Velázquez, Ovid’s Myth and the “Spinners” of Fate

by | Apr 22, 2013 | Art and Literature, Art Appreciation: Visual Analysis, Baroque Art, Diego Velázquez, Fiber Arts, Mythology, Painting Techniques

Diego Velázquez, Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), oil on canvas, H: 220 cm (86.6 in) x W: 289 cm (113.8 in)
The Prado, Madrid

(Not for beginning art students; I was not able to understand or interpret this painting at all until teaching a class in Mythology.) 

The study of myths in all cultures, like the study of art, may seem obscure but it can illuminate some truths about humanity.  Around the world, the beauty of weaving has some association with magic. So we look to Diego Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (also called The Spinners, The Tapestry Weavers or The Fable of Arachne) which focuses on the weaving contest between Pallas Minerva and Arachne described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  The foreground scene is about a competition which includes spinning and carding, preparations that come before the weaving of tapestries. The final outcome of the story is implied, not shown. Velázquez used a complex composition of diagonals to weave a tale,  a fable that lovers of Charlotte’s Web should appreciate.

Velázquez often put humor into his mythological scenes, but The Spinners is not a satire. It’s related in theme to Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), considered by a majority of art experts to be the greatest secular painting of all time.  The painterly effects of hair and material which dazzle us in Las Meninas go even further in The Spinners, which has a similarly complicated meaning.  Its format is horizontal rather than vertical, but it also features a foreground and background for two tiers of storytelling connected by an opening of light and stairs. As Las Meninas is a group portrait disguised as everyday life in Velázquez El Escorial Palace studio, Las Hilanderas is a narrative posed as a genre scene in the dress styles or 17th century Spain.  It’s dated one year after Las Meninas, 1657.

Detail of Pallas Athena (Minerva) and a “spinning” wheel

According to Ovid, Arachne was a girl born to humble parents in Lydia (an area of Turkey famous for beautiful weavings). She was reknown for her remarkable skill, but did not see her art as a gift from the goddess of weaving.  Arachne accepted praise that set her above Pallas Minerva (Pallas Athena–also the goddess of wisdom) in the art of weaving.  She said, “Let her compete with me, and if she wins I’ll pay whatever penalty.”  So Pallas Athena disguised herself as an old crone, saying “Old age is not to be despised for with it wisdom comes…..seek all the fame you wish as best of mortal weavers, but admit the goddess as your superior in skill.”

Arachne wasn’t humbled and said “Why won’t (the goddess) come to challenge me herself?”  Athena then cast off old age and revealed herself.  Arachne was not scared and immediately took up the challenge of the competition.   In foreground of Velázquez’s canvas, Athena (in a headscarf) and Arachne set up their spinning and carding operations in preparation for the weaving competition.  At least three assistants are helping in the task.  There are balls and balls of wool and thread and even a cat, but no looms in sight. 

Just as Shakespeare liked to insert plays within his plays to elucidate the story, Velázquez was fond of putting subsidiary stories in his paintings.  Another episode takes place in the background, although Velázquez skipped parts and hinted of the conclusion under the archway. Here Athena wears her goddess of war helmut. There are the same number of people in front as in back, five.  It would be reasonable to believe that the young women in the back are the same assistants who help in the foreground, but have changed their clothing into fancy dresses.  Only the lowly-born Arachne, furthest from the viewer, is modestly dressed.

From the girl “Fate” in shadow, we peer into a scene where Athena is about to strike Arachne.
Arachne’s belly is the center of the painting, hinting of the spider’s belly she will become.

According to Ovid’s tale, when goddess and girl had completed their tasks, Athena revealed her tapestry with its central subject of Athena winning her competition with Poseidon to be the patron of Athens.  She wove an olive vine from her sacred tree into the tapestry’s border. Secondary scenes showed the power of gods and goddesses as they triumphed over humans. The subject of Arachne’s tapestry was stories of trickeries by gods and goddesses, at the expense of mortals. She had shown as her central subject as the rape of Europa by Zeus in the form of a bull.  This scene is recognized in the back of this painting as a replica of Titian’s famous painting of that subject in the Spanish royal collection.  
 
