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HISTORY OF BEAUTY - ABOUT ECO'S BOOK IN ENGLISH

Unrestrained, who?

Unrestrainedness produces suffering, aesthetic ideals have a price. We're talking of Arthur Rimbaud, who disappeared as young man to Africa, when he did not find in himself the great poet which he felt inside. Maybe he was, but he didn't learn to express his greatness. 

The book is Umberto Eco's art book called the History of Beauty (2008), which runs through the history of European Art. Rimbaud says in the sub-text: One night, I had beauty in my lap - I think it was bitter. - I scolded it. It's a quote from the chapter Beauty in religion and  the talks about symbolism. 

Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, the whole decadent symbolist group, is represented in the text, with pictures by Gustav Klimt, Henri de Fantini-Latour and Eduard Manet. Symbolism flourished around the period 1850-1914, in any case, the First World War ended all artistic and poetic experiments, and Weltschmerz was eclipsed for awhile. 

I paid attention to Gustav Klimt, because we happen to have his biography, Gottfried Fliedl named the book World in woman's Gestalt. Klimt lived precisely in the symbolist period, 1862-1918. Translation is by Tarja Braun. 

Eco's text calls Klimt's painting Salome. The name is incorrect, and it has been wrong over and over in many art books. The painting's frame says: Judith and Holofernes. 

These two biblical women's relationship to killing a man is fundamentally different. Judith kills Holofernes herself, with the help of a maid-servant. But Salome, of the famous dance of he seven veils and got as a reward from King Herod John the Baptist's head. 

Fliedl's book uses a lot of space for this mess of the names, because it is odd. Klimt's picture is typical of art nouveau-painting, where ornament almost obscures the image under it. Judith's face shows a proud and self-aware expression, even though the repentance is not, of course, a murderer image immediate after the deed, at least, but the anger and passion at the time killing. 

The woman is wearing beautiful and colourful clothes and seems to have tucked Holofernes's head into a bag. Maybe this was a deliberate act or manifestation of cool anger? 

I did not before realise that the 1900s in Vienna there was a very powerful women's suffrage movement. Women began increasingly to work in jobs outside of the house and bear fewer children. Freud had his practice in Vienna and met a lot of hysterical women, with the symptoms he thought to be the result of the decadent and inactive upper-class lifestyle. He also thought he observed women feeling sexual frustration, which may have been correct, if emancipation was expressed in sexual autonomy. 

I do not know, because I do not have available a Viennese social history. But perhaps in Judith, Klimt's painting commented on Viennese women's independence. 

But the second image, depicting a murder scene, is one of the first women's works in Western painting, an authentic picture of the hatred directed toward a man. The painter is Artemisia Gentilleschi. Her life and destiny have been well documented, for example in English Wikipedia, which gives a strong picture of her role in Baroque art - and gives her the leading role in inducing women to become active visual artists. 

Artemisia and her artist father, Orazio belonged to the so called caravaggists, Baroque artists, who followed Caravaggio's lead. One of Caravaggios trademarks in painting was a certain type of light, the other was his own violent life story: he was forced to flee Italy after having killed a man. 

Artemisia lived from 1593 to 1653. Her painting Judith and Holofernes is anything but a decadent image. One might call it downright realistic. At the same time, the picture is a clear statement of how a woman feels after having been raped. 

This is not a drama of passion, the kind Klimt seems to suggest, but rather an execution. (Both these images printed here are the strategically important details of the paintings, the killing itself.) 

One can learn a lot from these two images in considering the relationship between man and woman in two different periods, or, for that matter, their relation to violence. Violence has not lessened after these pictures were painted - quite the contrary.

After all what we know of WWII, history books, documentary films, fiction, rape is still widely used as a weapon of war in order to shame and degrade the enemy. Recently this weapon was used in Europe in the Yugoslav war in the 1990s. 

Perhaps new images of Judith are already being made, but they haven't caught my eye as of yet. Maybe Judith has another identity today. And she doesn't necessarily even live in Europe at all. 

Allegory is perhaps not at all Judeo-Christian, it may not be related to any religion, but to certain times and cultures? 

(TRANSLATION: Leo Ackley, Marjatta Ripsaluoma and Google-translation machine, original Finnish version in my blog called Ripsa: ripsaluoma.blogspot.com )

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