Wandering Through Wonders
di Elizabeth Frolet
" Masters, I am to discourse wonders, but ask me not what;
for if I tell you, I am not true Athenian "
(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's dream, Bottom)
INTRODUCTION
Speaking about art, beauty, love is particularly difficult and in some ways ridiculous and farfetched. Our times do not believe anymore in those hackneyed words and have a tendency to deride them or to transform them into advertising slogans that totally disgust us.
Today, I will try and outline what are the different manifestations of what one calls marvels or wonders, vanishing and impalpable, many-sided. I will become the child sure of being able to capture his dream in the palm of his hand: a fragile butterfly with coloured wings that will leave pastel traces that immediately vanish on the tip of his fingers.
Wonders? Why? Here I must stop a moment, to say that in French or in Italian there is only one word 'merveilleux' that corresponds to the two English words : wonderful and marvellous.
It is not a very serious subject. It seems to be a lost word which when it is pronounced, disconcerts people. It is old fashioned, too delicate. Our common language prefers to use the concept of horror, disaster, fantastic, violence or the triviality of everyday life. As if these terms, marvellous, marvelled, that do not correspond to a common social experience, or that are not experienced by our contemporary society, should be mocked, derided, depreciated or negated by power. You could argue and say: "But isn't television a marvellous magical box?" But what is marvellous about a luminous box that everyday proposes predictable images, that repeat themselves, and which endeavour to brainwash or lull into oblivion the spectator, instead of enchanting him or enticing him into dreams and personal discoveries? Even the children who are over fed with Tolkien and Harry Potter don't have a precise idea or feeling about what 'marvellousness' is. For them and their parents, their idea of 'marvellousness' is collateral to a supernatural force that has the power of transforming and controlling the world. It is a kind of superpower that belongs to evil or angelic entities. In those cases, we are always speaking about a kind of domination, or of a superhuman authority that expresses itself through superhuman and incredible endeavours that are set in theatrical battles against evil monsters.
Being both an art historian and an artist, and wanting to try and think of art in a slightly different way, I threw myself into this research with little thought and lightness, with enthusiasm and with the need to see what would happen at the end of this 'absurd' path where not many serious art historians have ventured; I could have spoken about contemporary art in Rome, of its difficulties, of its strangenesses, or about its points of interest. The results are already known, specialists in American universities have already paved the way to such enquiries… Mexico is also a special country full of unknown chtonian forces that do not mix well with banalities… As usual, chance gave me a hand, and an impulsive act brutally imposed itself when I was asked to organise a show around the WunderKammer of Francesco Calzolari in Verona. Not wanting to create an over academic event, I proposed that I choose the most important pieces of the collection, to confront them with contemporary works, with the aim of highlighting how the idea of marvellousness evolved from the XVIth to the XXIst century. However, the curator violently opposed my project, arguing that the concept of wonders belonged to the world of science and not anymore to our culture and least of all to the world of contemporary art.
Once more, power and wonder were united in his mind. There was no hope to take into consideration how a society, or a group of people could 'look' at things. The show did not take place. But this categorical refusal stimulated me and made me convinced that wonders could not be banished from our universe. Where were they hidden? How could they come to life? What was there 'history'?
To recognize the existence of marvels or wonders, rather than negate it, already means betting on enchantment, psychological turmoil, irrationality, unpredicted events, trips behind the mirror, excursions inside the dark hole of imagination. It means believing in mental freedom without the shackles of a purely materialistic logic. It means speaking about the 'invisible' world, about an antique memory hidden very deep inside us and which reappears in mysterious visions bewitching and terrifying. It is like making an investigation about the unclear, imaginary and childish part of man. It is also being tempted by immortality.
I have no intention of making a mystical tract about wonders and their poetry. All the mystics are marvelled by the world. However, I shall only be able to create a sort of 'sentimental encyclopedia' that will endeavour to figure out a labyrintical universe. Defining a marvel is not only a semantic or etymological problem, it requires that one finds out how the occidental eye looked at the world of immaterial appearances, what importance it gave it, and how it helped it to manifest itself.
