt the need to ‘free’ himself from Titian by returning ‘back to Ovid’. In addition to the modern, scientific aversion to mythology, the invocation of Classical dress and architecture can further alienate the modern response. 

However, perhaps the element which seemed most challenging in responding to Titian’s work was the theme of chastity, which lies a t the heart of both stories. Callisto is banished by Diana and later turned into a bear when she is discovered to be pregnant (having been raped by Jupiter), while Actaeon is turned into a stag and killed by his own hounds for intruding on the sacred privacy of grotto in which Diana is bathing. This tension between erotic potential and a steely chastity is embedded in Titian’s paintings. The overtly feminine and untoned bodies of Diana and her nymphs may perhaps seem even more eroticised to a modern audience used to the thin, boy-like physiques of glamour models. However, in Diana and Actaeon, there is a striking disjunction between Diana’s large, sensuous body and her small, focused face, fixing a piercing glare upon the intruder. Similarly, despite the lavish profusion of limbs and bare flesh, from Actaeon’s point of view the scene seems untouchable. He does not physically connect with the scene upon which his presence has such an impact; he is separated from the nymphs by a glassy pool, his left hand not even quite touching the red drapery. The positions of Diana and her nymphs give an overall dynamic of recoil, with four of the torsos angled away from the incoming Actaeon. Some of the women are not yet disturbed by his presence – the nymph drying the goddess’s calf, for instance – but there is a sense of hostility and fear in the faces turned towards him. 

Despite the potential incongruity between the theme of chastity and 21st century society, I was surprised this tension seemed so widely ignored. Instead, unadulterated sexuality seemed to be the order of the day. The most talked-about installation, Mark Wallinger’s Diana, highlighted this focus. The room is very dark, except for light leaking from an enclosed ‘bathroom’ in the centre, into which there is an blurred window, and a few cracks and peep-holes. One has to make a real effort to see in, making the experience profoundly uncomfortable. In forcing the viewer into this voyeuristic, intrusive position, the work is effective and thought-provoking. But, it seems to have much more to do with modern concerns of prohibited desires and surveillance culture, than with Titian or Ovid, both of whom emphasise the unpremeditated action of Actaeon. Similarly, though Ofili claimed to return to Ovid as the source for his works, he seemed to have freed himself from the subtleties of this influence, as well as that of Titian. His works are liquid and vividly coloured (a response to the names of Diana’s nymphs), and his set design conjured the supernatural and organic atmosphere of these myths. However, like Wallinger’s installation, the paintings are dripping with images of lust and desire, contrary to the inadvertent intrusion of Actaeon and the rape, (not seduction, rape), of Callisto. Golding’s translation of this scene from Ovid could not be clearer:

The wench against him strove as much as any woman could.
I would that Juno had it seen, for then I know thou would
Not take the deed so heinously.

Diana’s reaction then, in both cases, is uncompromising and severe, captured by Titian in the calculated and controlled gesture of dismissal in Diana and Callisto, and Diana’s active pursuit of Actaeon in The Death of Actaeon, which as Nicholas Penny points out, is Titian’s most glaring departure from Ovid’s text. The most perceptive responses to Titian highlighted this aspect. While some of the costume designs hinged on the most simplistic links with the story, such as the moon as a symbol of Diana, the costume which licked the ballet dancer playing Diana in a firey red captured her aggressive role in these stories. Most effective, however, in suggesting the ambiguous nature of Diana as simultaneously sexualized and sterile, victim and aggressor, feminine and masculine, was Shawcross’s installation, Trophy. An industrial robot curves and swings round its prey like a mesmerising snake, ready to strike. Its light-tipped wand hovers around a stag’s antler carved out of blocks of different woods. This would seem to be the eponymous trophy from the corpse of the dead Actaeon, examined by the victor. However, a more subtle balance of associations is at work. The powerful and mechanical nature of the robot evokes masculinity, not to mention the phallic wand. The examining light distils the power of the gaze, both in Actaeon looking on Diana, and her condemnatory stare recorded by Titian. Yet the movements of the robot are feminine, sinuous and graceful. The antler is a male symbol used by the animal to display prowess, and physically involved in fighting, yet it is now also the symbol of a victim. It is made of an organic substance which links it to Diana’s wooded dominion, yet is represents the neutralisation of the sexual threat it once advertised. In a fairly dimly-lit exhibition, this was the only room which might have benefited from greater darkness, to draw attention to the light from the wand, and the changing shadows its movements might have impressed upon the wooden antler.

