art
2009-11-02 16:56:38 UTC
Walking as Art - Mythology & Religion
http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/religion.html
--------------------------------------
<<The limping partridge dance of Crete
The dance floor at Knossos could also have served as a threshing floor
for grain, such as that of Atad mentioned in Genesis, 50: 11. The
partridge is related to a limping dance performed at Carmel during
Pesach, the Passover Feast, that
appears to have been a Canaanite Spring festival which the tribe of
Joseph adopted and transformed into a commemoration of their escape
from Egypt under Moses....The proverb quoted by Jeremiah: "The
partridge gathers young she has not brought forth," means that Jewish
men and women were attracted to these alien orgiastic rites. So also
the understanding Titian gives us a glimpse of a partridge through the
window of the room in which his naked Love-goddess is lasciviously
meditating fresh conquests.
The non-material form of cultural preservation perhaps can best be
seen in the traditions of the ritual dance, and of the grand theater--
with mythological roots very much older than the settling of Crete--in
which it is set. One of the principal features of the great palace at
Knossos uncovered by Evans was interpreted as Ariadne's dance floor.
Upon this was performed the labyrinthine Geranos, or Crane Dance as it
was called on Delos...still a popular folk dance throughout Greece. To
be sure, some versions of the myth say the shipload of reprieved
victims stopped by Delos on the way home where they performed this
dance before an altar constructed by Apollo him-self from the horns of
she-goats taken only from one side of the animal's head, reminiscent
of the one horn grasped by Europa, and of the one horn clasped by the
much earlier female figure in the Paleo-lithic cave at Laussel. The
Geranos is a circle-dance in which the performers with joined hands
weave in and out, over and under, tying themselves as it were, into a
knot and then untying themselves without letting go of hands. It may
be related to the circle dances said to have been conducted by Jesus
in the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. The equinoctial timing of the
celebration also suggests affinities with the old Troy Town, Maze, and
Morris Dancing of the British Isles, and the Sword Dances of the
Highlands. Robert Graves relates this Cretan tradition to the mating
ritual of the cock partridge which it carries out on a regular dance
floor. Partridges were hunted by hiding a lamed a decoy cock in the
center of a brushwood maze, the sound of its cries attracting other
birds: the hens to mate, the other cocks to challenge, and both to
feed. Therefore, literally at the center of this labrynthine myth, we
find an extraordinary correspondence with Duchamp's sculpture With
Hidden Noise, for the Labyrinth itself may be based ultimately on a
construction "with hidden noise." Moreover, some ancient traditions
attribute to the call of the concealed decoy a miraculous generative
or procreative power, capable (in effect) of transforming the Virgin
into the Bride, for, according to Aristotle, Pliny and Aelian the hen
partridge can be impregnated by the sound of the cock partridge's
voice....
The painting by Titian described by Graves is one of a series of works
very closely related to the Venus of Urbino, probably painted "with
some assistance from the workshop" between 1545 and 1548, and
presently in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A partridge is perched on
a window sill, the object of interested sniffs from a little dog who
is on the pillows, with some of Cupid's arrows, at the feet of Venus.
The pose is certainly more open, for the hand no longer forms the
gesture of a Venus Pudica (in the style of Giorgione) as in Titian's
earlier Venus of Urbino, and the goddess's legs are uncrossed. Titian,
however, also incorporated a red- legged partridge (alectorus rufa) in
another earlier painting (done in the late 1530s and belonging to the
Scuola di San Rocco), an Annunciation in which the Virgin Mary was
intended as the new Eve who extinguishes the sins or transgressions of
the old (origo peccati per Genitricem Christi extincta est). Since,
for such a subject, there could be no question of "lasciviousness,"
this context underscores the iconographical ambivalence of the
partridge, both as a symbol of sexual potency and as a token of divine
miracle:
the partridge, its mostly negative connotations notwithstanding, could
symbolize the Incarnation itself: the female was believed to be so
full of sexual desire that it was able to conceive by a wind that had
passed a male, or even by the latter's mating call. But this very fact
was susceptible of a positive interpretation: a partridge bearing the
motto AFFLATU FECUNDA ("fruitful by a breath of air") could illustrate
the fact that the Virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit; and since the
Virgin Mary, through the angelic salutation, "conceived through the
ear" (quae per aurem concepisti), the partridge could visualize the
phrase AVDITA VOCE FECUNDA ("fruitful by hearing a voice").
[Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic, New York
University Press, New York (1969), pp. 29 f., 121, and pls. 34, 134.
Professor Panofsky, thanking Millard Meiss, cites Filippo Picinelli,
Mundus symbolicus, IV, 53, No. 553. "For the whole subject" see, E.
Jones, "The Madonna's Conception through the Ear," in Essays in
Applied Psychoanalysis, London and Vienna (1923), pp. 261 ff.]
The Assumption of the Virgin, Scuola di San Rocco, VeniceIt seems,
then, that the pesach bull cult had been superimposed on a partridge
cult; and that the Minotaur to whom youths and maidens from Athens and
elsewhere) were sacrificed had once represented the decoy partridge of
a brushwood maze, towards which the others were lured for their death
dance. He was, in fact, the center of a ritual performance, originally
honoring the Moon-goddess, the lascivious hen-partridge, who at Athens
and in parts of Crete was the mother and lover of the Sun-hero Talus.
(In Athenian legend Talus was thrown down by Daedalus from a height
and transformed into a partridge while in the air by the Goddess
Athene). But the dance of the hobbling cock-partridge was later
transformed into one honoring the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, the cow in
heat, mother and lover of the Sun-hero, the bull-headed Minos. Thus
the spirally danced Troy-game (called the "Crane Dance" in Delos
because it was adapted there to the cult of the Moon-goddess as Crane)
had the same origin as the pesach. The case is proved by Homer who
wrote [or sang!]:
Daedalus in Cnossos once contrived
A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne
[Graves, The White Goddess, p. 329. The Homeric verse "the scholiast
explains as referring to the Labyrinth
dance, and...Lucian in his Concerning the Dance, a mine of
mythological tradition, gives as the subjects of
Cretan dances: 'the myths of Europ, Pasiphaë, the two Bulls, the
Labyrinth, Ariadne, Phaedra (daughter of
Pasipha), Androgeous (son of Minos), Icarus, Glaucus (raised by
Aesculapius from the dead), the magic of
Polydius (probably the shape-shifting dance of Zagreus at the Cretan
Lenaea), and of Talus the bronze man
(virgin-born of Perdix the partridge hen) who did his sentry round in
Crete.'"] >>
---------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
http://www.univie.ac.at/cga/art/religion.html
--------------------------------------
<<The limping partridge dance of Crete
The dance floor at Knossos could also have served as a threshing floor
for grain, such as that of Atad mentioned in Genesis, 50: 11. The
partridge is related to a limping dance performed at Carmel during
Pesach, the Passover Feast, that
appears to have been a Canaanite Spring festival which the tribe of
Joseph adopted and transformed into a commemoration of their escape
from Egypt under Moses....The proverb quoted by Jeremiah: "The
partridge gathers young she has not brought forth," means that Jewish
men and women were attracted to these alien orgiastic rites. So also
the understanding Titian gives us a glimpse of a partridge through the
window of the room in which his naked Love-goddess is lasciviously
meditating fresh conquests.
The non-material form of cultural preservation perhaps can best be
seen in the traditions of the ritual dance, and of the grand theater--
with mythological roots very much older than the settling of Crete--in
which it is set. One of the principal features of the great palace at
Knossos uncovered by Evans was interpreted as Ariadne's dance floor.
Upon this was performed the labyrinthine Geranos, or Crane Dance as it
was called on Delos...still a popular folk dance throughout Greece. To
be sure, some versions of the myth say the shipload of reprieved
victims stopped by Delos on the way home where they performed this
dance before an altar constructed by Apollo him-self from the horns of
she-goats taken only from one side of the animal's head, reminiscent
of the one horn grasped by Europa, and of the one horn clasped by the
much earlier female figure in the Paleo-lithic cave at Laussel. The
Geranos is a circle-dance in which the performers with joined hands
weave in and out, over and under, tying themselves as it were, into a
knot and then untying themselves without letting go of hands. It may
be related to the circle dances said to have been conducted by Jesus
in the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. The equinoctial timing of the
celebration also suggests affinities with the old Troy Town, Maze, and
Morris Dancing of the British Isles, and the Sword Dances of the
Highlands. Robert Graves relates this Cretan tradition to the mating
ritual of the cock partridge which it carries out on a regular dance
floor. Partridges were hunted by hiding a lamed a decoy cock in the
center of a brushwood maze, the sound of its cries attracting other
birds: the hens to mate, the other cocks to challenge, and both to
feed. Therefore, literally at the center of this labrynthine myth, we
find an extraordinary correspondence with Duchamp's sculpture With
Hidden Noise, for the Labyrinth itself may be based ultimately on a
construction "with hidden noise." Moreover, some ancient traditions
attribute to the call of the concealed decoy a miraculous generative
or procreative power, capable (in effect) of transforming the Virgin
into the Bride, for, according to Aristotle, Pliny and Aelian the hen
partridge can be impregnated by the sound of the cock partridge's
voice....