It is common place to think that the artist is a creator of wonders. But is it really the case? The artist creates all kinds of things… terror, naturalism, light, concepts, stereotypes. Nowadays, the general tendency followed by fashionable artists is to nourish scandal and malaise, to reflect as directly as possible everyday banalities. Of course a few people escape this trap.
According to me, the ability to wonder about things is very close to the aptitude to love. It all depends on how you look at things. You need eyes that eroticise reality and render reality mysterious. You must stop and look into things. Yes! To understand and love wonders, you need to seriously like love. Consequently, my position in this argument can only be subjective! I do not pretend in anyway to be all encompassing, scientific. A marvel, scientifically analysed, seems to me more monstrous than all the monsters invented by man! But it is true that marvellous science also exists. My choice here is to speak about the 'inner man'. I would have liked to present this text in the shape of a labyrinth, or as an illogical sequence of terms, subjects, works and names linked to the elaboration of marvels. A kind of 'abc' where the wunderkammer would be next to Giordano Bruno, Joseph Cornell, Mozart, André Breton, Cervantès, Italo Calvino, Max Ernst.… But here, it is not possible. We need some logic, some semblance of objectivity, so I will first present the concept, it connotations and uses. Then I will show in which ways it re-emerges in western art and literature. Finally, it will be possible to put everything in discussion, as those crucial wonders, having no special status in the order of our cognitive priorities, can suffer the worst changes of fortune.A/ WONDERS : CONCEPT AND HISTORICAL EVOLUTION
1* Merveille/Wonder/Mirabilis.
Aristotle in his 'Poetics' speaks about wonders as an element necessary to the tragedy and the epic, but it is one of the rare terms that he does not bother do define, specifying vaguely that 'wonders' are pleasant.
In the French dictionaries, it is something that causes admiration. It is an object or an action that causes wonder. But the marvel when it is too well known does not charm the ears anymore. The marvel is not necessarily a rare thing, it is relative.
It is also something that creates stupor and that seems to go beyond the forces of nature. As Diderot says, men, even the most rational ones have a weakness for wonders. 'Man likes wonders; I am surprised to see that I am always on the verge to abandon myself to it'. Marmontel separates the natural wonders which involve the extreme category of possible things from the supernatural wonders that are produced by beings that are not submitted to natural laws and that produce accidents beyond its forces or independent from its laws.
Marvels can be prodigies that strike the imagination as something wonderful or surprising. It is also a kind of miracle both beautiful and terrifying. Think about Pascal that says: 'What a Chimera man is! Such newness, such a monster, such chaos, such a subject of contradiction, such a prodigy.'
The word marvel (merveille) which has its origin in the word mirabilis, implies with its root mir something visual. It is the way one looks at something either superficially or deeply that will generate wonder. Miracles or monsters will easily awake wonders, but in other cases, vision will have to go beyond the surface of things in order to reach an extraordinary hidden reality beyond the object considered.
In one way or in another, a wonderful thing surprises. And therefore marvels can be 'fantastic'. This word comes from the Latin fantasticum or from the Greek phantasein : to 'show the appearance', or to 'give the illusion' but also ' to appear' when one speaks about extraordinary events. Phantasma refers to a ghost, a spectre. In 1831, the Dictionnaire de l'Académie gave to 'fantastique' the meaning of 'chimerical'. It is also something 'that has only the appearance of a corporal being without reality'. According to mythology, the chimera is a huge monster with a lion's head, a goat's belly and a serpent's tail, invincible in Lycia. 'A vain foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.'
