In every painting entitled “Lamentation” that I recall or can find with a Google image-search, Jesus lies prone, usually with a shroud behind him, and Mary looks downward at his limp body. She usually has companions: most often Mary Magdalen, because the relevant Gospel passages (e.g., Matt. 27:61) place the two women together from the Crucifixion to the empty tomb. (The specific moment of lamentation is not explicit in the Gospels.)
An exception is Carlo Crivelli’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1485) in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Crivelli shows Jesus’ body propped up so that he appears to look down at Mary with a gentle expression. Jesus’ hand has fallen so that it is on the same level as the hands of Mary and St. John and is intertwined with John’s in a rotationally symmetrical pattern. However, Jesus and John display opposite emotions: Jesus calm, John in anguish. Mary Magdalen’s hands help to support Jesus’ thigh so that his right foot appears to take a step.
To my eye, the color of Jesus’ body stands out more from the rest of the painting in the original than in the photo above (supplied by the MFA). Crivelli makes Jesus look animated and yet strikingly pallid.
The garland of fruit is a common motif in Crivelli’s work and seems to represent a local tradition in the region where he worked, the Marches, of hanging fruit above religious paintings during festivals. Crivelli–who favored trompe-l’oeil to the extent that Susan Sontag cited him as an example of “camp”–has incorporated this popular tradition into the painting. The garland includes a cucumber, which is so common in Crivelli’s work that it functions as a signature. The whole structure looks like a throne in the Netherlandish painting that Crivelli often imitated.
By making Jesus sit and appear to look down on Mary, and by intertwining his hands with the others’, Crivelli asks us to ponder the relationship between the living and the dead. In the Gospel account, Jesus will soon rise again. Nevertheless, he has died. It would be as much of a theological error to ignore the reality of his death as to deny his pending resurrection. I think that Mary Magdalen may be tempted by the former error as she tries to make his body move.
Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913) were partners in life and work who published joint poems under the pseudonym “Michael Field.” One of their poems describes a pietà by Carlo Crivelli–this one, if I am not mistaken. It is similar enough to the MFA’s Lamentation that some of their words apply to both paintings.
For instance, Michael Field writes: “His body, once blond, is soiled now and opaque / with the solemn ochres of the tomb.”
The poem implies that Mary Magdalen had found the living Jesus attractive. But now, “no beauty to desire / Is here–stiffened limb and angry vein.”
Yet there is such subtle intercourse between The hues and the passion is so frank One is soothed, one feels it good To be of this little group Of mourners close to the rank, Deep wounds ...
This large exhibition presents works from ancient Athens to contemporary America, including some famous and powerful objects. In this context, Shambroom dignifies democracy as the rule of regular people. (His photograph is also the favorite of Boston Globe critic Mark Feeney.)
Shambroom’s village councilors are middle-aged Americans in mostly casual clothes, including polo shirts for the two men. They all seem to be listening to the speaker at the right–three of them watching her face, one staring attentively into the distance.
The flags and seal behind them convey authority. These people represent the state, which ultimately wields the power of life and death. (Compare the empty juror chairs in Jim Dow’s eloquent photo, “Grady County Courthouse, Jury Box, Cairo, Georgia, 1976,” also in the exhibition.) But the councilors are not evidently bossing anyone around. They are probably trying to decide whether a proposed building conforms to the city plan.
The councilors occupy a dais that sets them apart from any constituents who might attend, whether to petition them or to oversee their work. The woman at the center, presumably the council chair, is raised higher, and she seems to be listening with mild amusement.
The large scale of the photograph (33 x 66 in) makes it monumental, in the tradition of public history painting. In fact, the exhibition invites a comparison to “The Magnanimity of Lycurgus” (1791), a large and histrionic oil painting by Jean-Jacques François Le Barbier, which was made for the Paris Salon at the height of the Revolution. Shambroom’s photo suggests that representative Americans deserve the same kind of recognition as the Lawgiver of Sparta.
The word “populism” is being used today mainly to criticize political ideologies that posit that the true people of any given country form a homogeneous and intolerant bloc. The people have enemies–domestic and foreign–and can be led by a single, charismatic figure. For me, Shambroom’s city council images are quiet statements of a different form of populism. Here, the people are diverse and deliberative, and they merit the right to do the unglamorous and endless work of self-government.
Hannah Arendt wrote the poem “Klage” (“Lament” or “Complaint”) in the winter of 1925-6, the season when she turned 20 and broke off a passionate relationship with her teacher, Martin Heidegger. It appears in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2024), translated by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.
Hill’s translations are eloquent as well as learned. She aims for reliability and does not attempt to replicate Arendt’s sing-song rhythms and rhymes. I have given myself a little more license in translating “Klage” as follows:
Complaint
Oh, the days they pass by uselessly Like a never settled game, The hours pressing ruthlessly, Each play of pain the same.
Time, it slides over me, and then it slides away. And I sing the old songs’ first lines— Not whatever else they say.
And no child in a dream could move In a more predetermined way. No old one could more surely prove That a life is long and gray.
