Between 1767 and 1799 there was a series of wars fought between the British East India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore, all part of the ongoing struggle of the British to consolidate dominion in the Indian subcontinent and lay the ground for what would become the British Empire. The Fourth, and last, Anglo-Mysore War culminated in 1799 with the decisive defeat and death of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Mysoreans, at the siege of his capital, Seringapatam.
During the subsequent plunder of Tipu’s palace, East India Company troops came across an unusual and intriguing mechanical toy in a room given over to musical instruments. It was a carved and painted wooden tiger savaging a near life-size European man. Concealed inside the tiger’s body, behind a hinged flap, was an organ which could be operated by the turning of a handle next to it. This simultaneously made the man’s arm lift up and down and produced noises intended to imitate his dying moans and the growls of the tiger. A piece more emblematic of the Sultan’s antipathy towards the British would be hard to find!
The Governors of the East India Company sent the interesting object back to London, where, after a few years in storage, it was displayed in the reading-room of the East India Company Museum and Library at East India House in Leadenhall Street. It proved to be a very popular exhibit and the public could not only view Tipu’s Tiger, but crank its handle and operate its machinery at will. This they did on a regular basis, apparently, to the deep annoyance of students trying to study there. No surprise then, that at some point the handle disappeared, and the periodical The Athenaeum reported that:
“Luckily, a kind fate has deprived him of his handle… and we do sincerely hope he will remain so, to be seen and admired but to be heard no more”
In 1880, the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the piece, and it remains there to this day (the handle has of course been replaced, though not for the public to crank). Tipu was big into his tigers: he had jewelled, golden tiger heads as finials on his throne, tiger stripes stamped onto his coinage, and tigers incorporated into the Mysorean swords, guns, and mortars. However, this wonderfully painted piece is certainly the most unusual! Do call into the V&A if you get the opportunity.
In November 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin, investigating the disappearance of store owner Bernice Worden, arrested one Edward Gein. Upon searching his house, they found Bernice’s decapitated body hanging upside down by her legs and “dressed out like a deer”. In addition, they found a catalogue of grisly trophies and keepsakes made from human skin and bones. Gein confessed to murdering two women and, even more shockingly, exhuming up to nine corpses of recently-buried middle-aged women from local graveyards. The Butcher of Plainfield, as he became known, would provide inspiration for the future makers of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and – thanks to the 1959 Robert Bloch novel of the same name – Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Besides making people forever wary of motel-room showers, Hitchcock’s Psycho continues to have an incalculable influence on popular culture. It was a clear marker in the history of cinema, particularly the psychological thriller, of which Hitchcock was a master. It may not have been the first “slasher movie” (that credit has been given to British movie Peeping Tom, released just three months prior to Psycho, or even 1932’s Thirteen Women) but it was certainly the most dramatic and impactful in the public consciousness.
It is of course the story of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), the obsessional, split-personality psychopath of the title, and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), the single female finding herself in very much the wrong place at the wrong time, namely Bates Motel. The notorious shower scene, in which Marion is murdered in a frenzied knife attack, is the pivotal scene and one of the most studied montages of film editing ever made. It was shot over one week in December 1959. The finished scene runs for three minutes, includes seventy seven different camera angles, mainly extreme close-ups and fifty cuts.
For Leigh’s blood, which swirled down the shower drain, Hitchcock used Bosco chocolate syrup. To create the sound effect of the knife stabbing flesh, he sent prop man Bob Bone out to fetch a variety of melons. The director then closed his eyes as Bone took turns stabbing watermelons, casabas, cantaloupes and honeydews (he chose casaba). The soundtrack of screeching string instruments was an original and highly effective piece by composer Bernard Herrmann.
Paramount had considered the movie a highly risky project, so Hitchcock deferred his salary in exchange for 60 percent of the net profit. The film cost just $800,000 to make, grossed $40 million and Hitchcock pocketed some $15 million…so not a bad decision!