The borders between wonder, fairy-tale world and fantastic situations are not always clear. These terms are all adapted to the narration of extraordinary events that first belonged to the epic style where everything that could not be understood was then immediately referred to the mythological structure of the universe. For the medieval epopea, like the Chanson de Roland, it was necessary to insert in the narration elements called mirabilia: amazing facts, manifestations of gods on earth, geographic strangeness. These bizarre elements were part of the order of the cosmos. The Christian epic poems will transpose these mirabilia in a new frame where the miracles depend on God and the aberrations of evil are attributed to the devil and his troop of demons.
R. Caillois places immediately fantastic literature on the level of pure fiction and gives it an element of fear. What is considered fantastic provokes a feeling of strangeness generated by a break in the coherence of the universe. Wonderful and fantastic works of literature and art are devoid of the progressive ideology of science fiction. The principal themes of fantastic literature are the ghost, the double, the vampire, possession and metamorphosis.
In general, what is wonderful doesn't work with fear, it mainly builds its power around amazement and uncertain questioning in front of an incomprehensible phenomenon or an unrealisable dream. Wonderfulness and marvellousness are companions of the improbable, of non-evidence or of what cannot easily be explained logically but that possesses however strong links with reality.
The Seven Wonders of the World form a symbolic list of places constructed by man where beauty is extreme and rare: the Pyramids, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Diana, the Tomb of Mausole, the Statue of Zeus by Phydias, the Colossus of Rhodes existed. They are not dreams, but their extraordinary nature was such that human imagination transformed them into myths. In fact, they belong to the realm of gods.
In short one could say that wonders appear each time our eyes look at an event with surprise and uncertainty….2* The word as it was used in the Middle Ages
The full blossoming of wonders happened in the Middle Ages. The Ages of Darkness, Marvels and Monsters. Darkness, faith, fear, the consciousness of being surrounded by an unknown immensity, full of perils, surprises and unexplained events, have fostered a recurrent faith in wonders.
The mirabilia which were topographical descriptions, in most cases false and imaginary, testify of the same attraction towards a universe that belongs to God and the unreal, all this coupled with a cult of roman monuments. It is more important to describe the world as a myth and this act of faith is the measure of knowledge.
Love is faith. The medieval man cultivated courtly manners, lyricism and instituted Courts of Love. Those were the times of the troubadours who through the magic of their music and words transformed the language, inventing shapes, sounds and melodic images that contributed to create an imaginary universe at the heart of which resided 'fine love' or fin'amor. Love transformed by poetry stimulated an ecstasy of the heart. This world of aristocratic culture was immersed in a terrible desire for wonders and poetical magic. The beautiful Dame or war, both recipients of masculine vitality were the eroticised ideals that nourished this need for wonders. At the beginning of the XXth century, Surrealism will update these aspirations and movements of the heart, enriching them with an artistic methodology based on the unconscious and the irrational. The fundamental principles remained unchanged.
The double process of dream and allegory will be crystallized in the Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meung) where love is set on a marvellous background: an ideal orchard, in Spring, in a dream.
This liking for epics, fables, novels of the Round Table, united to the great influence of Ovidio, Latin author of the Metamorphosis, poet of love, of fantastic scenes and extraordinary love stories, contributed to this multiplication of marvellous places and behaviours. In the Roman de Thèbes, for example, the exaggerated description of 'wonders' creates a fabulous universe where love reigns in a world of war, death and refinement.
Tapestries such as 'The Lady and the Unicorn' presented heroes, ladies and fantastic beings on backgrounds scattered with flowers and birds, symbols of the beauty of the soul and of its dreams. The nightingale, Laostic, becomes the metaphor of the song of the lover unjustly slaughtered. Women, of course belong to this world of marvels:Le blanc sur le vermeil éclairait son visage mieux que sinople sur argent. Pour en ravir le coeur des gens, Dieu avait fait d'elle la Passe-Merveille. Jamais Dieu n'en avait fait telle. Plus jamais n'en devait créer.
Beauty and the noble soul of this damsel lead to love, 'mouth to mouth, and arm in arm they rested until dawn' after what, our valiant knight left to conquer the Grail, another marvellous vase.
