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In all of our explorations of crowns and crown jewels, we have barely addressed the most famous crown jewels of all–those of the United Kingdom. Ferrebeekeeper posted about the giant dark spinel in the imperial state crown (aka “the black prince’s ruby“) and about the crown of the Tudor kings–which was destroyed back in the 17th century–and that is about all we have said about the most famous royal regalia. The reason for the paucity of posts is that the crown jewels of the United Kingdom were themselves destroyed in 1649 at the order of Oliver Cromwell, a puritan anti-monarchist who seized control of England and had no use for such things. Interestingly, this was (at least) the second time that all of the crown jewels were lost: in 1216 Bad King John somehow sank all of the previous crown jewels (and most of the treasury) in the Wash River (we will explore that humorous catastrophe in a future post).
Anyway, the real point of all of this is that although Cromwell destroyed all of the golden crowns, jeweled scepters, ancient magic swords and whatnot, he did not quite destroy all of the crown jewels. A single metal item from the ancient medieval royal collection of England survived the meltdown and is now the oldest item in the crown jewels (although the Black Prince’s ruby (which was sold and later returned) is pretty ancient too). The sacred coronation spoon of the ancient kings of England survived the Commonwealth. As the crown jewels were being torn apart and melted by stern religious zealots, there was apparently a spoon enthusiast (?) in the crowd. This Mr. Kynnersley bought the ancient coronation spoon for 16 shillings.
The first mention of the coronation spoon was in 1349, but even then it was said to be “of ancient form” so the true age and origin of the spoon are lost in history (although experts surmise that it is from the 12th century). The coronation spoon is decorated with monster’s heads and ornate medieval scrollwork. It was probably originally used to mix water and wine (a critical component of drinking in ancient times which ensured that the imbiber neither died of dysentery nor blacked out from alcohol poisoning). If you squint a bit, the spoon has quite a lot of resemblance to a modern bartender’s mixing spoon.
As far as I can tell, the spoon is too famous and special to be photographed, but there are many high quality drawings and reproductions of it. I wonder how this spoon will fare during the next 800 years of royal history, or will it fall victim to a new King John or another Cromwell somewhere down the line?
I am extremely sorry that my posts have been so thin on the ground for the last fortnight. I don’t have very good excuses for last week (although maybe the brain-melting heat wave which swept through the region provides some cover), but last night there was a blackout in Brooklyn, and there was no way I could write anything in the digital realm! Being cast back in time made me reflect on the world before the internet and electricity. Specifically I became fascinated by non-electrical lamps (which you never really think about until you need them).
Although I filled up my darkened house with LED tea candles and glowsticks, other peoples have not always had recourse to such safe options–like the Romans, who were forced to rely on candles, fires, torches, and their favorite night time standby, the oil lamp. Ferrebeekeeper has touched on how the symbols and visual culture of Ancient Rome do not always make sense to us today…and indeed today’s post offers a powerful example of that. Oil lamps came in all sorts of shapes and sizes (some of them seem to have been commemorative, or tourist trap items), but one of the absolute favorite lamp shapes was a foot. These oil foot-lamps were sometimes bare and sometimes super ornate, but most often they are wearing handsome sandals.
So, why are these things shaped like feet? Trying to research this question on Google resulted in me being whisked to various strange theological explanations of the Book of Romans by Dr. Lightfoot! I was hoping that this was the foot of Mercury or something, but I never did get to the bottom of what is going on. Speaking of which, the best hint I got was that the lamps may have been placed at the bottom of a mural so that the painting glittered in the darkness…which is to say these were the original and literal footlights. This makes no sense to me, but it is sort of a modern English pun, I guess. Perhaps it was a pun or a satisfying visual cue to the Romans as well.
Roman Foot Lamp with Sphinx Handle (Excavated in Libya, manufactured ca.1st century AD) Pottery
Whatever the case is, I love the feet! These lamps are truly satisfying to look at, so maybe the Romans were on to something (they got roads and aqueducts right, after all). If anybody wants to make a new old-style lamp company I am opened to that. Also, if there are any classics majors out there who could explain this, please help us out in the comments! I am unhappy with the “footlight” explanation and I long for a real understanding of what is going on with these charming feet!
