Independent V&A Visit Reflection

This week I took a trip to the V&A, where I found myself drawn to the Renaissance sculptures. This was unusual. Although I like the Renaissance, it usually doesn’t compel me as much as most other movements, and I tend to walk right past classical sculpture. As I looked, a passage from John Berger’s “Keeping a Rendevous” came to mind: “Before Pollaiuolo’s St. Sebastian, instead of being horrified (or convinced) by his wounds, one is seduced by the naked limbs of both executioners and executed. Before Ruben’s Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, one thinks of nights of exchanged love. Yet this sleight-of-hand by which one set of appearances replaces another (the martyrdom becomes an olympics: the rape becomes a seduction) is nevertheless an acknowledgment of an original dilemma: how can the brutal be made visually acceptable?” I remain captivated by this resulting dissonance. Here, Pluto’s rape of Proserpina becomes a performance. Eroticism courses through Samson's holy murder of a Philistine. Christ is seen as a lolling diva. Any discomfort caused by the sight of true violence is gone because of the assumption that art must bring pleasure. Yet there is no hole; brutality is replaced with something new.

The Rape of Proserpina - cast by Raffaello Peri of work by Vincenzo de Rossi

Because the story of Pluto and Proserpina story is a fixed myth, neither are able to act of their own volition. Proserpina’s body language shouts a will to escape while the her actual pose fixes her place as holding and being held. She supports her shin on Pluto’s thigh, arm outstretched to signal distress when she could be using it to struggle against his embrace. His hold is all function—no caressing, no seizing, no gripping. He may as well be lifting a chair. He’s acted this out too many times. The pair gaze despairingly not at each other, nor the viewer, but at an invisible choreographer. Or perhaps they are watching themselves. Pluto bears the look of a man who has witnessed a painful yet necessary act. Only Proserpina appears guilty, a look mixed in with her mournful expression (itself a pitiful self-recognition of her haplessness). In dancing with Pluto, she has absorbed his sins against her. When rape is a dance, it cannot be rape.

Samson Slaying a Philistine - Giambologna

Samson stands stoic and resolute. He takes no pleasure in the murder yet does what he insists is righteous. The Philistine, face thrust forcefully backward neath Samson’s grip on his hair, arches his back and wraps an arm around Samson’s leg—not for support or leverage; as a revelatory embrace. Samson’s cleansing force is so pure that death by his holy hand is near orgasmic.

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ - workshop of Andrea della Robbia

Jesus Christ lies in the arms of St. John, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene. The surrounding three are appropriately somber: St John turns his head from Christ in a plea he knows to be futile, the Virgin’s face folds with anticipatory grief as she strokes her son’s hair, and, despite guarding her chest behind a hand, Mary Magdalene’s wide eyes and almost-smile of a wince lay bare her heartbreak. Yet St. John and Mary's robes are covered in lurid, rubbery paint that looks like it belongs in a. Chuck E. Cheese. (Was this added later in an attempt to show how the glaze looked originally? I can't find information on this online. In any event, it's deliciously tacky.) And Christ is lounging against them. He appears sedate and self-satisfied, eyebrows raised and lids half closed, propping himself up with one arm and letting the other laze on his hip. The wounds from his crucifixion are hardly bigger than bug-bites. Blood dribbles from a nick on his torso like teardrops. His is a leisured languishing. A languid anguish. Christ is now a tranquilized pinup girl on the verge of unconsciousness.

He looks this way, I imagine, because almost no interpretation of Jesus makes it seem like he’s actually dying. Like Berger quotes from Dostoevsky's The Idiot in Keeping a Rendevous (in reference to Holbein's painting of the dead Christ), "That painting! Do you realize what it could do? It could make a believer lose his faith." An air of true finality would challenge the believability of the resurrection. The death must, consequently, appear a kind of sleep. In The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Christ’s body is angled so that it can be admired in its totality, both as a celebration aesthetic beauty (and thus human holiness) and as a demonstration of the artist’s skill. Visual art, is, of course, is about looking. Sculpture is about the association looking has with touching. One does not have to be convinced that a piece has depth when it already exists in three-dimensional space. Here, the subject reads as overtly sensual given the fact that he is literally offering his weakened body up to the viewer. In the end it reads as a jarring interpretation of “passion.”

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Part 1

Independent V&A Visit

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