The collaboration between the ballet and this project had enormous potential. This seemed the most interesting and innovative part of the project, and may well have been very effective in the final product: ballets screened by the Royal Opera House on 16th July. Having missed these, the glimpse offered of this process in the Choreographic room and the Exhibition Cinema was intensely frustrating. It was impossible to form a sustained appreciation of the interpretation, symbolism and creative vision involved in this fantastic project. Much more effective (if less ‘fair’ to all the choreographers involved) would have been an in-depth exploration of the process of creating one routine, involving interpretative discussions, rehearsal, performance and reflections, rather than the scattergun selection of disjointed clips.

This exhibition had so much potential to be at the forefront of interdisciplinary art. It was a shame that some of the resulting artwork seemed to see the Titian as a constraint to be ‘broken away from’, rather than as an inspiration to be closely scrutinised. The potential for an exploration into the touching points and differences between media was not fully grasped. In addition, the false premise of letting the art ‘speak for itself’, probably concealed much of the interesting interpretative and creative response which the paintings provoked. The collection felt like a drawstring bag of interesting contents, when the drawstring just needed tightening to bring all the elements more closely together. The potential for creating original art which yet remained a close and observant response was best realised in the most unobtrusive and yet most accessible part of this exhibition. On a chair in the first room of Titians were a couple of little books containing poems commissioned by the exhibition from the foremost poets in Britain today. This book is available for purchase, but even better the poets can be viewed reading their own poems and explaining the process of writing on the exhibition’s website. My analysis of some of these works will form a future blog entry. In the meantime, do go and watch these poems: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/poems-inspired-by-titian/.

Thoughts on Representation

“we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted -- better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that” [1]

What is it about art that can make even the most realistic representations ‘better to us’ than the very reality they seek to capture? Browning’s observation – that paintings can make the observer love what they have never cared about in reality – is by no means new. Aristotle notes in section 6 of his Poetics that ‘there are things which we see with pain so far as they themselves are concerned but whose images, even when executed in very great detail, we view with pleasure’[2].  There is something, then, fundamentally different between experiencing reality and experiencing a representation of that reality, and that difference fundamentally concerns pleasure. To answer what is so different, I will propose three answers, exploring the latter two in detail through the writing of Hopkins and the ekphrastic work Ruskin. Ekphrasis, the representation of art by another work of art in a different medium, has a special part to play in this discussion because of the way in which it can highlight the capacities and boundaries of different art forms, and thus their relation to reality.

The three answers then: the first is simply the fascination excited by the nature of representative art as essentially illusory. Earlier in Browning’s poem the Prior criticises the realism of Fra Lippo Lippi’s painting, exclaiming: ‘Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true/As much as pea and pea!’[3]  Of course, a representation cannot be as like its referent as two real peas. A painting of a pea must be two dimensional and even a sculpture of the pea must be of a different material, probably harder than the original and of a different texture. Even supposing appearances were identical, they would certainly not taste the same! The ‘trompe de l’oeil’ that allows Ruskin to write about marks on canvas as animated humans with histories, futures and thoughts is intrinsically and enduringly intriguing and pleasurable. Second, the production of art involves looking at reality in a new way and, arguably, with a view that the reader will also be forced to look again at the familiar in a more intense and pleasurable way.  Finally, art intensifies our experience of reality by its own limitations. In seeking to express or create things beyond the nature of a particular artistic medium, the observer/reader’s attention is paradoxically drawn to precisely those aspects of reality.