“Bitterly resenting her rival’s success, the goddess warrior ripped it, with its convincing evidence of celestial misconduct, all asunder; and with her shuttle of Cytorian boxwood, struck at Arachne’s face repeatedly.”  In the painting, Athena holds her shuttle in the foreground, not the background, but Velázquez cleverly placed it in Athena’s left hand where it points to the next image of Athena in armor.  Velázquez highlighted the goddess’s anger against a light blue background and emphasized the force of Athena’s striking arm.  Arachne’s head is nearly the center of the painting, but the viewer realizes she will exist no longer. “She could not bear this, the ill-omened girl, and bravely fixed a noose around her throat: while she was hanging, Pallas, stirred to mercy, lifted her up and said:

“Though you will hang, you must indeed live on, you wicked child; so that your future will be no less fearful than your present is, may the same punishment remain in place for you and yours forever!”  Then, as the goddess turned to go, she sprinkled Arachne with the juice of Hecate’s herb, and at the touch of that grim preparation, she lost her hair, then lost her nose and ears; her head got smaller and her body, too; her slender fingers were now legs that dangled close to her sides; now she was very small, but what remained of her turned into belly, from which she now continually spins a thread, and as a spider, carries on the art of weaving as she used to do.”   Note that the belly of Arachne which will be the spider’s core is at the exact center of the painting.

The Spinners, right side, detail of Arachne 

With the fable explaining the origin of spiders, it makes sense that the preparatory activity in the foreground is all about the thread (and the spinning of fate), because there is so much winding to that thread.  I interpret the young helpers to Arachne and Pallas Athena as the three Fates.  The Fates can be described as Moira in singular name, or Moirai. Their specific names are Clotho meaning “Spinner,” Lachesis, who measures the thread, and Atropos who is inflexible and cuts it off. The three Fates are goddesses and daughters of Zeus who are sometimes considered more important than Zeus in their ability to seal destiny.  They come in various disguises, and wouldn’t be surprising if these young women seen as helpers are really the ones who ultimately are in charge. In myth and life, there is always the question of how much free will or how much fate determines outcome.

Velázquez uses highlights and shadows strategically for his story telling goals.  Arachne stands out because she is highlighted to a much greater degree than Minerva is, yet we see nothing of her face.   How ironic that he, Velázquez who proudly showed his face in Las Meninas, his allegory of painting, does not allow Arachne to show hers.  Her back is to us, as she labors deftly and diligently. Both Athena and Arachne are barefoot. The goddess, who is older though not an old lady, even shows some leg! 

One of the women in the background is looking back to the foreground, a complexity that pulls the composition together. Perhaps she had been the only one of three Fates who supported Arachne and was pulling strings for her.  The woman or Fate dressed in blue shows her back to the viewer, but she appears again immediately below in the foreground, though separated by stairs.  Here Velázquez has deliberately darkened her face in shadow, in deeper shadow than is necessary for the composition.  As in other Velázquez paintings, shadowed figures can signify that a character in the painting is an actor, an actor who is playing a role in an act of deception.  Though she aids Arachne in the guise of as a common peasant girl, her concern with thread could actually be in the process of spinning a different fate.

Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne, oil, 1634, at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

Velazquez was familiar with the fable of Arachne from a Peter Paul Rubens painting of Pallas and Arachne which was owned by the Spanish royal family. The Rubens composition is more violent, with Pallas Athena striking Arachne to the ground. A copy of this painting was in the background of Las Meninas, Velázquez’s most famous painting of 1656, a composition which raises the status of art and the artist. Velázquez must have thought of the art of weaving as a noble pursuit, similar to the art of painting.  Both require exceptional talent and skill.  Weaving and spinning have additional, magical connotations in mythology, such as the woven clothing of goddesses, the weavings of Odysseus’ wife and the thread which let Theseus out of the labyrinth.  Velázquez was a great artist, but, like the prodigy Arachne, he was not of noble birth.

Detail of self-portrait in Las Meninas, with
the red cross added later

Las Meninas — which contains a portrait of the artist in the act of painting — is about the role of the artist, the origins of creativity and the attainment of status.  The Spinners further explores these subjects and elucidates some of the same ideas. Our talents are divine gifts and, as mortals, there are limitations on us.  No matter what the artist’s genius is, there are warnings against boasting.  In the end, we are left with a reminder of the punishment which comes from carrying pride too far.  

The paintings compare artistry and skill, and the status of the artist, to the non-negotiable status of higher beings, i.e., the Spanish Royal family, and an Olympian goddess. There is a crucial difference, however. Arachne, an upstart weaver, was just a girl when she challenged the goddesses of wisdom and weaving and the Fates. Velázquez, on the other hand, was 56 when he painted Las Meninas, and his self-portrait looks outward asserting the importance due to him.  Remember how Athena in the guise of an old lady had warned Arachne that with old age comes wisdom.  

Velázquez, The Water Seller of Seville, c. 1620
Apsley House, London

Velázquez had also been an extraordinary prodigy, only about 20 when he painted The Water Seller of Seville. There, an elderly man is passing a glass of water to an adolescent boy while a young adult man stands behind. It was nearly 40 years later that he finally gained knighthood status, the Order of Santiago. A red cross, painted on his chest three years after completing Las Meninas, indicates that title he attained shortly before death in 1660. However, from Velázquez’s other paintings, we know he treated royalty and peasant with equal respect and dignity. The old man in The Water Seller of Seville wears a torn cloak indicating his humble means compared  to the young boy he serves.  So it is not Arachne’s lowly birth, but her youthful pride which denied the wisdom of age that Velázquez sees as her ultimate downfall.  The attainment of greatness is possible if one waits, for only with age comes wisdom.

Velázquez’s stylistic change over the years from tight and controlled to very painterly is typical.  He painted two allegories of deception, one mythological, when he was around 30 and in Rome, a turning point in his career.   (You can some of the changes of his style from early to middle and late in a blog about him.)  

Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2016

Photos in the Flux of Nature

by | Jan 10, 2013 | Art and Literature, Art and Science, Photography

Rosamond Purcell, Field of the Cloth of Gold, 2010

A group of pictures in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition this past fall, Very Like A Whale, fooled me.  I thought artist Rosamond Purcell’s medium was some inventive watercolor, ink or acrylic technique.  Was the room too dark, or are my eyes are going bad?  To my surprise these pictures were photographs!

It was an imaginative way to portray Shakespeare, and artist whose myriads of visions who give us such a breadth of humanity.  Very Like a Whale took its exhibition name from a quote in Hamlet showing the human ability of interpreting single objects in multiple ways.  (Hamlet and Polonius saw different images in the same cloud.) Purcell curated the show, along with Shakespeare scholar and Folger Director Michael Witmore. This pair also collaborated on a book, Landscapes of the Passing Strange, using her photographic images with evocative quotations from Shakespeare. This great review is by an English teacher.
Rosamond Purcell, Twenty Shadows
The exhibition covered scientific knowledge in Shakespeare’s time using objects and prints created during the Renaissance.  Quotes from various Shakespeare plays and Purcell’s color photographs were interspersed with these more scientific images in a suggestive and imaginative display. For example, Twenty Shadows, above, was one way of seeing Shakespeare, and the graphic presentation of viewing instruments is another. Near the demonstrations of refracting light and perspective was a quote:
“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows
Which shows like grief itself but is not so;
For sorrow’s eyes, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects
Like perspectives, which rightly gazed up
Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry
Distinguish form”   — Richard II, Act 2, scene, lines 14-20
Rosamond Purcell, Awake Your Faith, 2010
Purcell’s photos make me think of change and of flux, but they also can be enjoyed as abstract compositions without the quotes from Shakespeare.  Does she have a unique developing technique with strange chemical solutions?  Probably not, but she takes her photographs from images reflected on antique mercury glass jars.  The colors are beautiful, and the forms as they mesh and flow together are evocative.  Surreal has been a word used to describe some of these works.   Awake Your Faith, right, is a photo of a statue in The Winter’s Tale.
We may see something today and it could be gone tomorrow.  What seems to be real may in fact not be real. That’s how nature works.   And, as a quote from Shakespeare that was in the exhibition, says: 
“Fortune is painted blind……….she is turning and inconstant, and mutability and variation;  and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls and rolls and rolls.” — Henry V, Act 3, scene 6, lines 29-36  (The Folger used one of their Library’s images for this quote, but Durer also made an engraving of Fortune in the current National Gallery show.)
Purcell’s interest in science is a constant, though. She is a collector of objects found in nature and has always combined science with her art.  She is especially known for her photographic documentation of natural history collections. As an author, illustrator and/or photographer, Rosamond Purcell has written or illustrated 17 books.
Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2016

