Weird Cheese Eye Things & Christian Allegory
Christian iconography. Chuckle! It's as mad as a bag of transubstantiated communion wafers.
Take Jan Provoost's Christian Allegory (1510-15) for instance. Brimming with the thrown-together, jumble-of-images, pseudo-meaningful charm of a C-grade Leaving Cert "imaginative composition".
All the usual suspects are present and correct. Lamb & dove: Super-cute! Mighty sword of righteousness: Awesome! Giant fuzz-encrusted all-seeing eye: Spooky! Weird sleepy-looking monocular ovoid cheese thing (with a pair of jutting hands): Fuck!
Oh, and giant bowling ball? Confusing!
January 24, 2010
9 responses to Weird Cheese Eye Things & Christian Allegory
I think this is what John 3:7 refers to.
The lamb may be standard, but the levitating lamb is a novelty…
I bet Jesus doesn’t even know what the bowling ball represents. Nor Mary (if that is Mary). Might explain why they’re looking away. It’s just too mental.
Maybe the bowling ball isn’t supposed to be about Jesus, rather the Jesus.
An Allegory for…what? Note the giant hand and bejewelled sleeve holding the bowling ball. Where is the arm? Or is it a kind of Addams Family style freelance hand? If so, why the sleeve? What are those shiny black things in the box Mary so awkwardly carries (Jesus, no gentleman he, isn’t helping her with any of the various, and weird, items she has to hold)? Are they olives? They look like olives.
More questions than answers.
Well…that’s just, like, your opinion man…
I know. He’s all “No, I’m grand. I’ve got my cool sword ‘n’ super-hero cape thing going on. I’m sorted. No olives for me, ta.”
Also, he’s the head off Anthony Quayle. Which leads me to believe that Provoost was a time-traveller…who caught a glimpse of bowling & Guns of the Navarone on telly before returning to his own time terrified.
Having spent the morning wishing I had a doctorate in Renaissance Christian and Neoplatonic Symbology and Typology so that I could figure out this particularly dense cartoon, (and thereby find Pugatory’s fire exit or something), the answer has just slapped me repeatedly around the gob like the mitts on a beaming eye.
What Provoost represents here is a typical scene in a sixteenth century veterinarian’s waiting room. The bearded gentleman is a rather careless shepherd who has neglected the lamb pictured above his shoulder to the extent that the lamb’s hoof has curled above its head. The rather battered-looking blade on his sword was obviously insufficient to pare back the hoof so he is seeking medical assistance. The lamb has leaped over its owner’s shoulder out of either springtime friskiness or fearful agitation.
The woman is looking for help for her dove, which appears to have a digestive problem. What seems to be a casket on her lap is actually a contemporary Flemish birdhouse, now laden with the remains of olives due to the bird’s unfortunate condition. The book fluttering above her head is actually the latest edition of a periodical called ‘Uomo Universale’, which was the early Humanist precursor to ‘Men’s Health’. She has thrown it upwards in disgust, having at first believed it to be a copy of the ‘Decameron’, (the medieval equivalent to our esteemed anthology of domestic anecdotes, ‘Take a Break’).
The large globe in the centre is simply an unusual light fixture. Very much the talking point of the room and like ‘Big Mouth Billy Bass’ and other such modern wonders, it plays a tune whenever anyone passes it. The tune in this instance is ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands (Palestrina mix)’. The eye-design is, ahem, eye-catching, just as the interior designer intended. The motif features on both the wall mural and floor mosaic and was available in three colours, aquamarine, beige and celestial gold.
The hands reaching up through the floor symbolise the hands of the damned about to claw me down into the Inferno for typing out such rotten, blasphemous nonsense.
Forget the premises of sixteenth century veterinarians, you’re describing the exact colour scheme of my Ma & Da’s living room circa 1979. There were fewer ungulates present, but still…