My brother-in-law Phil is a man with style (which I say because it’s true, not because there’s a slight chance he may read this blog) and when I attended his wedding back on a December day in 2007, I noted how typical of his style it was that he should have chosen, as the site for his nuptials, the wonderful St Giles parish church at Stoke Poges (actually, thinking about it, is was more likely to have been Zoe’s choice than Phil’s but let’s not let that get in the way of a good intro). It was a stylish choice, for St Giles is a wonderful example of a really old and really quaint English village church, as perfect for a wedding as can be imagined. It was also the inspiration and setting for one of the 18th century’s most famous and enduring poems, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
Thomas Gray was an English poet and classical scholar, who lived in Stoke Poges from 1750. The poem is a meditation on death and remembrance, inspired in turns by the deaths of his friend Richard West and his aunt Mary (not to mention the very near death of his friend Horace Walpole following an incident with two highwaymen, but that’s another story). Gray sent the completed poem to Walpole, who popularised it among London literary circles, and it was published in 1751.
Gray’s Elegy quickly became popular, and was printed many times and in a variety of formats, and praised by critics. It contains many phrases that have entered the common English lexicon: for example “far from the madding crowd” was used as the title of Thomas Hardy’s novel, and the terms “kindred spirit” and “paths of glory” also come from this poem (Gray also coined the term “ignorance is bliss”, though in a different poem). His elegy isn’t technically an elegy — not a conventional one at any rate — but it does contain elements of the elegiac genre and it is a thoughtful contemplation on mortality. It is worth taking the time to read or listen to it, as of course you can below.
Gray is himself buried in St Giles’ graveyard, and thus, since I was at the time an enthusiast for the hobby of discovering and visiting literary graves (or “stiff-bagging” as my sister-in-law indelicately puts it), Phil and Zoe’s choice handed me that one on a plate!
Here is a reading of the poem, with the words of the poem below, to follow along with:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r, Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn, The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave, Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault, If Mem’ry o’er their tomb no trophies raise, Where thro’ the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn or animated bust Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust, Or Flatt’ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d, Or wak’d to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll; Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command, The threats of pain and ruin to despise, To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land, And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib’d alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin’d; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,
The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse’s flame.
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray; Along the cool sequester’d vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die.
For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee, who mindful of th’ unhonour’d Dead Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say, “Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn Brushing with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Mutt’ring his wayward fancies he would rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or craz’d with care, or cross’d in hopeless love.
“One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill, Along the heath and near his fav’rite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill, Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
“The next with dirges due in sad array Slow thro’ the church-way path we saw him borne. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay, Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn.”
THE EPITAPH Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heav’n did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear, He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God.
Vincent Van Gogh remains perhaps the most representative, in the public imagination, of the “tortured genius”. Never successful as an artist in his lifetime, he suffered from bouts of psychotic delusions and mental instability, including that notorious episode in which he took a razor to his left ear. Ultimately, he took his own life: in 1890 he shot himself in the chest with a revolver and died from his injuries two days later. He was 37. But my, what an artistic legacy he left, and what tremendous global fame he would achieve, posthumously…if he had only had an inkling!
Today, when we think of Van Gogh, a number of his paintings spring to mind. There is his Sunflower series (take your pick, there are many different versions), painted in 1888 and 1889 with the gusto, in Vincent’s own words, of a “Marseillais eating bouillabaisse”. There is The Starry Night (famously name-checked in the opening line of Don McLean’s song, Vincent), painted in 1889 and depicting the view from Vincent’s room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. There are his many self-portraits (over 30, with and without bandaged left ear). Or perhaps his wonderfully (and deceptively) child-like Bedroom at Arles.
There is one of Van Gogh’s paintings in particular, however, that appeals to my imagination the most, and that is his Café Terrace at Night. Depicting a late-night coffee house in the Place du Forum in Arles, it brings together all the elements of Van Gogh’s talents in one wonderfully evocative scene. Bathed in the light of a huge yellow lantern, the café looks like the perfect place to spend a warm summer’s eve, doesn’t it? I could wile away an hour or two there, watching the world go by, no problem!
An intense yellow saturates the cafe and its awning, and projects beyond the café onto the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge. The street leads away into the darkness under a blue sky studded with larger-than-life stars. Dashes of green from the tree in the top-right and the lower wall of the café, along with the orange terracotta of the café floor, add to the satisfying palette of this painting. Van Gogh wrote that “the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day”, and on the strength of this piece I can see what he means.
