In "Hart, hermit, skeleton" (July 1), the Hermit card was discussed in conjunction with the Magician.
Today it occurred to me that this was something that had come up before: different versions of a depiction of a hermit, with and without an owl, and in conjunction with the Magician card of the Tarot.
The most famous and influential hermit in history is indisputably St. Anthony the Great, whose hallucinatory "temptation" in the wilderness has attracted the attention of artists from Gustave Flaubert to Salvador Dalí to Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch revisited the theme more than once, and while the St. Anthony Triptych in Lisbon isn't my favorite depiction of that saint by that artist, it entered the sync stream in "U.E. echoes A.E." (October 2019). I wrote:
In my post on some of the early Wheel of Fortune Tarot cards, I noted that one of the creatures on the wheel in the Tarot de Marseille closely resembles the dog in Bosch's painting The Conjuror. I then wrote "Some critics have even identified the other creature, the one in the conjurer's basket, as a monkey, but this is a mistake. The reappearance of this pair in the central panel of Bosch's St. Anthony Triptych leaves no room for doubt that it is a barn owl" and included a relevant detail from that latter painting.
As far back as "The Magician: Preliminary thoughts" (October 2018) I had recognized a connection between Bosch's Conjurer painting and the Magician card of the Tarot. Here is a detail showing the conjurer with his dog and owl:
And here is a detail from the Lisbon St. Anthony Triptych, showing the same two animals, and confirming that the owl is indeed an owl and not a monkey.
Around the time I was writing about these Bosch paintings in connection with the Tarot, I ran across an English translation of a book by Umberto Eco called, appropriately Serendipities, with the St. Anthony Triptych on the cover. As reported in the 2019 post, I bought the book "on the strength of its appropriately serendipitous cover art," only to discover later that it was actually the vastly inferior (fake, in my opinion) São Paulo St. Anthony Triptych, and that the element that had drawn my attention to that painting in the first place -- the owl -- was conspicuous by its absence.
I commented:
[I]t's a strange sort of anti-serendipity that the book caught my eye because of the St. Anthony Triptych, that I was interested in that triptych largely because of the owl, and that the version on the book turns out not to have an owl.
Since you asked, my favorite depiction of St. Anthony, and my second-favorite Bosch after The Conjurer, is the Madrid Temptation.
Dalí's painting shows a fanatic. This one shows a saint, one who has come to terms with the goblin-haunted world in which he finds himself and with the "minor presences, riff-raff of consciousness" (Irish Murdoch's phrase), weird but ultimately harmless, that accompany him in his meditations.
1 comment:
Not only does the owl not ordinarily make an appearence in The Hermit, neither does the full moon. Ms. Bruno's painting, it seems clear, depicts a rising full moon against a backdrop of twilight-blue evening sky. In our time, we associate the moon with the tides, and if one looks closely at this image, regardless of the moonrise, one can almost imagine the hermit to be standing on a rocky promontory next to the ocean. The Hermit isn't typically garbed in a green cloak-- the color green's strong affiliation with "earth", as well as the companionate owl, might imply our hermit's druidical affinity; while the ostentatious "ix" of this painting-- where -ix is a Latinate suffix of feminine gender-- reminds us that the very idea of the hermit is conjunct with renunciation of the female. And as to the goofy aphorism, I incline myself to the opposite thought: if you open the door of wisdom, all other doors will be closed. The question is: will it be worth it? To ask the question in the context of the hermit is to answer it.
Now, a casual glance at Bosch's "Temptation" discerns what is, by and large, a landscape, and one not without its charm. No doubt, to scrutinize the painting's details would be to discover a number of weird "riff-raff" phenomena, for which Bosch is renowned, but these don't really sway the picture from its basically pleasant aspect. As William points out, the painting would appear to show Anthony's having "come to terms" with the world's ultimately "harmless" deprivations and depravations. The color green is rather pronounced here, for the obvious reason that vegetation is prominent. Various shades of brown also preponderate. This gives the image an overall green-brown coloration. Green and brown associate themselves strongly with "earth", and the idea of the work would seem to be that the earth, while not perfectly so, is essentially good. Perhaps Anthony himself seated meditatively in his makeshift hut, is the best demonstration of the truth of that ideal. Might it well be said that "the hermit"-- just as in the case of St. Anthony-- in choosing to open the door of wisdom, whilst all other doors close--a fact we see vividly portrayed in the painting-- by his good will to become wise, vindicates the good earth, and is living proof that creation is good?
Post a Comment