Jezebel

No One Could Relax around Jezebel, Anne Carson's new poem above, appeared last week in the London Review of Books.

Carson organized lines into "Stacks" rather than stanzas, each with its own subtitle:

Shame Stack
Stack of What Made Jezebel Jezebel
Cheapjack Stack
Thunderstorm Stack

Of course this piece did not originally print white on black. That is my own (possibly impertinent) way of making the form more apparent in this miniature online environment. And anyway, those concrete spatial choices are, I think, sufficiently beautiful in themselves just to look at as shapes. But (in addition) once the image has been clicked up or zoomed, then this rewarding text (derived from one of the more vicious & misogynistic stories of the Old Testament) can be savored not only as form but as quasi-narrative wedded to form.

Victorian Bible Stories in Paint

Solomon Alexander Hart
Philip Melanchthon expounding a Text from Luther's Bible to the Monks
1863
oil on canvas
Calderdale Council, Yorkshire

George Frederic Watts
Eve Created
ca. 1865
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Edward Burne-Jones
The Annunciation
1879
oil on canvas
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool

George Hayter
Angels Ministering to Christ
1847-49
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

workshop of Ary Scheffer
Temptation of Christ
1854
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Arthur Hacker
Christ and the Magdalen
1890
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

I do not Speak

I do not ask for mercy for understanding for peace
And in these heavy days I do not ask for release
I do not ask that suffering shall cease.

I do not pray to God to let me die
To give an ear attentive to my cry
To pause in his marching and not hurry by.

I do not ask for anything I do not speak
I do not question and I do not seek
I used to in the day when I was weak.

Now I am strong and lapped in sorrow
As in a coat of magic mail and borrow
From Time today and care not for tomorrow.

– Stevie Smith (ca. 1937)

Briton Rivière
Daniel in the Lions' Den
1872
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Ford Madox Brown
The Coat of Many Colours
1866
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

William Dyce
Meeting of Jacob and Rachel
1850
oil on canvas
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester

John Adam Houston
The Good Samaritan
ca. 1845
oil on canvas
Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, Edinburgh

Philip Richard Morris
The Good Samaritan
1857
oil on canvas
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire

William Etty
The Good Samaritan
1838
oil on canvas
National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge

Byam Shaw
Jezebel
1896
oil on canvas
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth

Frederic Leighton
Jezebel and Ahab
ca. 1863
oil on canvas
Scarborough Art Gallery, Yorkshire

Thomas Matthews Rooke
Jezebel Thrown to the Dogs
1879
oil on canvas
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth

English Bodies in Art

Abraham Kent
Right hand and arm of Victoria, Princess Royal
1843
marble
Royal Collection, Great Britain

"Following Queen Victoria's death in 1901 a collection of fourteen marble hands and feet, facsimiles of the infant limbs of her children, was sent from her private apartments at Buckingham Palace to be kept at Osborne.  These remarkable objects were presented on crimson velvet cushions (in some cases marble slabs) and kept under glass domes to preserve the pristine whiteness of the marble.  They are another manifestation of the Queen's desire to capture fleeting likenesses and souvenirs of her children as they grew, whether by means of miniature portraits or jewellery fashioned out of milk teeth.  Although hands and feet are often the features that mothers remember of their babies, and firms exist even today to offer casts, Queen Victoria seems to have favoured marble replicas as providing the most faithful souvenirs.  The need to realise the limbs in marble is perhaps best explained by a passage in Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu in which an elderly painter, Frenhofer, lectures the young Frans Pourbus: the mission of art, he declares, is not to copy nature but to explain it.  A plaster cast of the hand of one's mistress seems like 'a horrible cadaver, without the slightest resemblance'; it requires 'the chisel of a man who, without copying it exactly, can impart to it movement and life'.  Owing to the subconscious funerary association of white marble, many visitors to Osborne mistake the limbs for memorials of children who died in infancy, whereas all of Queen Victoria's nine children survived well into adulthood."

– Jonathan Marsden, from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love (Royal Collection Trust, 2010)

William Blake
Christ Appearing to the Apostles after the Resurrection
ca. 1795
watercolor
Tate Gallery

"In the final chapter of St. Luke's gospel, two angels announce that Christ has risen from the tomb.  Later, Christ himself appears to his disciples.  As Blake shows here, they are terrified, thinking that they are seeing a ghost.  Christ tries to reassure them by holding out his hands to show the wounds he received at the crucifixion, and saying 'Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.'"