Perceval and Gauvain, noble knights of King Arthur's Court, live and fight in order to know why bloods seeps through the sword of the Roi Pêcheur. They face the most terrible dangers to meet a marvellously dressed damsel who carries a Grail so luminous that it overpowers the light of the candles. Such obstacles lead them to marvellous ladies and just as magnificent castles.
Sire Gauvain will have to sit on the Bed of Wonders, undergo the attack of hundreds of arrows, and the assault of a lion ' strong, cruel, big and terrible', before being able to enjoy the rosy skin of the pure damsels that live in the castle he set free from a terrible enchantment.
This profusion of images and stories that light up imagination, breed a great quantity of miracles and mysteries, cardinal points of a world recreated during the Middle-Ages in Europe.
Poets do not hesitate to use metaphors where 'wonders', monsters and poetic delicacies are united. This cohabitation is in a way natural, as if the terrifying reality of the times became a pretext to conceive through their 'love orchards' an enchanted vision of reality.
The frontiers that separate what is monstrous or marvellous are not very clear. In the Middle Ages, the mirabilia, presagia include prodigies, startling figures that people consider monstrous omens that are terrifying and at the same time possess marvellous virtues. For example, if someone dreams about the eyes and the head of a dragon, those symbolise a 'marvellous secret' or a treasure for 'one believes that the eyes of the dragon are precious stones and that his head is filled with them.'
The ambiguity of what sometimes characterises the monster and the marvel exist in the roman grotesques, and later in the numerous Arabic accounts where plants, animals and men are confounded. Thus, the famous 'Wak wak' , a tree with branches that carry the heads of the sons of Adam, shouts 'wak wak' at dawn and sings hymns to the Creator in the evening. There are also marvellous botanical drawings that mention the existence of 'monstrous' gardens where pomegranate trees produce many-coloured birds when they blossom, and branches that become snakes when they fall. These singularities which are part of the Wonders of Creation (Les Merveilles de la Création ) will reappear in the West under the shape of trees on which hang skulls and angelic heads.
In fact the monster and the marvel that surprise and disturb, are complementary and mutually reinforce each other. The monster, hybrid creature, half animal, half man or composed of different animal parts frightens because we recognize in it elements which are at the same time attractive and strange, but that we reject. The wonder is also attractive and strange, but desirable. How does one feel about a siren, half woman half fish, a mandragora, half plant, half human, or Saint Lucy who serves us the horror of her martyrdom on a beautiful silver plate? It is a question of attraction, a kind of fascination where the boundaries of enchantment, desire and fear are not clear. Do we not desire the monster, hybrid association of man, animal and plant, the hermaphrodite, both male and female, the centaurs, the dragons assailed by heroes, the chimeras, the unicorns, the sphinxes, the Minotaur, the popes with asses' ears… ?
Nowadays, for our materialistic morality, the cult of adulterous love established as a model of spirituality will seem more monstrous than marvellous. In a way, it is also what Cervantes alluded to in his book in which he mocked the crazy imagination of senseless knights and lovers.
It goes without saying that this lush forest of marvels that multiply through love and chivalrous feats will not disappear easily. But humanism and the birth of the scientific spirit will give a deadly blow to this fascination for wonders. However, before being totally denied, wonders will undergo two mythical resurrections, through Marco Polo and the Wunderkammer.3* The Wonders of Travels and the myth of the Orient
The East was a region that generated wonders for the Middle Ages. Gold, myrrh, flowers, silks, shining colours, perfumes, and spices were part of the iconography of the countries around the Mediterranean basin. Oriental arabesques and fantastic vegetal motives were absorbed and readapted with slight variations into a Christian symbolic system . The foliages carried disturbing fruits and men like fruit hanged from trees. (Silimar motives will reappear in Redon's iconography, see La Nuit 1910-1912). Arabian tales were reelaborated into allegories. Lunar faces and whirling shapes created prodigies that moved around with talking plants. The Orient fascinated the West that tried to assimilate all its refinements.