The painting by Titian described by Graves is one of a series of works
very closely related to the Venus of Urbino, probably painted "with
some assistance from the workshop" between 1545 and 1548, and
presently in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. A partridge is perched on
a window sill, the object of interested sniffs from a little dog who
is on the pillows, with some of Cupid's arrows, at the feet of Venus.
The pose is certainly more open, for the hand no longer forms the
gesture of a Venus Pudica (in the style of Giorgione) as in Titian's
earlier Venus of Urbino, and the goddess's legs are uncrossed. Titian,
however, also incorporated a red- legged partridge (alectorus rufa) in
another earlier painting (done in the late 1530s and belonging to the
Scuola di San Rocco), an Annunciation in which the Virgin Mary was
intended as the new Eve who extinguishes the sins or transgressions of
the old (origo peccati per Genitricem Christi extincta est). Since,
for such a subject, there could be no question of "lasciviousness,"
this context underscores the iconographical ambivalence of the
partridge, both as a symbol of sexual potency and as a token of divine
miracle:
the partridge, its mostly negative connotations notwithstanding, could
symbolize the Incarnation itself: the female was believed to be so
full of sexual desire that it was able to conceive by a wind that had
passed a male, or even by the latter's mating call. But this very fact
was susceptible of a positive interpretation: a partridge bearing the
motto AFFLATU FECUNDA ("fruitful by a breath of air") could illustrate
the fact that the Virgin conceived by the Holy Spirit; and since the
Virgin Mary, through the angelic salutation, "conceived through the
ear" (quae per aurem concepisti), the partridge could visualize the
phrase AVDITA VOCE FECUNDA ("fruitful by hearing a voice").
[Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic, New York
University Press, New York (1969), pp. 29 f., 121, and pls. 34, 134.
Professor Panofsky, thanking Millard Meiss, cites Filippo Picinelli,
Mundus symbolicus, IV, 53, No. 553. "For the whole subject" see, E.
Jones, "The Madonna's Conception through the Ear," in Essays in
Applied Psychoanalysis, London and Vienna (1923), pp. 261 ff.]
The Assumption of the Virgin, Scuola di San Rocco, VeniceIt seems,
then, that the pesach bull cult had been superimposed on a partridge
cult; and that the Minotaur to whom youths and maidens from Athens and
elsewhere) were sacrificed had once represented the decoy partridge of
a brushwood maze, towards which the others were lured for their death
dance. He was, in fact, the center of a ritual performance, originally
honoring the Moon-goddess, the lascivious hen-partridge, who at Athens
and in parts of Crete was the mother and lover of the Sun-hero Talus.
(In Athenian legend Talus was thrown down by Daedalus from a height
and transformed into a partridge while in the air by the Goddess
Athene). But the dance of the hobbling cock-partridge was later
transformed into one honoring the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, the cow in
heat, mother and lover of the Sun-hero, the bull-headed Minos. Thus
the spirally danced Troy-game (called the "Crane Dance" in Delos
because it was adapted there to the cult of the Moon-goddess as Crane)
had the same origin as the pesach. The case is proved by Homer who
wrote [or sang!]:
Daedalus in Cnossos once contrived
A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne
[Graves, The White Goddess, p. 329. The Homeric verse "the scholiast
explains as referring to the Labyrinth
dance, and...Lucian in his Concerning the Dance, a mine of
mythological tradition, gives as the subjects of
Cretan dances: 'the myths of Europ, Pasiphaë, the two Bulls, the
Labyrinth, Ariadne, Phaedra (daughter of
Pasipha), Androgeous (son of Minos), Icarus, Glaucus (raised by
Aesculapius from the dead), the magic of
Polydius (probably the shape-shifting dance of Zagreus at the Cretan
Lenaea), and of Talus the bronze man
(virgin-born of Perdix the partridge hen) who did his sentry round in
Crete.'"] >>
---------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer