Harry’s Place Arts

This is a guest post by Cornelis Gijsbrechts

(continued from last week)

The image shows Lucky Luke, the cartoon cowboy who shoots faster than his shadow.

Here is what Victor Stoichita has to say about Lucky Luke:

“Lucky Luke’s tuft of hair indicates nonchalance, while his double’s indicates fear. The hero’s hat marks the speed of the action, while that of the shadow marks his surprise.

I do not suppose that Lucky Luke had read Sambucus’ Emblemata, Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel. If he had, he would probably have realized that his homicidal feelings for his shadow (the action is repeated at the end of every adventure) were simply the product of a warped love, the sign of a guilty conscience and, finally, that this second-rate black silhouette he periodically uses for target practice were nothing more than the manifestation of an ‘imaginary enemy’. But this string of thoughts would probably have slowed the brave cowboy’s reactions, and — who knows? — given his shadow the kind of advantage that would have forced the lovable hero to forsake the sunny world of the comic strip for ever.” (Stoichita, A Short History of Shadows, 1997.)

Part of the humour of Vermeer’s ‘The Art of Painting’ may be found in the double-take experienced by the viewer through the realisation that while the depicted painter has only begun to paint the subject of his painting, the woman, the artist Vermeer has already portrayed her as well as the painter and his studio. This is an inevitable result of a scenario of production in the third person where Vermeer asserts his authority over the imagined painter by treating him as a possible figure of fun: floppy socks, unkempt reddish hair, inappropriate costume, provide supporting evidence for this interpretation.

Turning to Maerten van Heemskerck’s painting ‘St. Luke painting the Madonna’ a similar scene may be observed, with some key differences. Here an elderly man wearing a Phrygian cap is painting a woman and child. Behind him a young man gesticulates with widepsread arms mirroring the gestures of the infant. The young man is a self-portrait of Heemskerck posing as a rhetorician in the grip of ‘furor poeticus’ advising St. Luke, and it would seem supported by the Infant Jesus, to include rhetoric and poetry in portraying this biblical scene. It is clear that St. Luke is not in a position to do so and it is left to the real artist, Heemskerck, to blend the worlds of Christian and pagan eros.

The painting was given to the Haarlem St. Luke’s Guild of Painters as a gift by Heemskerck and it would have occupied a central position at the St. Luke’s altar of the Guild. One of the few facts known about Vermeer which may be stated with certainty is that he was admitted to the St. Luke’s Guild of Delft on 29 December 1653. Was the painting now known as ‘The Art of Painting’ intended to occupy a similar position to Heemskerck’s? Did Vermeer omit the Infant Jesus in a daring reconfiguration of the theme?  Also noteworthy is the disappearance of the gesticulating ivy-crowned poet (Bacchus). Is he the person holding back the tapestry in Vermeer’s painting, and who one may imagine as a virtualisation of the artist beyond the image, returning the viewer’s gaze with an imperturbable look?

One of the twentieth-century’s most Sphinx-like rhetoricians (possibly the last century’s pre-eminent mortician?), Thomas Pynchon, in his novel of Lucky and Unlucky Strikes, Gravity’s Rainbow, provides a portrait of the Infant Tyrone, whose pre-pubescent sexuality is connected in an unfathomable manner to the trajectory of the Rocket. Early in the novel little Tyrone’s penis is subjected to conditioned and unconditioned stimuli by the evil Dr Lazlo Jamf. However, leaving aside this central scientific experiment for the time being, it is the following passage occurring in the same section which is of interest:

“Halfway between the water and the coarse sea-grass, a long stretch of pipe and barbed wire rings in the wind. The black latticework is propped up by longer slanting braces, lances pointing out to sea. An abandoned and mathematical look: stripped to the force-vectors holding it where it is, doubled up in places one row behind another, moving as Pointsman and Mexico begin to move again, backward in thick moiré, repeated uprights in parallax against repeated diagonals, and the snarls of wire below interfering more at random. Faraway, where it curves into the haze, the openwork wall goes gray. After last night’s snowfall, each line of the black scrawl etched in white. But today wind and sand have blown the dark iron bare again, salted, revealing, in places, brief streaks of rust … in others, ice and sunlight turn the construction to electric-white lines of energy.”

Pynchon is describing the optical illusion or interference known as the moiré effect or pattern where two grids are overlaid at an angle to produce a distortion or a perception of flickering. Examples may be found here and here.

Is Vermeer’s painting a visual record of the thick moiré produced by the collision of Christianity and Classical antiquity?

Was cool-hand Jan the fastest gunslinger in the West? As ever, your arts correspondent, Gijsbrechts, is on the case.

To be continued.