In the quotation above, Browning highlights the great discovery of Russian Formalism: the things which art renders new and ‘better’ to the observer are often precisely those things ‘we have passed/ Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see’. According to Shklovsky, ‘habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war’[4]. His verb graphically suggests that material and even human surroundings are not only dulled to our perception, but actually engulfed and annihilated by familiarity. Scholars like Shklovsky suggest that we do not actually perceive familiar objects with the full extent of our observational capacity, we only recognise them. Thus,

‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.’[5]

If the technique of art is defamiliarisation, this must involve the artist him/herself seeing things in an unfamiliar, new and strange way. In the Victorian period, this way was articulated by John Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing. In a footnote to defend his assertion that in nature there are no outlines, he explains perhaps his most famous theory of painting. He argues that excellent painting is really a matter of perception: ‘The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify’[6]. The implication is that ordinary recognition interprets and actually distorts what is really perceived by the ‘innocent’ eye.

Whereas, for the Russian Formalists, such perception was an end in itself, for Gerard Manley Hopkins to take pleasure in reality was to appreciate God and his creation. Close perception was then a religious act. He was deeply suspicious of writing poetry as an occupation suitable for a priest, and thus it seems no coincidence that when he did write and was most comfortable with his writing, he attempted to discern the ‘grandeur of God’ which with the world is ‘charged’. In his journals, even when resolves to write ‘no verses in Passion week or on Fridays’[7] in a gesture of pious self-discipline, he can be found making unrelated, seemingly unprovoked observations upon the world around him. From his descriptions, it does not appear that he only analysed and recorded the spectacular and unusual, but sought, in the spirit of Russian formalism, to make the habitual, astonishing. This is achieved primarily by the extraordinary connections he makes between phenomena that have no ‘real-world’ association. This metaphorical stretching takes place not only at the imagistic level – likening moonlight to a cobweb, for example[8] - but at the level of words themselves.  One of the most dramatic chains of mentally-acrobatic images can be found in a journal entry from 1866:

‘Drops of rain hanging on rails etc. seen with only the low rim lighted like nails (of fingers). Screws of brooks and twines. Soft chalky look with more shadowy middles of the globes of cloud on a night with a moon faint or concealed… Cups of the eyes, Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. Bows of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves. Also of the bones sleeved in flesh. Juices of the sunrise. Joins and veins of the same. Vermilion look of the hand held against a candle with the darker parts as the middles of the fingers and especially the knuckles covered with ash.’[9] p9

The disjunct images are immediately striking: rain likened to fingernails and the long list of unlikely similes for an eyelid.  The power of these similes lies in the mental effort required to bring the two images together, whereby both subject and analogue are rendered fresh and new. In order to visualize how raindrops might be like fingernails, one has to imagine an exact image of fingernails long enough that when light shines from behind them, the semitransparent material of the nail is illumined while the rest of the finger is silhouetted and dark. Both water droplets and finger nails are so familiar as to be prime candidates for Shklovsky’s deadening habitualization. They are also very different substances: one liquid and transparent, the other hard and translucent. However, drawing together these images reveals, perhaps, how they truly appear, rather than what they truly are. Even though water is ductile and fluid, a drop suspended and unmoving could appear, as Hopkins suggests, as shiny and solid as a fingernail.

The image of the illuminated hand then returns for closer inspection when Hopkins considers a hand held up before the candle. Having drawn attention to the translucent and light-catching nails, he now suggests the whole hand to be light-permeable. However, rather than describe the effect of light passing through the skin in terms which are familiar – we know the skin to be peach coloured and to glow with a more rosy hue when backlit – he treats the hand as actually transformed in colour. Indeed, he begins the sentence with the specific name of the most striking red-orange pigment used in painting. This opaque paint vividly conjures the actual colour of the translucent skin. This painterly colour is subtly transformed into an image of hot coals when it is contrasted with the ashy darkness of the knuckles and finger-middles. Through the theme of painting materials, the diverse images are woven together into a painterly perspective. Despite the insubstantial vaporous quality of the clouds, there are lent opacity and substance by the description of their ‘soft, chalky look’, while the eyelashes, which have three-dimensional substance, are rendered mere lines by the phrase ‘pencil of eyelashes’.