During the Middle Ages, far away travels in search of gold and precious stones that covered the walls of palaces belonging to princes, sultans and great Khans were considered Wonders. Marco Polo who was a well trained trader with an opened mind interested by the discovery of exotic countries, has enchanted with his Book of Wonders, generations of readers who were transported into a world where reality was never far away from prodigy. His use of a modular structure for his stories, reminds us by its reiterations another book of Wonder, the Thousand and One Nights where wonders abound. Marco Polo, who roamed through the Orient for years, hypnotises us with his repetitive formulas unveiling us at the same time a luminous East where miracles abound. His XXIst story, entitled 'Of the Wonder of Baudac, of the mountain' explains us how a Christian community avoided massacre by praying in front of a cross to move a mountain. And the 'Saracens upon seeing such a thing, were filled with wonder, and the caliph became a convert.' It is Marco Polo who tells us about the legend of the old man that constructed a Paradise for assassins whom he fed with hashish. The garden he describes us is similar to the love orchards of the minstrels. Oriental wonders that have fed the fantasy of western court poets." He had built between two mountains, in a valley, the most beautiful garden and the biggest in the world, where you could find all the fruits and the most beautiful palaces in the world, all decorated with gold, beast and birds. There were canals: some carried water, others honey and others wine. "
The Paradise promised by Allah to his followers becomes a reality immersed in a blissful nature. At the chapter CXXXVII: 'Here start all the marvellous things of India', Marco Polo explains us the technical wonders that allow the construction of ships of a surprising quality. Then follows the description of the Island of Zipangu (Japan) that will remain engraved in all the minds of the future missionaries and traders that will try to penetrate this country impermeable to western interference:
" And all the space of the rooms is covered with gold. (…) and all the windows and the walls and everything and also the halls are covered with gold ; and one could not say how much it all cost. And they have pearls, they are red and round and grey, and they are more precious than the white ones. "
All the journey of this Venetian merchant, meticulous, almost 'scientific' and devoid of lyrical outbursts, offers us a map of routes without end that the great Khan controls surrounding himself of amazing beauty and power (gold, silver, women, spices, fruits, flowers, lions, falcons, silks, festivities, paper, wood…). Should the reader submit to the fascination of these descriptions, he will never end dreaming about these splendours located in countries far away but real.
The wonders that Marco Polo offers us consist in a trip towards the discovery of another world, different, rich and brilliant. They are not miracles, but rather the discovery of a new geography that will remain engraved in the mind of Columbus and Magellan when they will leave in search of a mythical continent.4* The Wunderkammer
'The room of wonders' or the 'cabinet de curiosités' which reach their full maturity during the Renaissance, proceed from the same type of curiosity that Marco Polo had for a new world, strange, surprising, a need of being enchanted by the knowledge of another world. The wunderkammer, is a place where one reflects on the cosmos, its immensity, its complexity and its fleetingness. It is a sanctuary where the erudite monks of the Middle Ages, then the noble collectors of the Renaissance, would accumulate strange and rare relics. These rare objects, often suspended from the ceiling of the churches, had an aura of sacredness and exerted a strong power of attraction on the believers. These relics that had a magical power, manifested their effects through proximity, contact or ingestion. During the antiquity Orpheo's lyre, or the eggs of Leda played this same role. Their possessors would boast about their marvellous effects, just as later, the churches would cleverly cultivate the mystery of the bones of the saints, or of ostrich' eggs, or of biblical signs such as the whale bone of the cathedral of Modena or the mirror of the Queen of Saba in the treasury of the Saint-Denis cathedral. Those precious objects were also very expensive and are definitely a symbol of the power of the Prince or the Emperor.
The East remained a prolific source of wonders, and provided the silks that became church facings, or antediluvian crocodiles that were an allusion to the diabolic perversity of the reptiles.