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Group of partly-draped female figures, possibly the Fates from Turner's painting The Golden Bough
ca. 1834
oil on paper
Tate Gallery

"This unusual survival is in oils on what Finberg described as 'tracing paper' – it shows a carefully finished group of reclining women, among and partly covered by red and black draperies, trimmed to the edges of the figures.  Two on the left raise their arms in graceful gestures; the grouping to the right is less legible, with at least three reclining nudes, two of whom face each other while a third looks up to the right, again gesturing with her arm, albeit in this case truncated above the elbow.  Although close examination suggests five figures, the third and fourth are relatively inconspicuous, and John Gage has proposed that the group represents 'the Three Fates', which had been 'apparently drawn in a sketchbook in the life class of the Academy, cut out, and glued on the canvas' of Turner's mythological painting The Golden Bough [directly below], which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834.  This would account for the anecdote recounted by Gage, that when the painting was subsequently owned by Robert Vernon 'this paper began to peel, and the artist was called in to make a repair.  He removed the paper and kept it, repainting the group on the canvas . . . with only two figures facing away . . . and with no attributes to identify them'." 

– Tate Gallery, catalogue text by Matthew Imms (2016)

Joseph Mallord William Turner
The Golden Bough
ca. 1834
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Joseph Mallord William Turner
Group of partly draped female figures, perhaps the Three Graces
ca. 1830-40
oil on paper
Tate Gallery

"The subject of this unusual small-scale oil painting on 'tracing paper' is unclear, as is its purpose.  It was possibly used to try out a grouping of figures for a larger painting in process.  Compare Tate D36262 [the cut-out above], another small painting on paper of a group of elegant nudes; it has been proposed that the latter actually spent some years pasted onto a finished painting of The Golden Bough, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834."

– Tate Gallery, catalogue text by Matthew Imms (2016)

Frederic, Lord Leighton
Head of Fanny Kemble - study for Jezebel and Ahab
ca. 1862
drawing
Tate Gallery

"Leighton was the most eminent of all artists working during Queen Victoria's reign.  He trained in Germany and Paris.  One result of this training was the importance he attached to making preliminary drawings for any composition he painted in oils.  This drawing is a study for head of Elijah in Leighton's 1863 Royal Academy exhibit Jezebel and Ahab which is now in Scarborough Art Gallery.  The model was Leighton's friend the actress Fanny Kemble.  The use of a woman to pose for a male figure seems unusual, but the drawing would have been used by Leighton to set a male model when he stood for the figure of Elijah for the painting."

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

William Blake
The Simoniac Pope
ca. 1824-27
watercolor
Tate Gallery

"In Hell, Dante and Virgil meet those guilty of simony (buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment).  Like all simoniacs, Pope Nicholas III is punished by being suspended head downward in a well of fire."

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Tom Phillip
Canto XXVIII from Dante's Inferno
1983
screenprint
Tate Gallery

attributed to George Richmond
Fettered Nude Figure reclining by a Rock
ca. 1825
drawing
Tate Gallery

John Hamilton Mortimer
Monstrous Male Figure, possibly Caliban
1770s
drawing
Tate Gallery

Edward Burne-Jones
Study for painting, The Call of Perseus
ca. 1877
drawing
Tate Gallery

James Barry
Study for painting, Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos
1770
drawing
Tate Gallery

"Philoctetes was a Greek hero, celebrated for his stoic endurance of suffering.  A festering wound on his foot meant that he was left behind on the island of Lemnos while the Greek army continued its journey to Troy.  Barry based Philoctetes's body on a  celebrated fragment of classical sculpture, the Belvedere Torso.  But his notes in the corner of the drawing show a major problem facing history painters: how to suggest bodily pain without resorting to distortions of the face which would destroy the dignity of a heroic figure."

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

William Orpen
Anatomical Study, Male Torso
ca. 1906
drawing
Tate Gallery

James Thornhill
Sketch for Invitation Card to The Feast of St Luke
for The Virtuosi of St Luke 
1714
drawing
Tate Gallery

"James Thornhill was an eminent figure in the London art world.  In 1714 he replaced Kneller as the Governor of the Great Queen Street Artists' Academy.  Shortly after, he was made a member of the the Virtuosi of St. Luke, the most prestigious art club.  In 1714 Thornhill hosted the club's annual feast at his house in the Piazza, Covent Garden.  The ink sketch is a preliminary design for the invitation card.  A jovial centaur points to a canvas showing St. Luke, patron saint of artists, painting the Virgin and Child.  St. Paul's church, Covent Garden, appears in the background."

– curator's notes from the Tate Gallery

Torqued Ellipses

The last words of Annne Carson's poem about Jezebel kept coming back to my mind this morning but I was never a prize-winning catcher of allusions so they had to drift back into my mind several times before I realized that Torqued Ellipses was Richard Serra's title for a whole series of his recent & famous monumental sculptures. I wonder if Carson expected everybody to recognize the reference instantly. Or not recognize it at all. I wonder if Serra's title has already entered the language detached from its source.