The stock market crash that happened in the United States on 29th October 1929 (“Black Tuesday”) precipitated the 20th century’s longest and deepest recession known as the Great Depression. To compound the financial collapse, three waves of severe drought throughout the Thirties reduced the Great Plains to a “dust bowl”, causing widespread poverty and famine in states such as Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas. This was the world into which Johnny Cash was born. He was born in 1932, and lived with his family in one of F D Roosevelt’s New Deal colonies in Dyess, Arkansas. From age five he worked with his family in cotton fields, and experienced their financial and personal struggles throughout drought and flood. If a deprived background leads to authenticity in music, then Johnny Cash was surely authentic!
He was also incredibly gifted musically, with that amazing bass-baritone voice of his, and after being discharged from the US Air Force in 1954, he launched a career that would turn him into one of the bestselling artists of all time and a country music icon. His other defining characteristics were his tendency to misdemeanour as a result of alcohol and drug abuse, and his natural compassion for the underdogs of society. The former led to many setbacks from which Cash had to bounce back, whilst the latter led him to activism on behalf of Native Americans as well as a series of concerts in high security prisons.
Of his many comebacks, the biggest was undoubtedly the 1968 live album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. Recorded in front of an audience of nearly 2000 convicted criminals, in Folsom’s Dining Hall 2, it cemented his outlaw reputation and status as champion of the downtrodden, and it shot him back into the big time. Containing definitive versions of many Cash classics, it’s a masterpiece that’s sold consistently ever since. He began, appropriately enough, with Folsom Prison Blues, the song he had first recorded back in 1955.
Cash had been inspired to write this song after watching the movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison (1951) whilst serving in West Germany in the US Air Force. The song combined two popular folk styles, the “train song” and the “prison song”. It was recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee in July, 1955, produced by the legendary Sam Phillips, and the musicians were Cash (vocals, guitar), Luther Perkins (guitar), and Marshall Grant (bass). Here is a great performance of the song by Cash and the Tennessee Three on the Jimmy Dean Show in 1964.
I hear the train a comin’, it’s rolling ’round the bend And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when I’m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on But that train keeps a rollin’ on down to San Antone
When I was just a baby my mama told me, “Son Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns” But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry
I bet there’s rich folks eating in a fancy dining car They’re probably drinkin’ coffee and smoking big cigars Well I know I had it coming, I know I can’t be free But those people keep a‑movin’ And that’s what tortures me
Well if they freed me from this prison If that railroad train was mine I bet I’d move it on a little farther down the line Far from Folsom prison, that’s where I want to stay And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away
Johnny Cash and the Tennessee ThreeJohnny Cash at Folsom Prison
Venice had been one of the great trading powers of medieval and Renaissance Europe, but by the 18th-century its political dominion was waning. Although past its heyday, the republic still possessed great appeal to the emerging tourist market; it was a preeminent destination for the thousands of prominent young adult males embarking on the “Grand Tour”. Capitalising on the tourists’ desire to secure a memento, there developed the genre of view painting, spawning a plethora of paintings of the Rialto Bridge, the Grand Canal and St Mark’s Square, by the likes of Canaletto, Bellotto, and the Guardi brothers.
As well as real city views, the artists sometimes liked to let their fancy fly and paint imaginary views (capricci) that placed buildings, archaeological ruins and other architectural elements together in fictional and often fantastical combinations. The name of one such artist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, is not particularly well-known these days but nonetheless left to history a series of etchings whose influence is felt to this day: the so-called Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri).
These prisons of Piranesi’s imagination were dark, labyrinthine depictions of a nightmare world. Ever since they were published — the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 — Piranesi’s images have inspired designers, writers and architects alike. We can see elements of them in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and in Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. The etchings foreshadow M C Escher’s playful explorations of perspective, and we can even see their influence in the moving staircases at Hogwarts.
Piranesi’s prison interiors have no outer walls; each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. The spaces are large and continuous: they may not even be interiors; this may be a city that has grown into a world, where interior and exterior are no longer definable. We see strange devices suggestive of torture: wheels with spikes, pulleys, baskets big enough to contain a person. You don’t quite know how they work, or what the thinking could be behind them. Prisoners undergo mysterious torments, chained to posts, whilst high above them spectators gather on a vertiginous walkway. It is impossible to tell at times who is a prisoner, who a guard, who a visitor, and in the end you suspect that everyone in this place is a prisoner.
