wind - the eloquence of symbols

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    A POPULAR autbor who professes to dislike the use of sym-bols is said to have expressed bimself in this way: 'What is a symbol? You say one thing and you mean another. Why don't you say it directly?' Because certain phenomena tend to vanish ifwe approach them without ceremony. To cali a spade a spade may be a very good habit, but there would be no sense in pretending that discourse is confined to the nature of spad es. The sacred, the ominous, the sublime, the graceful, the comical, the pitiful (to name only a few) - these are in-tangible subjects of discourse and likely to vanish if we try to state them directly. A symbol, however, speaks by allusion, it says one thing and means another, and thereby retains what a plain statement would destroy. 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.' To translate this magical sentence in to literallanguage would be more troublesome than i t looks. Some of the images ('sleep', 'rounded', 'dream') may lend themselves to a fairly reasonable translation ('death', 'finished off', 'illusion'), but when i t comes to the word 'stuff' connected with dreams, the attempt m ust surely be abandoned. In the centre of any good symbol there is an opaque core which will not yield to rational analysis, although around this core transiucent images may be grouperl which draw from it their strength and denseness.

    Wbile it would be pleasant to believe that a direct state-ment is always shorter, easier to remember, and more accurate than an indirect one, I would say that a good symbol proves the opposite. It preserves, by virtue ofindirectness, the over-tones which the plain statement evades or dissolves; and for that reason a metaphorical statement is often the most accurate. It is also the most compact. A metaphor condenses and contracts where the literai statement is forced to expand. And in the third place it is easier to remember because it strikes the imagination.

    It might be objected that these observations so far do not refer to symbols at all but only to metaphors. But metaphors

  • in language do exactly what symbols do in the visual arts: they substitute one thing for another, and speak by allusion. Goldsmith, in an essay on metaphors, observed that 'passion itself is very figurative', and derived from this fact some of their trieks and dangers. If engendered by a kind of inspired madness, as in the profundities of oracular speech, a meta-pbor may hecorne so obscure that no body can understand i t; and on the other hand, by an excess of clarity and deliberate eontroi it may hecorne so transparent that it is reduced to a platitude. The art of symbolism is to avoid these extremes by being intelligible but unexpected. An eloquent symbol has a way of Battering our desire for depth without offending our sense of coherence. With a high degree of lucidity i t manages to remain enigmatic. Its poetical force derives from a union ofthe transparent and the opaque.

    The humanist printer Aldus Manutius used a clevice in which an anchor was combined with a dolphin. The history of this emblem, derived from a coin of Titus, was told in Erasmus' Adagia. By letting the dolphin, the quickest fish in the water, curl around a firm and stable anchor, Aldus thought of conveying the mora lesson that in our actions we should combine a udacity with patience, speed with steadi-ness (festina lente). Not until this argument is known does the design in w hi ch i t is locked u p, reveal i ts su p rem e elegance and precision. The symbolic meaning gives it a focus.

    Mr E. M. Forster has said that if a work of art parades a mystifying element, it is to that extent not a work of art, 'not an immortal muse but a sphinx which dies soon as i ts ( riddles are ered'. ~ er are ymoo w icnfit /

    a b e descnption. They disturb us as long as we do ""' not understand them, and bore us as soon as we do. Their l oracle is a platitude in disguise. Bu!gr~ s~~~ exa~~ ~ th reverse of a hinx; i t lives m6re lllily When tt31.cldte ts \

    w . d or ulolirre"io~give~thre;;' illustrarloru i ~i.C"tures in the National Gallery.