Among the seeming random complexity of this passage, it is perhaps the word ‘juice’ which stands out most strangely. This is a prime example of Hopkins’s dislocation, not only of images, but of words themselves. Though the watery jelly of the eyeball might be, visually, like the liquid extracted from fruit, the specific association of ‘juice’ still renders the description of the eye unfamiliar and strange. ‘Juices of the sunrise’ is even odder Perhaps visually the colour of the sunrise and, say, orange juice, might be similar, but again the specificity of the word jars and renews our image of the sky.

 By reducing everything he sees down to their most basic and anonymous formal components of colour, shape and texture, Hopkins uses the ‘innocent’, painterly eye recommended by Ruskin, and renders his objects both strange and minutely exact to the imagination. His writing style too is compressed so as to be almost impressionistic. As a painting by Monet does not exhaustively explain or recreate the subject, but provides the visual tools with disjointed, vivid strokes which the eye and mind cohere and interpret, so Hopkins gives the barest components of his images, leaving the connections to be drawn with an active effort that intensifies the visual experience. Indeed, Hopkins’s condensation of language almost amounts to an admission of the limits of language, just as the annotations he made to his sketches highlighted the limitations of drawing. It is precisely that gap between his language and the effect produced by it that makes his writing ‘better to us’ than the things he describes, some of which we have probably already carelessly passed today.

There is a sense in which reality encompasses all its representations. Reality is three dimensional, but includes two-dimensional surfaces like painting; it is aural but includes silence; it is visual but it includes blindness; it includes but is not limited to the sense of touch; it exists in motion but includes stillness. There is a sense in which any art that seeks to represent reality is fulfilled in reference to reality, just as referring the reader to the reality of fingernails and water drops fulfils Hopkins’s artistic creation. However, what happens when the subject is a representation itself?  In contrast to reality, a painting is silent and still, created with a limited colour palette. In contrast to reality, writing is non-visual, in that the writing generally conveys more than the visual marks on the page, which is why looking at a page of poetry in an unknown language would not fully realise the artistic product. Writing can attempt to evoke sound, smell, touch, sight and even taste, but these things are not inherent in the process of reading. Reading occurs in time, but that may or may not correspond to the timeframe suggested by the subject. What happens, then, when a poem is painted or a painting is written about? We will explore only the latter of these dynamics, in the work of Ruskin, yet an appreciation of the former will naturally be involved.

Ruskin appreciates the problems involved with turning a painting into a linguistic account. In his majestic work entitled Modern Painters, two artists in particular emerge as pinnacles of excellence in Ruskin’s opinion: the elder is the Renaissance artist, Tintoretto, and the younger, a contemporary of Ruskin, Turner. Yet, perhaps Ruskin is only conscious of what is missing from a linguistic description. He asserts that he ‘will not insult this marvellous picture [Tinoretto’s crucifixion] by an effort at a verbal account of it’[10]. 

Yet his description adds as much as it takes away. He observes that contrary to most renditions of the crucifixion, Tintoretto does not communicate Christ’s agony in either his expression, which is calm, nor through bodily wounds. Instead,

‘the Agony is told by this, and by this only; that, though there yet remains a chasm of light on the mountain horizon where the earthquake darkness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory about the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the colour of ashes.’[11]

Here we can see the essential instability and multiplicity of words. In the painting there is a patch of yellow-peach colour behind Christ, around which there are dark, grey-violet clouds, but to call this ‘a chasm of light’ evokes many implications that surely cannot be inherent in the marks made by Tintoretto. Chasm comes from the Greek for ‘yawning hollow’[12], implying the action of opening and the impression of depth. It also suggests that the sky has been cracked or broken apart, which air cannot occur in reality, let alone in marks representing clouds on the walls of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Likewise, though the picture veritably features dark tones, especially towards the edges, the picture does not (could not?) directly represent an earthquake. ‘Earthquake’, then modifies the darkness in some imaginative, unexplained way, probably informed by Gospel account of an earthquake which occurred at the moment of Jesus’s death. Ruskin also introduces retrospective time into the static picture when the brightness around Jesus has ‘become’ pale. This tendency to animate a still scene is most pronounced when Ruskin goes on to describe another Tintoretto: The Massacre of the Innocents. 