Roman Imperial Foot-Lamp (Ca. 3RD-4TH Century A.D.) bronze
I was going to showcase a mermaid painting from the glorious 19th century–a golden age of exquisite oil painting (when the technique of the masters combined with stupendous wealth and the camera made visual refernces available for the first time without yet stealing the show), but then I looked up at the wall and noticed I have my own mermaid painting–it just isn’t finished yet. So I am afraid the 19th century masters will have to rest on their laurels until another day…and I am also afraid you will have to use your imagination to fill in some of the unfinished details of this work in progress. This is one of the last of my torus-themed paintings, and you can see the great flounder lurking beneath it, preparing to take over as the central leitmotif of this era of my art. The torus is made of a coil of strange purple cells (or rope) which is surmounted by an alien lotus blossom. On the left a classic mermaid sings meltingly of the splendor of the seas, while on the right a trio of sinister dark carnival “mermaids” race towards the enigmatic central shape. All around them the ocean blooms with life–mollusks and crabs desport themselves as a made-up roosterfish swims by and a moray looks on in wonder. Yet humankind is also present. The lost lure with its beguilement and hooks hints at our trickery, although a masked diver suggests we are not inured to the lure of the dep in our own right. Tune in later to see how it looks when it is done!
Has anyone noticed the rash of giant snake attacks in Indonesia? These alarming stories of giant snakes follow a very ancient (and horrifying) narrative pattern: a lone villager or traveler chances across an enormous predatory reptile from 20 to 30 feet in length. Mayhem ensues. Usually the human survives and fights off the monster with a machete (or with aid from a torch wielding mob), but sometimes the human vanishes…only to be found being slowly digested inside a reticulated python.
Taken from an individual human perspective, it is hard not to think of the pythons as the insatiable villains of such stories, but the real narrative is more complicated. Palm oil is made from fruit of the palm oil plant, a tropical generalist. Not only is this oil a lucrative (and delicious) additive to desserts and other processed foodstuffs, it is also extensively used in cosmetics, shampoo, and soaps. Indonesia has the third largest rainforest in the world, but palm oil growers are destroying these forests at an unprecedented rate. Indonesia’s tropical rainforests are vanishing even more quickly than the rainforests in Brazil or the Congo. These forests are cut down and replaced with palm oil plantations, enormous monocultures where most traditional rainforest animals cannot live, however rats can and do live there on the oily palm fruit. The pythons are hunting rats in these plantations because their forests were destroyed.
Humankind the great hive organism is swallowing these forests whole (in the form of delicious candy and aromatic toiletries). The animals which live there are likewise being eradicated. Indeed the most recent giant python to attack a villager who molested it was literally cut into pieces, fried, and devoured by hungry villagers. It makes one wonder if the Saint George and the Dragon pictures were not so much about humankind surmounting evil as about the tragedy of deforestation in medieval England.
Cockerel Cycle and French Cruller (Wayne Ferrebee, 2014, oil on panel)
It’s National Doughnut Day! To celebrate, here are two paintings from my Microcosmic Doughnut Series. Topologists and astrophysicists posit that our universe has a toroid shape—so I have combined my disparate background in history, toymaking, natural history, and Flemish-style painting to craft doughnut-shaped microcosms. Within these intricate cosmological confections, people and animals from throughout time converge in a never-ending circle—in the manner of the water cycle, the Krebs diagram, or an ouroboros. Thus the individual elements in these paintings not only have metaphorical significance, they are also part of a dynamic larger picture. Each landscape of dynamically intertwined symbols represents the cycles within individual life, history, or biology. Each little doughnut painting is its own self-contained world; yet, taken in aggregate, the individual stories of predators and prey, metabolism, historicism, world trade, or biorhythms of organisms signify even larger cycles of creation and destruction not readily discernible from the fixed perspective of an individual life. For example, the one above is about a classical French bon-vivant…or maybe it is about frogs or about cocks or chicken eggs. There is also a fertility aspect to it (not to mention a French cruller in the middle).
Furnace Doughnut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, oil on panel)
This second painting is less easily explained. A variety of brightly colored synthetic organisms fly up out of a baker’s furnace. Above the mysterious swarm, a humanoid figure in an asbestos suit and a blue-hot dragon spray fire on a salamander which basks in the radiant pure energy. Blue-black gothic stoves dance around beneath the centerpiece of the composition: a glowing lava doughnut congealing out of the primal kitchen…or is it just a delicious glazed doughnut with chocolate icing and an orange squiggle? The whole scene makes me hungry for cheap baked pastries…and for raw creation. Now I’m off to paint some more. Let me know what you think (and enjoy Doughnut Day with your loved ones).
Sunflowers in a commercial field in California
Ferrebeekeeper is always chasing down where domesticated plants and animals originally came from. Bananas are from Malaysia and New Guinea. Quinces are from the Near East. Goats are from Crete and Iran. Turkeys seem to have come from Mesoamerica. Pigs are from Eurasia (sometimes these sites are somewhat less than specific). All of this leads to the question of what came from here? Are there any domesticated animals from eastern North America? Are there any domesticated plants that didn’t come from Eurasia or Africa or some tropical wonderland? It is autumn and the answer is right outside. All domesticated sunflowers everywhere descend from a variety originally native to the woodlands in the central east of North America. Some of the earliest archaeological finds of domesticated sunflowers come from 3000 to 3500 year old sites in Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Of course answers as to what happened thousands of years ago in societies which did not leave written records are always open to debate and to new findings—so a subset of archaeologists think that sunflowers too were first domesticated in the great temple societies of Mesoamerica. But until they come up with truly conclusive evidence let’s say the useful yellow plants are from Arkansas.
It is possible I will have to change this article around, but this evocative Aztec-style picture was made by modern artist Zina Deretsky
Sunflowers are a genus (Helianthus) of approximately 70 species of tall aster flowers (asters are a family of flowering plants which include cornflowers, periwinkles, cosmos, and lots and lots of other flowers which I have not written about). Domesticated sunflowers (H. annus) are annuals which grow to 3 meters (9.8 ft) tall in a growing season. According to my sources, the tallest sunflower on record somehow grew to a height of 9 meters (30 feet), which I find implausible (though I would dearly like to see such a thing). Sunflowers spend their energy on growing a full head of large oily seeds. The head of a sunflower is a complex and botanically interesting combination of different sorts of flowers growing together. The “petals” are produced by sexually sterile flowers which fuse their petals into an asymmetrical ray flower. A whole ring of these peculiar flowers surround the inner head, where individual disk flowers are oriented in mathematically complex relations to each other (seriously, try drawing the head of a sunflower and you will soon appreciate the peculiar juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity going on in the form).
Sunflowers were first imported to Europe in the 16th century. They have become commercially important in the modern world largely because of their inexpensive high-quality oil (although the seeds are roasted, milled, baked, and otherwise made into every sort of foodstuff you could think of). Young sunflowers do track the sun across the sky during the day, but they swiftly lose this ability as their buds open.
The sunflower has garnered a vast variety of spiritual, aesthetic, and cultural meanings as it moved around the world and became one of humankind’s favorite crops. However nearly every culture is inclined to associate it with joy, beauty, abundance, and the sun. They are wonderful plants.
Vanitas with Skull (Hendrick Andriessen, ca, 1600-1650, oil on panel)
Here is a simple but extremely lovely small still life painting by Hendrick Andriessen, a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in “vanitas” paintings. The entire composition is designed to remind the viewer how transient human life is. The fragile pipe stems are easily broken (and tobacco’s pleasure is brief and tainted). Each lovely cut flower withers away, The quivering flame is blown out…and nothing represents the dreadful onrushing nature of death like a human skull. At the apex of the composition is a fragile bubble ready to burst.
As summer ends, this composition seems fitting in many ways (for example it was my birthday this past weekend). Additionally, the bubble has symbolic significance in other realms than art. We all knew the China bubble had to pop…..
Joos Van Cleve was active in Antwerp from 1511 to 1540. His winsome figures have a delicacy and elegance which is somewhat in contrast to the earthier figures of Flemish painting. He was also a pioneer in putting large decorative landscapes behind his figures (although, to my eyes his landscapes are much inferior to landscapes by the greatest artists of the previous generation—like Bosch and Patinir). In a way Van Cleve’s great innovation was combining the elegance and color of French art, the ecumenical breadth of Flemish painting, and the verisimilitude of Italian painting. This magnificent picture of the Virgin and Child with Angels rewards close scrutiny. You should blow up the image (for this is a huge file) and enjoy the appealing little details such as the deer woven into the rug, the tart summer cherries which a footman is offering to Mary, and the same footman’s studded jerkin!
Of course Van Cleve was not the peerless master that some of his more well-known contemporaries were and he sometimes overreached. Looking at the less-than-perfect curly-haired angel in the acid-color jerkin gives me hope for my own career as a painter (whereas sometimes the works of Raphael and Perugino leave me in despair about ever picking up a brush).
