In last year's very long post "The Throne and the World," I attempted to trace the evolution of the final trump of the Tarot de Marseille -- from the biblical visions of Ezekiel and John, through the "Maiestas Domini" depictions of Christ, to the dancing woman of the Tarot. One of the most mysterious transitions in this development is from the male figures of God and Christ to the female dancer of the Tarot, and I speculated that the beardless, and thus sexually ambiguous, Christ of the Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse (later echoed by Caravaggio in his Supper at Emmaus) may have played a important role.
Today a routine scan of the shelves of the small English-language section of the local used bookstore turned up an unexpected find: an unabridged republication of Joseph Halfpenny's 1795 book Gothic Ornament: Architectural Motifs from York Cathedral, which I of course snapped up without hesitation, as one never knows when such things might come in handy. Flipping through it at home later this evening, I was intrigued to discover this:
This is clearly a close cousin of the Maiestas Domini, with a central figure in an almond-shaped nimbus (mandorla), surrounded by four angelic beings -- humanoid angels in this case, rather than the Four Living Creatures of the Apocalypse. But unlike a Maiestas Domini -- and like the Tarot -- it shows an unambiguously female central figure, and one who is standing rather than seated on a throne. Halfpenny says that its subject is the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
York Minster is of course a bit too far from Marseille for direct influence on the Tarot to be plausible, but it's given me a lead to follow. If, as seems likely, similar portrayals of the Assumption can be found in France or Italy, their relevance to the Tarot can be taken for granted.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to puzzle out the meaning of "The plant is the three pages just starred by an asterisk," ...
-
Just putting this out there, since both the name Amber and the sun have been in the sync-stream. Yesterday, the preschoolers acted out a Chi...
-
I dreamt I had gone to see the Background Brethren in a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden. (Someone in the audience sitting near me ...
-
Late last night, an image of the Justice card of the Tarot impressed itself on my mind, and I started thinking about it. It occurred to me t...
-
I dreamt that a very large man walked into the lobby of my school. He was maybe six foot six and looked like he weighed well over 400 pounds...
-
Remember Jorn Barger's "Elvis Index" from the golden age of the Internet? The idea was to use the Altavista search engine to q...
-
Recently I was thinking about the handful of prophets I regard as epoch-making -- Moses, David, Jesus, Joseph Smith -- and I fell to wonderi...

No comments:
Post a Comment