Some of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons:
…and some examples of their influence in modern culture:
When we think of the Impressionists, we tend to think about Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne…and quite rightly, because they were titans of their art. However, less well-known to us (always the way, unfortunately, eh ladies?) were “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism, namely Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot and the subject of today’s blog, Mary Cassatt. These women more than held their own amongst their male counterparts; all three produced wonderful art and exhibited successfully at the Paris Salons.
Mary Cassatt was a young American artist who arrived in Paris in 1866, having quit the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts back home, due to the lack of inspiration and patronising attitude of the male students and teachers there. Although we associate the birth of feminism with the early 1900s, the first wave of feminism began as early as the 1840s, and some doors were opened to women, particularly in cosmopolitan Paris, to which Mary was drawn.
Not all doors were opened, however: women still couldn’t study art at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts so Cassatt signed up for private study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, (the Orientalist I wrote about back in March) and she became an advocate for women’s equality all her life. She became a friend and collaborator of Edgar Degas, too. They had studios a five-minute stroll apart, and Degas would regularly look in at Mary’s studio, offering advice and helping find models.
Cassatt’s art centred on the lives of women, and in particular she painted many works depicting the intimate bond between mother and child. It is that aspect I am showcasing here, with a gallery of pieces featuring some often touching depictions of mother and child, beginning with Young Mother Sewing, painted in 1900 and purchased a year later by influential art collector and feminist Louisine Havemeyer, who fittingly used it to raise money for the women’s suffrage cause.
Everybody knows The Owl and the Pussycat, the nonsense poem by Edward Lear. There’s no rule that impels its inclusion in the primary school curriculum; it is just one of those pieces of our culture that gets passed down and which everyone has heard by the time they’re ten. Perhaps by osmosis. Or more likely, its appeal to many a nursery school assistant charged with entertaining a roomful of children, due to its delicious use of language, rhyme, and imagery.
First published in 1871 as part of his book Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, Lear wrote the poem for the daughter of a friend. And like that other great Victorian purveyor of nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll, Lear had that exquisite talent for choosing just the right made-up nonsense words. “Runcible”, for example, as in the phrase “which they ate with a runcible spoon”, was one such coinage, right up there with Lewis Carroll’s ‘galumphing’ and ‘frumious’ from Jabberwocky. Lear went on to use this wonderfully meaningless adjective to describe his hat, a wall, and even his cat. “The Runcible Spoon” would be a great name for a café, wouldn’t it? In fact, there already is one: I came across this in the village of Hinderwell, whilst on holiday in Runswick Bay:
The Runcible Spoon cafe, Hinderwell
But is ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ meant to mean anything? Is it simply delightful fantasy with its owl and pussycat that can talk and sing songs, a pig that engages in financial transactions, and a turkey officiating at a wedding? Should we read anything into the fact that they have to sail the seas for a year and a day, travelling to the land of the Bong-Tree, in order to get a ring? Or is it making a commentary on Victorian society, subverting its norms and mores? I don’t think we need to know. Simply enjoy the vermonious use of words (vermonious? I just made it up, of course!).
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?“ They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-Tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose.
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.“ So they took it away, and were married next day By the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.
When I was young, not yet a teenager, I inherited from my elder sisters a number of vinyl LPs, among them David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat, the Moody Blues’ In Search Of The Lost Chord, and an album that apparently didn’t need much of a title: Led Zeppelin II. Although I loved all of these records, it was the latter album that informed my immediate direction in music; riffing guitar, crashing drums, shrieking vocals: what was not to like?
Soon I would encounter Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, UFO, AC/DC and Black Sabbath, and by my mid-teens, a (largely young male) cross-section of the country would be in the grip of the so-called “New Wave of British Heavy Metal”. Seemingly all of a sudden, there was a superabundance of bands comprising long-haired, leather‑, denim- or lycra-clad rockers: Judas Priest, Saxon, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Angelwitch, Praying Mantis, the list went on and on. And oh, the gigs! I attended many of those. You would find your senses assaulted by very loud music, bright lights, dry ice, a seething crowd of headbanging fans, the smell of sweat and patchouli oil – it was certainly a thrilling experience. However, the idiosyncrasies of the genre, along with some of the bands’ increasingly theatrical stage shows and themes, would make them ripe for satire.
