Art is the best interpreter of art
Recently, my friend Rob Wyllie and I co-wrote an essay on tyranny in 1 and 2 Samuel. Our reflections soon expanded beyond the biblical text to include the many artistic meditations on the story of Saul and David. How could we resist? We read poems from Christopher Smart, Robert Browning, and John Henry Newman, from John Berryman, Anthony Hecht, Marilyn Nelson, and William Baer. We discussed Joseph Heller’s occasionally hilarious but often strained satire in God Knows and Jonathan Rogers’s young adult masterpiece The Bark of the Bog Owl. We discussed Michelangelo’s chiseled heart-eyes and Caravaggio’s severed, gaping giant’s head. We were particularly taken with a painting of Saul and David long attributed to Rembrandt (though also long contested). I was so taken by the painting that I wrote a poem about it and sent it to Rob. He sent back one of his own.
Rob had an insight while working on his ekphrastic poem. Saul’s covered eye in the painting evokes the story of the Ammonite King Nahash in 1 Samuel 11. Nahash, one of the villains of 1 Samuel, lays siege to the Hebrew city of Jabesh-gilead. He plans to subjugate it by plucking out one eye from each inhabitant. This would be an act of brutal intimidation, presumably meant to render the subjugated Hebrews docile or, if they should revolt, less effective as fighters. It would be an act of sadistic bombast as well, the kind of thing a tyrant like Nahash would brag about on a victory stele. He explicitly says that he wants to humiliate the Hebrews. The young King Saul, despite still uncertain support from the people, musters the tribes. He breaks the siege in an early morning attack, routing Nahash and the Ammonites. Afterward, some of the victorious Hebrews want to execute Saul’s former detractors among the people, but he instead consolidates his kingship via forgiveness and humility before God. In Robert Alter’s translation, Saul states, “No man shall be put to death this day, for today the Lord has wrought deliverance in Israel” (1 Samuel 11:13). It is the high point of Saul’s story. He will soon spiral into uncertainty, paranoia, and jealousy. An evil spirit will slither into his soul. In evoking Nahash (whose name means snake), the covered eye in Rembrandt’s painting—though it is the king’s left eye rather than the right that Nahash threatens to pluck out—marks Saul’s fall from early triumph and magnanimity to despair and burgeoning tyranny. The spear he clutches in the painting will soon be aimed at David, whom he can only see as a rival to his throne.
Rob and I had already written about this painting in our academic piece. We noted several significant things in it, but we did not see the possible allusion to Nahash. That did not come until Rob looked at the painting as a poet rather than as a scholar. I do not want to overplay the significance of one instance. Other scholars might have made the connection between the painting and Nahash via critical reflection. (Many art historians probably have made it.) But I do think it suggests something about the strange power of ekphrastic art, of art about other artworks. On the surface, ekphrastic art might seem limited, derivative, even parasitic. But the best ekphrastic art provides startling insights into the work that inspired it. Consider, for instance, W. H. Auden’s and William Carlos Williams’s poems about Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (another case of contested attribution). Surely these poems offer some of the most profound insights into the painting. While Auden and Williams are exceptional cases, ekphrastic art often illuminates in similar ways.
My favorite ekphrastic poems are in David Middleton’s 2005 collection The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet. A consummate formalist, Middleton prepares a taut poetic canvas: each poem in the collection is sixteen lines, divided into four stanzas. The lines are written in an understated, ruminative blank verse (with the occasional end rhyme, often subtly inserted into the final stanza). Middleton usually begins with descriptions of the paintings, moving from foreground to background or from background to foreground, drawing our attention to significant yet easily missed details. From there he proceeds, often in the third or fourth stanzas, to possible allusions and to thematic reflections.
In his poem about Millet’s The Gleaners, for instance, Middleton draws attention to “a horsed overseer” in the background of the painting, watching over the harvest of a farther field. Middleton describes this figure as “Boaz remote from these three silent Ruths,” bringing out the biblical echo in Millet’s work and suggesting that there is no imminent relief for this trio of gleaners, perhaps suggesting as well how the overseer is himself “remote” from the just biblical figure of Boaz. In the next stanza, Middleton entertains another possibility, classical rather than biblical. Perhaps these women are “Fates, stark daughters of Night,” who will “spin cut hay or wheat in auric weave.” Either way, if they are humble gleaners or “stark” Fates, these three women remind us of the human neediness which we should try our best to alleviate but in which we also inevitably partake: “We all must breathe the fatal golden dust.”
The Gleaners, Jean-Francois Millet
Middleton concludes his collection, fittingly, with a poem on Millet’s most famous painting: The Angelus. Here he begins by evoking the implied sounds of the scene, the tolls of the “distant bells” coming from “the far-off village church // Built up from Norman stone.” He follows this background spire “up” into the still “gold” evening sky before returning us to the foreground of the painting and the “man and wife” in the “potato fields,” who,
Think of the Incarnation of their Lord,
The flesh redeemed, a graced creation saved,
Bells pealing from the New Jerusalem
Through history back to Eden’s speaking leaves.