But never will sorrow soothe away Old dreams, nor the insight of youth. Never will it make me give away The bliss of lovely truth.
-- Hannah Arendt, 1925-6 (trans. Peter Levine)
This is a young person’s poem about a broken heart, concluding with an expression of indomitable spirit. The author was just a kid (and her teacher certainly shouldn’t have slept with her). The result could have been a cliché, a torch song, but Arendt’s tropes were original, and her craft was impeccable.
For instance, we read about a little girl dreaming that she is trudging along, and an old man knowing that life is gray, and then we encounter the phrase Alte Träume, junge Weisheit (old dreams and young wisdom). This is a surprising, chiastic twist.
Heidegger would soon give lectures that included an extended treatment of boredom. Perhaps he and Arendt had already discussed this topic before she wrote her poem (assuming that he didn’t get the idea from her verse). In short, for Heidegger, our experience of boredom discloses truths about time that are otherwise concealed. When we shift into or away from moods like boredom (or angst), we learn that what we imagine to be a self and a world are actually a single complex that unfolds in time (Levine 2023). Heidegger is all about acknowledging the vorgeschrieben Gang (predetermined way) of life but still claiming one’s own Glückes schöne Reinheit (beautiful purity of happiness). Even as Arendt felt depressed about breaking up with Heidegger, she explored and applied such ideas.
Later, the distinguished political theorist Hannah Arendt defended a distinction between the public and private spheres and guarded her private life, as she had every right to do. But her dignity should not mislead us that her private emotions were ever tame. Hill quotes a letter from Arendt to her husband: “And about the love of others who branded me as cold hearted, I always thought: If only you knew how dangerous love would be for me.” As someone who has read Arendt for nearly 40 years–but who only encountered her poetry recently (thanks to Hill)–I would say: I always knew this about her.
Mrs. Dalloway created the Zoom link herself. There was so much to do for the evening’s virtual meeting: outreach, slides, breakout-group assignments.
Scrolling social media, Clarissa came upon a lovely vacation photo of an English garden. How calm the air can be early in the morning, like the flap of a wave, the kiss of a wave. She scrolled down to the comment thread and saw that Hugh had posted a cheerful remark. Her old friend Hugh–the admirable Hugh! She “liked” his comment.
A push notification: Active shooter. The location seemed to be no more than five miles away. Clarissa could have been there.
Septimus saw the same notification. Deep in a subreddit for veterans, he muttered to himself several times: “Active shooter.” Evans had been shot. No, it was an IED–Evans had bled out before Septimus’ own eyes when the shrapnel had ripped his throat. He’d come home in a body bag. But you could still see Evans sometimes, you could still hear him clearly speak. Septimus scanned the comments for Evans’ name, because he might still post. He might say what it’s like where he is now–is it a happier place?
Now, an automated reminder to take his meds. Septimus hated those pills. They deadened him so that he could hardly see the future or how love rules everything or the disgusting corruption of the human body.
On Clarissa’s screen, the name Peter Welch popped up. Out of the blue, after so many years, Peter suddenly wanted to know how she was doing. “Where RU?!?” she asked him back. He was in town, visiting from Dubai; maybe they could get together? His status was complicated and he wanted to talk.
A flood of memories, like photos from deep in one’s saved-items folder. For some reason, seeing Peter’s text brought back that time she’d hooked up with Sally Seton.
Richard was talking to someone, but Clarissa couldn’t see who. His laptop was angled away from her, and he had his headset on. She checked his calendar. He must be talking to Millicent Bruton. Millicent had sent the meeting invite and had asked Hugh to join them. Clarissa felt a pang. It wasn’t sexual jealousy–Millicent was no threat, and these people would never see each other in person. The feeling was FOMO. Why didn’t Millicent want her to join the conversation? Was Clarissa totally out of the loop now?
Richard honestly found Millicent Bruton a bit silly and scatterbrained. She’d drafted a post that she wanted him to put on his policy Substack. He, Hugh, and Millicent were editing it together in a shared doc. It was a mess. Her main point seemed to be that people should move to Canada. (That’s always the idea, Richard thought–let’s all move to Canada). Hugh, who managed internal comms. for his family’s real estate business, believed that no one ever reads more than 40 words. He was adding bolded headings– “What it means” and “Why it matters”–and turning Millicent’s paragraphs into bullet points.
Richard would post her piece–why not? His traffic was way down, anyway. So nice of Clarissa to organize the webinar for his org! A virtual get-together might boost his profile. He thought about sending his wife a heart emoji, but that feeling passed before he clicked.
Clarissa hoped that people would join the Zoom on time, leave their cameras on, post witty comments in the chat, and have a good time together. She pinged an old friend with a reminder and ordered a protein smoothie to be delivered for lunch. Before she submitted her order, she messaged Richard to see if he wanted anything, but he’d already ordered his own tempeh tacos.
Their daughter Elizabeth said, “I’m going outside for a walk.” Clarissa and Richard nodded distractedly and went back to their screens.
In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.
Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?
Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.
You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.
A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.
A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.
But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.
Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.
Merleau-Ponty writes:
Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.
The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.
There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.
And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.
Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).
