Ekphrastic Poetry: Part Four, Finding Comfort

Geertgen tot Sint Jans
John the Baptist
in the Wilderness

The genius of my first art professor, Patricia Rose, was how she demonstrated the power of detail in works of art, especially the capability of details to convey emotion, a surprising revelation. I remember sitting in the dark as she displayed the slide showing John the Baptist in the Wilderness by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, and then she zeroed in on the proliferation of flowers and animals, and the way the central figure sat in this wild grass, with one foot slightly above another ("one foot deliciously massaging the other beneath it"). It was many years later that I wrote about this image, the poem appearing in my book Will There Be Music? 

Hieronymus Bosch
The Extraction of the
Stone of Madness

Similarly in my poem "Motley Fool" I have examined closely Hieronymus Bosch's "The Extraction of the Stone of Madness," depicting an early form of the medical barbarity known as trepanation ("ice fishing into the skull to pluck the fish of madness"). I think the viewer places himself into this work, commiserating with the victim, this patient of 1494.

Death of Harold
Bayeux Tapestry

By chance I came upon the story of a friend of mine, a librarian named Ellin Klor, who was clutching her knitting materials while running up some stairs, and inadvertently stabbed herself in the heart with one of the needles (she survived!). Somehow this tale fit so nicely with a long poem I was writing about Einstein ("how starlight bends around the sun"), color theory, horse racing, and the Bayeux Tapestry ("Heavenly Bodies Along the Rail"). The detail in the tapestry that captivated me was the place where the dying Harold is depicted ("a spear hanging like a tear from his eye").

As a young woman reading Proust (my literary side) I remember being interested

Adoration of the Holy Wood
Piero della Francesca

in the way he was able to focus on such interesting themes, like the way one saw a steeple "move" as you traveled by coach upon different curving roads. And I loved his description of three trees, "those trees themselves I was never to know what they had been trying to give me nor where else I had seen them." By the time I had read these words I had already seen "these trees," those in Piero della

Overlooking Arezzo
Taken by author, 1967

Rembrandt
The Three Trees

Francesca's paintings, an engraving of three trees I had laid eyes on in Rembrandt's house, and a group of cypresses I had photographed above the city of Arezzo. The poem I wrote about all these ideas, if one could call them ideas, is called "Placement."

Portrait of Masolino
Town Hall, Panicale

Basilica of Sant'
Eustachio, Rome

Finding comfort in art can be as simple as noticing a portrait looking down upon you as you are being married in a town hall (Masolino in "The Marriage Ceremony"), or seeking solace from the head of a stag on the front of a church ("Meditation in Rome"). 

The appearance of my father in a vivid dream, not long after his death, seemed at the time to remind me of the Raphael drawing I had seen long ago in the Vatican, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes ("the disciples reached down for the nets, sun on their muscled arms").

This ends my art tour. It has been a pleasure being your guide.

Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes