Fig 1: The Earth from Space |
Three hundred years before our modern era we arrive at
paintings steeped in the pre-particular mode of the prevailing Byzantine style.
A purely inner perspective prevails. Affairs are soul size: In the 13th
century painting by Cimabue, the Virgin Mary (Fig 2) is much larger than the angels at
her side and many times the height of lesser mortals. Moral dimensions rule and
everything non-essential is omitted. Details are totally absent. The only thing
resembling something remotely tangible is the throne of the Virgin, a strange
mixture of city and seat.
Fig 2: Cimabue Maesta, 1280 |
Fig 3: Giotto Ognisanti Madonna 1310 |
Fig 3: Giotto Ognisanti Madonna 1310 |
A generation later, Giotto treats the same subject (Fig 3) already more realistically: The throne is more solid and angels hold vases with flowers. Detail has entered the scene. Particulars are slowly emerging. The heavens are fading. The earth is coming into focus.
When Fillippo Lippi executes the same subject (Fig 4) in 1437, the
background is filled with architectural detail: pillars, arches, passages and a
lintel with clearly readable inscriptions in the foreground. Spatial
perception and precision co-emerge. There is a very solid book on Mary's side.
A window is open. And through the window we get a first glimpse of nature.
Leonardo da Vinci's famous 'Virgin of the Rocks' (Fig 5) is painted
fifty years later. Nature that has only peeped through the window in Lippi's
composition has become dominant. The Madonna is placed in a dramatic,
overpowering landscape. The environment is gaining a life of its own. The
sparse symbolic flowers held aloft by angels in Giotto's earlier painting are now
growing on solid ground.
Fig 6: Leonardo Embryo in the Womb 1510 |
Fig 5: Leonardo Virgin Among the Rocks, 1483 |
Fig 7: Leonardo Mona Lisa 1503 - 1517 |
Leonardo's religious subjects introduce particulars. His sketches focus on them. He draws cats from all sides, horses whole and in parts, executes studies of heads and skulls, and details of instruments such as the workings of concave mirrors, the mechanics of flying apperati and war machines. Anatomical drawings are prominent among his sketches: Perhaps the most famous is his ‘Embryo in the Womb' (Fig 6). Leonardo already looks with the scalpel of the modern mind. He dissects with ink and sketches as a scientist.
The artist Leonardo still veils his Madonnas in the
mysterious sfumato. The scientist Leonardo takes the skin off the womb.
Medieval devotion has turned into scientific focus, the gold ground into
dissecting lines. Through Leonardo’s incisive step we see the inside. Modern
scrutiny has opened the body and has begun to examine its parts. Anatomical
dissection was not new at Leonardo’s time. It was practised before. What was
new is that it has become part of the artistic, and by extension, public
interest. We look at the ‘Embryo in the Womb’ and unknowingly gaze at the Madonna
of the scientific age.
Leonardo’s Mona Lisa stands in between the 'Virgin among the
Rocks' and the 'Embryo in the Womb'. The Madonna has become Donna (woman) without
child.
It may well be that the ‘Mona Lisa’ owes much of her popularity
to being the unconscious substitute for the medieval Mary. She is the secularised
version of the 'Virgin Mary’. This Madonna Incognito has turned the Louvre into the Lourdes of art.
I do not mean to imply that Leonardo was in any way
intending this. But every artist is part of the brushstroke of his time, the
agendas of his age. He is a teller of meta-tales, of meanings beyond his ken.
Leonardo is the forerunner of modern personality and of the
scientist in particular. He prefigures the modern dichotomy of soul: The
sensitive artist who delighted in freeing doves and the passionate designer of
war machinery, the painter of the ‘Madonna in the Rocks’, and the scientific
illustrator of the ‘Embryo inside the Womb’.
I had two reasons for choosing the Madonna image as a case
study. The first is the popularity of the subject during the middle ages and
the renaissance. The second touches on the deeper symbolism of the theme. For
the Madonna was to medieval times what the Isis was to the Egyptians, the
Sophia to the Gnostics and Gaia to the Greeks: the symbol for the mother
goddess, the creative aspect of divinity. Today we would call her nature.