    349

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  • In the Mars and V enus by Botticelli, Mars is seen fast asleep, undressed, relaxed, qtiite unconscious of w ha t goes on around him. Little satyrs play with his armour. Opposite to him, wide awake sits Venus, looking ratber shrewd and very .determined. She is becomingly dressed. What is meant by this curious combinarlon of a self-controlled Venus with a self-abandoned Mars who is being mocked by infant satyrs? For the Renaissance, Mars symbolises strife and destruction. Venus, on the other hand, is the goddess of love, of concord and ofharmony. The fact that Mars succumbs to Venus was interpreted as a sign that love is stronger than strife. Mars has relinquished his weapons and fallen asleep, while Venus appears in the character of V enus Vutrix, the victorious Venus who bas disarmed the god of destruction and converted his formidable armour in to a plaything. The mood of the picture is that of a humorous idyll, but with the overtones of a mora argument, the knowledge of which enhances our vision: Et se sempre Marle .fussi sottoposto a V enere, cioe la contrarieta de prin-cipii componenti a loro debiti temperamenti, nessuna cosa mai si corromperebbe.1

    The Madonna of the Meadow by Bellini would not seem to require the aid of iconography at all, so pure and self-evident is the lyricism of this painting. Here the Virgin, holding the sleeping Child on her lap, is placed against a cold, elear, luminous landscape, with cattle grazing, with a wbite bird attacking a large serpent, and with a ram placed next to a classical al tar. But the picture hecomes more eloquent if we recognise in it an allusion to Virgil's Georgics (II, 319 ff.). Virgil explains that the best season for planring vines is either a cold day of early spring 'when the wbite bird, the foe oflong snakes, is come', or a day 'close on autumn's first cold, before the fiery sun touches winter, and summer is waning'. There are also flocks mentioned in this passage, and an altar pre-pared for a goat, and this occasions a remark about the origins of tragedy (II, g8 1). But w ha t chiefy persuades me to believe in the relevance ofthese verses is that 'the white bird, the foe of long snakes' is in the picture. Instead of being genre-like episodes, capriciously added to the background of a sacred painting, these details support the sacramental theme defined by the figure of the sleeping infant.

    In conclusion l should like to speak of Raphael's Dream oJ 'tht Knight or, to be more exact, The Dream oJ Scipio. In this

    1 PICO DBLLA KIRANDOLA: Commento D, vi.

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  • picture the young Scipio lies at the foot of a laurel tree, apparently dreaming ofhis fame. Two women approach bim. The sterner one presents bim with a sword and a book, the more graciousoffers a flower. These three attributes - book, sword and flower - signify the three powers in the soul of man: Intelligence, Strength, and Sensibility, or (as Plato called them) Mind, Courage, and Desire. In this Platonic scheme ofthe tripartite life (to which Macrobius refers in his Dream of Scipio), two gifts, the intellectual and moral, are of the spirit while the third gift (the flower) is ofthe senses. That is why the three gifts are unevenly distributed in the picture. They appear in the proportion of 2 : I, and a similar division, but witb different accents, recurs in Raphael's Three Graces ( now in Chantilly) which once formed a counterpart to the Dream oj tke K night and refers, like i t, to the tripartite life of the soul. Aknowledgeof this doctrineheightensoursensefor the mysterious mood that pervades these two pictures ofinitiation.

    In the study of symbols i t is often impossible to anticipate whether an image which seemed puzzling at first, maynot resolve itself into a platitude. Even in that event, however, the experiment would not have been useless if, in Mr Forster's terms, it bas helperl to kil1 a spbinx. But by far a more important result is sometimes obtained when the elo-quence of a symbol is unexpectedly released because an ob-structing vagueness bas been removed. Connotations that ha.ve been forgotten or are half-understood are the greatest impediment to our perception. The primary aim of icono-graphy should therefore be cathartic.

    Were I tonamea figure wbich might serve asan emblem _for the dangers and chances of symbolic studies, i t would be the irregular solid in the background of Dtlrer's Melancolia. The surface of this unwieldy block - a truncated rhombo-hedron - is largely formed by irregular pentagons. I t is an image of confusion. But while completely irregular on the surface, the eonfigurarion of the block defines on the inside .two perfect equilateral triangles. Pico delia Mirandola thought this to be "the nature of chaos: an aggregate of irregu1ar shapes in which the perfect shapes lie bidden within. This is a most Socratic disorder, and recalls the Silenus of Alcibiades, inciting the spectatr through its confusion to extract, if he can, the bidden fonns: perche Chaos non signijica altro che la matnia piena di tutte leforme, ma eonfosa et imperfttta.

    . l 0mznunto D, xii.