He highlights a particularly dramatic part of the painting, where a woman is suspended in mid-air in front of some steps, holding a baby. A man above her is holding the feet of the infant. Ruskin renders the scene in italics, as follows:

‘she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight; - she will be dashed dead in a second’[13].

In a sense, this description is deeply true to the imaginative impact of the painting. However, again, to say that she ‘hurls’ herself implies an active, forcible leap into the air which, in the context, amounts to the desperate action of suicide. From the painting it seems she has been caught as she falls through the air, but another interpretation could be that she was pushed, or tripped. In anticipating her death, Ruskin looks beyond the painting into the immediate future.

Not only does Ruskin animate the time within the scene captured, he evokes the process of painting the finished picture as well. In describing the painting of water in The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, he implicitly imagines Turner observing the real scene which he will paint: ‘A stream of splendid colour fell from the boat, but that occupied the centre only’[14]. The past tense of ‘fell’, suggests a real moment in time, beyond the painting Ruskin considers. He describes how the water, without any particular identifying feature, was yet ‘no dead grey flat paint’. In this moment, he moves from real scene to a potential painted image. The next moment, he has returned to his imagined reality, describing the water as the subject of Turner’s painting: a ‘downright clear, playing, palpable surface, full of indefinite hue’[15]. As if having accomplished the mimesis of this spectacle, Ruskin then asserts, ‘But Turner is not satisfied with this’, as if narrating the moment when Turner is about to recommence his painting and add the sense of something unseen, either the past movement of the water, or a current concealed by its stillness.

The point is not to ascertain whether or not Ruskin’s art criticism was ‘correct’ or not. As Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘Who cares whether Mr Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music… is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets…’[16]. It does matter, in so far as it reveals where one art-form ends and another begins. More importantly, it shows that representation can never be the secondary, analytical activity it purports to be. Rather, mimesis is inescapably creative.  In the case of ekphrasis, the different media of written and visual art require an active, artistic and inventive recreation in order to represent each other. Finally, we should note that it is the aspects of Tintoretto that gesture beyond his medium - his evocation of internal agony, the impression of movement - that fascinate Ruskin, and that it is the moments in Ruskin’s prose where he reaches beyond writing into colour and music, when Wilde finds him ‘mighty and majestic’. In this we discover that what is most powerful in art is ultimately that which cannot be captured, that which hovers at its edges and beyond.

---

[1] Robert Browning, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, Robert Browning the Major Works (Oxford 1997, 2005) p181

[2] Aristotle, Poetics, ed. G F Else (Michigan 1970) p20

[3] Browning, p178

[4] Shklovsky in Literary Theory and Criticism, Patricia Waugh (Oxford 2006) p216

[5] Ibid.

[6] John Ruskin The Elements of Drawing (London, 1857) p6

[7] Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Gerard Manley Hopkins ed. Gardener (London 196) p93

[8] ‘Moonlight hanging or dropping on treetops like blue cobweb.’  Hopkins ed. Gardener 1961 p92. The cobwebs suggest an appearance of connectedness between the branches, and of the light as thin strands where it touches the fine branches. It also magically lifts the image of the light, which the logical mind knows does not exist independently from the trees it illumines, from the dark background, giving it an independent presence and substance.

[9] Hopkins, p93

[10] John Ruskin, Modern Painters Volume II: Part III p261

[11] Ruskin MP p262

[12] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/30870?redirectedFrom=chasm#eid

[13] Ruskin MP p264

[14] Ruskin MP p148

[15] ibid

[16] Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/ntntn10h.htm