There is Nothing Suspicious About These Glowing Treats in the ocean Depths (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, oil on panel)
Through the dark and improbable marketing magic of the Big Baking industry, today is National Donut Day (or possibly “National Doughnut Day” depending on how classical your tastes in pastry spelling are). Donuts are sweet snacks usually made of deep-fried flour dough. The traditional doughnut is ring shaped, probably because that is a very efficient way to make and evenly fry such a pastry (if the cake was a sphere or a disk, there would be uncooked dough in the middle), however there are also rod-shaped doughnuts, crème filled donuts, crullers, bearclaws, and heavens only knows what else! Donuts have a creation myth wherein a magnificent Dutch sea captain who loved pastries was piloting his galleon through a towering storm. The mariner was unwilling to let his ship sink and his crew perish, but he was equally unwilling to forgo the pleasure of fried pastries for even one moment, so he stuck the donuts on the ship’s wheel so he could devour them as he faced off against Poseidon. I say this is a myth because it seems likely that donuts predate the Dutch. They were probably invented by Sumerians in equally trying but now unknown circumstances. It’s still a great story though! I have heard that law enforcement officers have their own secret donut creation myths, but, since I am not a policeman these sacred traditions have never been vouchsafed to me. Maybe if you ask any of our friends in blue about this, you should be very circumspect…
Not pictured: storm, donuts, fat heroic captain…
Ferrebeekeeper has an immoderate fascination with toruses which stems from a peculiar combination of aesthetic, mathematical, and mystical factors. In my personal world of symbolism, the universe itself is a torus (it seems like it might well really be a torus, but our understanding of such matters is incomplete). The most familiar torus here on our Newtonian scale is the humble–but delicious & multitudinously variable—donut! So I paint lots of symbolic microcosmic paintings of donuts. I was amassing a whole wall of them, but I started to sell some so that I don’t have to live on the streets. Maybe they will be worth a bunch of money someday…. You could do me a huge favor and say exactly that to the art world professionals whom you meet in your life!
…or if YOU happen to have an art gallery, contact me directly and we’ll work something out forthwith!
I have already put up photos of some of these doughnut paintings on this blog here and here (to say nothing of the painting of a toroid honey bundt cake which serves to represent the entire blog). In celebration of National Donut Day, here are two more Wayne Ferrebee original oil paintings (well, digital photographs of the same). The painting at the top is grandiloquently titled “There is Nothing Suspicious About these Glowing Treats in the Ocean Depths.” Three magnificent sugary donuts glowing within drift among the happy denizens of the deep ocean. A friendly anglerfish proffers a funny lure, while a near-eastern ewer drifts toward the ocean bottom. A glass squid with orange dots scuttles past the scene. In the murky background a passing shadow resolves into another friendly creature of some sort. A cynical & world-wary viewer might interpret the work as some sort of warning about impossible things that are too good to be true, but the enlightened art-lover recognizes it as an evocation of benthic wonders!
Cell Donut (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, oil on panel)
The second donut painting here is a very tiny painting (4 inches by 4 inches–so smaller than the image onscreen) which concerns the micro-world beneath us. It is appropriately titled “Cell Donut.” Against a dark magenta background, a courtly mummer performs some sort of dance/pantomime for a paramecium and a clutch of glowing eggs (or possibly cells). A diagrammatic cell is in the lower right corner with all the color and complexity of a future city.
I took a course in cell-biology one and in the first moments, as the biochemist started writing out the molecular processes of respiration, it hit me that the drama at a cellular level is, if anything, more intense and complicated than the goings on at our familiar human-size frame of reference. “Cell Donut” is meant to remind us that the real rewards and perils are within us already–for in the microsphere within our bodies, billions of cells are fighting, metabolizing, reproducing, and recycling with maddening vigor and ceaseless action. Also the tiny donut in the middle of the painting is a classic plain donut…an ideal symbol for national Donut Day (as opposed to some of my other dozens of donut paintings, which can often be quite baroque, phantasmagorical, or strange…or are just straight-up bagels!)
I hope you enjoy these paintings, and I also hope you manage to drop by the bakers to enjoy a well-deserved donut or two!
Note: No matter what I do, or how I try, I cannot get these paintings to display properly! It is obvious that Word Press hates me and hates my artwork, despite the fact that I have essentially been working for them for free for half a decade. I’m afraid you’ll have to click on the paintings in order for them not to appear all hideously cropped and mutilated as they look above. [sotto voce] mutter mutter…should have chosen “Blogger”…mutter, curse… “never “Fresh Pressed”… grumble grumble.
Still Life with Mystery Serum (Wayne Ferrebee, 2002, oil on canvas)
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! Last week’s post about Kelly green did not seem like enough to celebrate that vivid and timely hue, so here is a little still life painting I made long ago back when I was painting small collections of household objects. The symbolic import of the painting is unclear, but, thanks to its color palette, it certainly has a Saint Patrick’s Day feel. Protestant orange is condensed into a small glowing sphere—an orange star? A gumball? An eye? Two electric fuses of brass and muted green sit nearby. The majority of the composition is dedicated to a silk handkerchief filled with horrors and delights. Upon the glowing green field, a golden ring glistens evocatively next to a small bottle of some unknown elixir or extract. But beware: beside these ambiguous treasures a tiny orange scorpion lurks–waiting for the unwary hand. To me the composition has always seemed like what a person would find inside a leprechaun’s pockets if one were foolish enough to look there. Or maybe these are purchases from a derelict gumball machine which someone kept pumping quarters into in fading hopes of getting something better…
ferrebeekeeper 