Dreaming of Arcadia in the Modern World

by | Sep 1, 2012 | 19th Century Art, Art and Literature, Cezanne, Exhibition Reviews, Franz Marc, Gauguin, Giorgione, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Landscape Painting, Matisse, Modern Art, Mythology, Nicolas Poussin

One of the first ‘pastoral‘ paintings(not in the exhibition) was
The Pastoral Concert, 1509, by Titian and/or 
Giorgione, originator of  the pastoral, where landscape is on par with figures. Shepherds and musicians are frequent in this theme.

Good things always end, including summer and a chance to see how the greatest modern artists painted themes of leisure as Arcadian Visions: Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, ends Labor Day.
The exhibition highlights 3 large paintings:  Gauguin’s frieze-like Where do We Come From?…, 1898, Cézanne’s Large Bathers, 1898-1905 and Matisse’s Bathers by a River, 1907-17.

Each painting was crucial to the goals of the artists, and crucial to the transitioning from the art and life of the past into the 20th century. These modernist visions actually are part of a much older theme descended from Greece and written about in Virgil’s Eclogues. Nineteenth-century masters were very familiar with this tradition from the 16th-century painting in the Louvre, The Pastoral Concert, by Giorgione and/or Titian.  Édouard Manet’s infamous Luncheon on the Grass of 1863 was probably painted to fulfill that artist’s stated desire to modernize The Pastoral Concert.   Those who think artists throw away tradition, think again; the greatest artists of the modern age did not.       

    
Arcadia was originally thought to be in the mountains of central Greece. Virgil described a place where shepherds, nymphs and minor gods who lived on milk and honey, made music and were shielded from the vicissitudes of life.  With its promise of calm simplicity, Arcadia was a place of refuge. Renaissance scholars writers and painters re-descovered it; Baroque painters developed the theme further, and 19th century artists glorified it because the Industrial created yearnings for a simpler life. (Musée d’Orsay in Paris has a small focused exhibit on Arcadia at the moment.) Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of 1876, An Afternoon of the Faun, had this theme, too, and was followed by Claude Debussy’s musical interpretation after that poem.

But, even Virgil had warned, that things are not always as they seem.  The exhibition’s signature pieces by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse reflect harmonious relationships between humans and nature, but tinged with loss. The best of Arcadian visions give equal importance to figures and landscape, as these artists do.  Other 19th century painters, whose work is shown for comparison, include Corot, Millet, Signac, Seurat, and Puvis da Chavannes.  It is interesting that the museum did not include Auguste Renoir’s Large Bathers, 1887, in the PMA’s own collection, probably because that idealized scene does not have anything foreboding.

   

 Paul Gauguin, Where do we come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?(detail of left side), 1898
From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is so large that it must be seen in real life.

Artist Paul Gauguin escaped France and settled in the the south seas, Tahiti, where he searched for his version of Arcadia.  It was the first time I had seen Gauguin’s Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?  No reproduction does justice to its color, details and beauty. Twelve five feet wide and four feet high, it must be seen in person to adequately “read the painting.”  Composed of figures familiar from other Gauguin paintings, this allegory makes us think deeply about the meaning of life via Gauguin’s favorite figural types, the women of Tahiti.  He depicts youth, adulthood and old age and treats each phase as a moment of discovery and passing to the next, but we may end up with more questions than answers. 
  

Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1898-1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the
culminations of many studies he had been doing of bathers since the 1870s.

The acoustical guide to the exhibition quotes Paul Gauguin who said that Paul Cézanne spent days on mountaintop reading Virgil. Cézanne’s soul was always in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence and the connection to that past was in his blood, coming from a very classical childhood education of Latin and Greek and hiking through old Roman paths with friend and future novelist, Émile Zola. Even though the bathers have no sensuality, Cézanne’s Large Bathers is a painting which gives exquisite beauty to its concept.  To me, it stands out as the most important painting in the show.  An article links Cézanne to thoughts of death, Poussin and several poets who wrote of the territory surrounding Aix as Arcadia. This painting is perhaps the most Arcadian modern painting of the exhibition, although there are no shepherds, no musicians and no men. While it picks up the dream of humankind living simply in nature, under its beauty and its bounty, one woman points to the river, suggesting a place where these complacent bathers will ultimately go.         