Enter Christopher Guest, a British-American screenwriter, actor, and comedian who would become known for his series of comedy films shot in mock-documentary (mockumentary) style, and beginning in 1984 with his hilarious take on the heavy metal movement, This Is Spinal Tap. Directed by Rob Reiner, it stars Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer as members of fictional British heavy metal band, Spinal Tap, and we follow them on their American tour. The film satirizes the behaviour and musical pretensions of rock bands, and to those with an inside view of the British heavy rock scene, the result is a painfully accurate and utterly hilarious pastiche.
Let’s start with the band members’ names, all great choices: David St. Hubbins (McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Guest) on vocals and guitar, bassist Derek Smalls (Shearer), keyboardist Viv Savage, and drummer Mick Shrimpton. Most of the film’s dialogue was improvised and dozens of hours were filmed, and given that the principal actors were American, the fidelity to the Britishness is outstanding.
The film is packed with great scenes of on and offstage antics and drama, but to keep it down I have selected three classics for your amusement: the scene wherein Nigel Tufnel takes us on a backstage tour of this guitars and amps (including the ones that “go up to eleven”); the scene wherein the band get lost trying to find the stage door; and the hilarious Stonehenge scene, in which the band, playing its set-piece epic, is flabbergasted to see the expected 18-foot-tall stage props of “Stone’enge” descend to the stage at the crucial moment in dimensions constructed erroneously and underwhelmingly in inches. Priceless.
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. No, not to this blog (though it’s a consideration) but to the entrance to Hell, this inscription appearing on the gates thereof in the early part of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Book I of his Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia). Thus begins an epic journey through the Inferno (Hell), the Purgatorio (Purgatory), and the Paradiso (Heaven). And we are talking epic here: 14,233 lines of terza rima (three-line rhyming scheme in the pattern aba bcb cdc ded etc), begun in 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before Dante’s death. It is widely recognised as one of the greatest works of world literature; indeed, in T S Eliot’s estimation, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world”.
The narrative describes Dante’s travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, allegorically representing the soul’s journey towards God. He is accompanied throughout by a guide: in Hell and Purgatory it’s the great Roman poet, Virgil, whilst in Heaven it’s Beatrice, thought to be Dante’s “ideal woman” and based on a real Florentine woman he had admired from a distance.
In Hell, Virgil shows Dante the poor souls suffering a punishment directly related to the nature of their sin. This is contrapasso (“suffer the opposite”): for example, the punishment for soothsayers and fortune-tellers (who had tried to see the future by forbidden means) is to walk with their heads on backwards so that they cannot see what is ahead. The lustful, who allowed their passions to blow them astray, are now constantly buffeted back and forth by stormy winds. Such poetic justice is similarly meted out to the gluttonous and greedy, the wrathful and violent, the fraudulent and hypocritical, and to the heretics and blasphemers. Many real personages of Dante’s time are named and shamed, damned by their incontinence in life. It paid to live an upright life in Dante’s day!
Purgatory is conceived as a terraced mountain to climb, representing spiritual growth. Dante discusses the nature of sin, vice and virtue, and moral issues prevalent in the Church and politics of the day. The 13th century was a rich time for medieval theology and philosophy, and Dante draws heavily from the body of work produced by philosophers such as Siger of Brabant, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas.
The third and final part, Heaven, is depicted as a series of concentric spheres around Earth, and here, Beatrice takes over the role of guide from Virgil, representing divine knowledge superseding human reason. Here we encounter the cardinal virtues, such as prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance, and ever upward, Dante finally has a vision of the ultimate and in a flash of understanding that he cannot express, he sees God himself.
If you’re imagining that a reading of the Divine Comedy could be a great adventure, you’d be right, but if you’re baulking at its length, an excellent alternative is to seek out the audio book narrated by (of all people) John Cleese, who does a smashing job of narrating this great poem.
Dante by Botticelli
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