Their prayers ended, man and woman must return to the lapsarian state “between these dreams of paradise,” between Eden and the restored creation, where “Potatoes must be planted, tended, dug.” Without at all slighting the difficulties of their life and work, Middleton—like Millet—invests these humble peasants with dignity, and he honors their ‘simple’ faith as sacramental, as both transcendent and incarnational, as pertaining to both prayers and potatoes. In a forthcoming essay on his “painterly poems” in the Alabama Literary Review, Middleton writes, “In his pictures, Millet—without sentimentally overly idealizing them—raises these almost medieval peasants of late pre-industrial France up to a level of dignity, sometimes even tragic dignity, traditionally reserved in literature and the other fine arts for persons of high station—persons such as kings and queens, princes and generals.”
The Angelus, Jean-François Millet
I am especially drawn to these poems because small prints of The Gleaners and The Angelus hang near the stairway in the farmhouse where I grew up. My mother purchased them from a Christian bookstore when she was a young wife. Middleton’s poems make me think not only about Millet’s paintings but also about my parents walking past them and starting up the steps, tired from their own hard outdoor work, sometimes grateful and content, sometimes worried, sometimes just worn down. Middleton’s poems make me think about sitting beside my praying parents in the pew on Sunday mornings as a little boy, the morning milking behind them and the evening milking still ahead.
To be more precise, Middleton’s poems helped me not only think about these paintings and my parents in a deeper way. They helped me think feelingly about them. They drew me into a contemplative mood. And now they cause me to wonder: does a painting present itself to a fellow artist in a different way? Critics often take their mood from other critics. They take their mood from critical conventions or theoretical schools. The critic “criticizes” the work rather than experiencing it, relegating such “naïve” experience to the passive lay audience. But in doing so, critics perhaps keep themselves from entering fully into the work. They distance themselves from what Susanne Langer, adapting a phrase from Henry James, calls the “felt life” of the artwork. This “felt life” can never be fully captured or conveyed in critical paraphrase; the work of criticism can never substitute for a direct experience of the artistic work itself in this regard. The ekphrastic poem can never substitute for it either, but through its artistic alchemy it can evoke an attuning mood by which one can even more richly experience the inspiring artwork. The “felt life” of both painting and poem richly blend as we turn from one to the other and back again, as we linger with them both, deepening both experience and insight.
This is one of several reasons why George Steiner claims in his 1989 classic Real Presences that “the best readings of art are art.” Art offers what he calls a “critical experience” of other art. He extends this beyond ekphrastic art narrowly conceived, noting how Dante takes up Virgil who takes up Homer, how “Joyce’s Ulysses is a critical experiencing of the Odyssey at the level of general structure, of narrative instruments and rhetorical particularity,” how in painting “Dürer’s re-thinking of the Flemish masters, the patient meditation on the planes and volumes of Piero della Francesca in Cézanne, Manet’s performative investigations of Goya, Monet’s Turner, are art criticism and assessment enacted, and unmatched in their acumen.” Think again of all those paintings, poems, novels, and sculptures of David and Saul. Steiner draws our attention to how all art is at some level, to some extent, a response to other art. Steiner suggests that inspiration, the creative mystery of poiesis, grows out of soil fertilized by imagination, observation of reality, and the careful study of other art. Ekphrastic art, like Middleton’s poems on Millet, expressly concentrates on the latter. (It of course does so in a way that breathes in new imaginative life and new observation of reality, as well.) Put more strongly, ekphrasis testifies to art’s fecund potential to inspire more art, to inspire the kind of “begetting on the beautiful” explored in Plato’s Symposium. (In a biblical key, all art is, at the deepest level, a creative response to the Master Artist’s Creation.)
I have already touched on another, related reason why ekphrastic art is often so insightful about the art that inspires it. The poet’s eye, vis-à-vis the critic’s eye, is more likely to be receptive and observant, less likely to see only what fits a pre-determined methodology or theory or pet reading. In general, the poet is more likely to linger in the rich ambiguities of the artwork. The poet does not have to tie up all loose ends in a tight critical reading at the expense of those ambiguities. Indeed, by writing a poem about the artwork, the poet often preserves and deepens ambiguities even while offering interpretative insights. The philosopher William Desmond says that humans are both receptive and striving beings, both passio essendi and conatus essendi. The great temptation of the critic is to stress the latter, to be impatient and unreceptive before the artwork. Recall Steiner’s telling praise of Cézanne’s “patient meditation” on Piero della Francesca. The ekphrastic poet likewise tends to contemplate the artwork more holistically. Perhaps this holistic patience is why my friend Rob saw an allusion to Nahash when he approached Rembrandt’s Saul as a poet rather than as a critic.
Much more could be said about ekphrastic poetry, and all kinds of provisos and qualifiers are necessary for what has been said in this brief reflection. Poets are not always patient and receptive. They can be too quick to start writing, too overbearing. They can be egotistical rather than appreciative. They can have a flattening agenda. All poets, and especially Christian poets, should allow themselves to be chastened by Søren Kierkegaard’s excoriation of these dangers in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The critic can be patiently receptive. (Some of the best criticism is a sort of ekphrastic art, as we see in, say, Ruskin’s descriptions of paintings. Steiner gives a similar appreciative nod to the descriptions in Erich Auerbach’s classic study Mimesis.) Likewise, critics do all kinds of important work that ekphrastic art cannot, from teasing out complex historical connections to offering in-depth comparisons to pursuing analysis at much greater length. That said, I suspect that all critics would benefit from studying more ekphrastic poetry and from trying to write some ekphrastic poems themselves. Insights await.