The design of The Large Bathers perfectly balances traditional space and compositional structure with the goals of modern art. I always knew how much I loved this painting, but now I know why. The exhibition gave me much new insight and appreciation to fill an entire blog about this painting.   Matisse’s painting is in the same large room of the exhibition, but the message is less subtle.     

Matisse spent ten years revising this painting, 8’7″ by 12’10”  Art Institute of Chicago
He completed Bathers by a River around 1917 

Bathers by a River is also very large and, as expected, even more abstract.  Matisse worked on the painting for 10 years and changed it, as his ideas and conceptions changed. Noticeable is the lack of color and empty features of the faces.   He paints verticals, a suitable balance to the curves, but a snake appears in front and in the center, which can be seen as a dire warning.  World War I was happening at the time he finished it. His earlier paintings of bathers were far more joyful and colorful.
Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
 is approximately 6’8″ x 9’9″

It was a complete surprise to see Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, also a very large painting.  The tropical landscape with an elephant and lions is included in the same room of monumental paintings. Rousseau drew exotic plants in the botanical gardens of Paris and he painted them in a simplistic style with unexpected, evocative juxtapositions.  He was a visionary before the Surrealists.  His woman reclines in a traditional pose on a seat-less sofa, as a dark-skinned horn player and jungle animals appears.  Music, repose, luxury of nature are typical Arcadian themes, and it is a joy to see it in the same room with the three signature paintings of the exhibition. 

Nicolas Poussin, The Grande Bacchanal, c. 1627, from the Louvre, Paris


To understand all these connections, the curator included a painting by the most representative painter of the Arcadian tradition, Nicolas Poussin. (New York’s Metropolitan Museum hosted an exhibition, Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, 4 years ago.)  Poussin was a Baroque artist who was thoroughly engrossed in a classical style with themes taken from ancient writers. His painting The Grande Bacchanal, 1627, on loan from the Louvre, has beautiful women, musicians, a Silenus and even baby revelers, with darkess approaching the landscape. Each of the early modern artists featured in the exhibition were familiar with Poussin’s style and sources, as well as Watteau and Boucher who painted pastoral themes in the 18th century.

Matisse’s early Fauvist paintings, Music and The Dance, are abstract and modern but thoroughly a part of the pastoral tradition.  Athough the exhibition does not show any of the colorful compositions Matisse did in the first decade of the 20th century, those paintings have tons of color and are steeped in the pastoral tradition.   (I’ll need to take trip to Philadelphia to see the Barnes Collection with another large version of Cézanne’s Bathers and Matisse’s famous The Joy of Life.)

A sketch of “Music” from MoMA  links back to Poussin’s The Andrians, with dancers, a lounging woman and a violinist.  This painting is not in the exhibition..

Quotes from the poet Virgil’s pastoral literature line the walls.  We witness how various artists of the 19th and 20th centuries interpreted his poetry in drawings, paintings, etchings and illustrated books.  The exhibition ends with Picasso, Cubists, Expressionists and little-known Russian painters of the 20th century.  Although not always inspired by Virgil or Ovid, these paintings can be linked to the desire for a bucolic life of simplicity and harmony in nature.  
I was awed to see the Robert Delaunay’s City of Paris, 1910-12.  Delaunay famously painted the Eiffel Tower in a Cubist jumble of colors and shifting perspectives.  That symbol of modernism was only a little more than 20 years old at this time.  This giant canvas of Paris also has three large nudes.  They are the Three Graces, just as Botticelli and Raphael had painted them.  Delaunay’s vision of Paris includes the past and the present, but the nudes of the past are actually seem more central to this composition of shifting triangles, circles and planes of colors.  If anything, Cubism reminds us of life’s impermanence. 
Robert Delaunay, City of Paris, 1910-12, is 8’9″ x 13’4″
Finally, at the end we see Franz Marc’s Deer in Forest, II, from the Phillips Collection.  Here the humans are gone and only animals are in the forest.   The exhibition is very thoughtful and reflective, and I thank Curator Joseph Rishel for giving us so much to ponder.  It is one designed not only to make us only look art more closely, but we must also think more deeply.  
Copyright Julie Schauer 2010-2016