The medieval mind still dwelt in wholeness. The particulars
were secondary. Nature could be conveniently summarised in the ‘Virgin with
Child’. During the Renaissance particulars begin to appear on the canvas of
painters and inside the mind frame of scientists. By the middle of the 19th Century they had taken over. What to the medieval mind was a by-product
of nature (the particulars) became its cause. Wholeness was composed of its parts, and nature made
of particulars.
Not surprisingly, it was at that time that the ‘Mona Lisa’
started to become the public icon it is now. Since then it is 'the' painting. Earlier
on, Rafael’s ‘Sistina Madonna’ held this place for over three hundred years. The
advance of 19th Century materialism and the Madonna without Child coincide.
So much for the past. But what about the future?
I believe we can begin to read the future in same way we
have read the past: by means of its icons. They are already there. And one icon
rules supreme. I am talking about the most reproduced image of the modern age: the photographs of the ‘Earth from Space’ (Fig 1). One of the reasons for their popularity is the symbolic
status of astronauts. They are the foremost representatives of the technological age. And
because of it the most separated from the earth. Even without flying to the
moon we can identify with space explorers floating weightless in outer space,
connected with only thin cord to their craft. We too move in capsules of
cars, live inside the cocoons of technology, connect with the world through
screens. The astronaut’s detachment is our own.
But so is their epiphany: the well-known story of space
explorers leaving as ‘detached’
scientists and returning as committed environmentalist. This astronaut to
terranaut conversion is the Saul to Paul event of the technological age. We all
partake in it. It is part of the global story, our collective meta-tale. As
are the concerns of returning astronauts: the fragility of the planet, the thinning
ocean of air, the vanishing species, the endangered world.
Central to the astronauts’ conversion was the vision of the
‘Earth from Space’. Today we meet this image in books, journals, posters and
postcards. We see it on screen. We can look back on our home without leaving
the planet. The 'Earth from Space' image reminds us of our separation and homesickness. It also reminds us of our responsibility for the planet.
But this is not all. There are deeper dimensions to the
popularity of the Earth from Space. The genre is telling. It is neither
still live or landscape (representing a what), but a portrait (representing a
who). And the who is Gaia, the living earth.
The first images from space and Lovelock’s idea of the
living earth appeared at the same time and were immediately brought together by the
public. Today it is impossible to talk of one without invoking the other. Gaia,
however, is not just any name, but evokes the creator Goddess of the Greek
pantheon. And as Gaia was to the Greeks what Isis was to the Egyptians, Sophia
to the Gnostics and the Virgin to Christians, we have come full circle.
In other words: the Madonna has returned. Though
metamorphosed, she is no less iconic than before. On the contrary: no Medieval
or Renaissance composition rivals the perfection of a single, well-placed
circle inside a rectangular frame. No arrangement can surpass the effect of a
bright-lit centre amid expansive dark. Many of the popular images show a
frontally illumined earth and thus appear flat.
(Fig 1). We have moved back (or is it
forward) to iconic surface. The level of optimal composition and balanced
colour scheme rivals great artwork. It is a masterpiece, produced not by the
merit of its creator, but the artistic qualities of the model itself.
Madonna della Seggiola, Raphael, 1514 Madonna Nova, 2014 |
And most important for our topic: the surrounding black is
void of particulars. Even the face of the earth shows little variation; we behold
vast sheets of ocean, swirling clusters of clouds, and continents neatly fitted
into a circular shape. Nothing else. There is no differentiation into nations,
states, people, parties, religions. There is only the unified globe: a pure iconic
picture of wholeness.
We have collectively chosen this image as the icon for our
time. In doing so we have voted for wholeness, for the earth and the
environment. By linking the picture of the earth with the Greek Goddess we have
even gone further and entered the numinous, transcendental dimension of iconic
art. We have professed, though unconsciously, for new stories to interpret the
world.
I am interested in our ability to collectively recognise these
new stories in artistic form. Our aesthetic sense is well on the way long
before our intellect even lifts its foot. We see a great deal further with what
we feel, than with what we know. In pictures the future often announces itself
long before the present takes note. In time of severe crisis this capacity
could stand us in good stead. We need to act soon and from a vision we share.
This vision is already there. And
embedded in it the ideas, thoughts, attitudes, and solutions we need. I believe
that the next great advance in planetary health will be the conscious
integration of our artistic knowing - the ability to create a better future by understanding
the aesthetic preferences that already relate to it. Doing this we begin to
collaborate with a vision that is ours as well as the earth’s.
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