But those singular objects, strange, rare or monstrous that were accumulated in the sacristies were also curiosities which, according to Saint Augustine helped to discover the world. The long list of mirabilia of the City of God, in which were mentioned materials that resist combustion, abnormal stones, animals strangely fertilized, were supposed to stimulate observation and encourage the mind to wonder, teaching it to be perpetually in love with the world as 'etiam mundum ipse miraculum' (the world in itself is a miracle).
Slowly (from the crusades to the Renaissance), the four walls that protected the treasures and the relics transformed themselves into studioli where there were listed a great quantity of talismanic objects, symbols of the extraordinary power of the person who owned them. This power was about virtue, knowledge and refinement. With the studioli, man becomes 'universal' and endeavours to transform this room into a mirror of the complex world that surrounds it. He combines artificalia (masterpieces of craftsmanship) and naturalia (creation of nature that reflect those of man). Those studies filled with curios, established erudite connections between man, these symbolic objects and a knowledge that was supposed to embrace the universe.
Whale horns, antique sculptures, esoteric books as the Dream of Poliphilus, the 'Trasmutazione metallica', wonders found in the east and later in the New Indies would be placed next to each other, stimulating thought and questioning. This ancestor of the museum was also the laboratory of a philosopher/magician in the style of Faust.
The collected wonders which were heterogeneous and carefully recorded, had a double value: both esthetical and 'scientific', the object was an artefact that had to be situated as precisely as possible in relation to the rest of the riches of the universe. Natural treasures or artificial ones could be held in just one cupboard, or in just one room. The magical density of this symbolic space was to reappear in the XXth Century with Duchamp and J. Cornell when they poetically recomposed 'museum boxes'. The main difference being that the sacristies and the studioli based their choices on the criteria of rarity and preciousness.
Collectors of naturalia, mirabilia, artefacta, scientific, antiquita, exotica, considered themselves as demiurges according to whom 'practising magic was just like marrying the world. ' With those ambitious aims, they tried to recreate the book of Nature, its memory within the theatre of the world. And it is in this theatre that could be staged the most extraordinary documents like the Livre des Merveilles given in 1413 by Jean sans Peur to the Duc de Berry in which westerners were shown carrying branches with fruits in the shape of birds. You could also see the 'Monstrorum historia' of Aldrovandi in which appeared a ' figure with monstrous genitals' that was supposed to have existed. Or you could read the following poem:" Oh marvellous effects of divine dexterity
The plant has flesh and blood, the animal has roots. "In spite of the ambition of dealing with mathematics and comprehending the laws of nature, the underlying order of the relationships established between the things obeyed to a fantastic logic.
Encyclopaedic collections will spring up within skies filled with suspended animals, as in a firmament invaded by figures and stars where order is created by chance. 'The Gods have filled the sky with monsters, and they have made a sky where prodigies abound.'
An enthusiastic position which faithfully corresponds to Giordano Bruno's conviction that the worlds are innumerable. In his book 'Of Shadows' (De Umbris Idearum, 1582) that speaks about memory and the universe, he proposes a list of birds and animals, of stones, metals, of artefacts which are strangely mixed up together and which also include sacred objects. This ill-assorted and unheard of association of objects is exactly what was found in the Wunderkammer. Magic, hermetism, symbolism, unfettered curiosity built the mind of this visionary man who tried endlessly to show men the wonders of the universe they refused to look at. This sin brought him to the stake.
Shadows and marvels will reappear with J. Cornell in his 'Shadow boxes'.
When the Renaissance will stop wondering at the marvels of the world with the illusion of becoming more 'Reasonable', the Wunderkammers will be condemned to death.5*Enlightment and Reason
Cartesian and spinozian rationalism will lead to the establishment of the first frontiers between natural things and miraculous ones. Scientific knowledge which progresses triumphantly during the XVIIth century will sign the death warrant of this quest for an extraordinary and stupefying world. The scientists that studied objective reality will relegate wonders to the area of childish aberrations. According to Spinoza, these are the prerogative of foolish men not of serious scientists. The lights of reason illuminate everything, track down all breach of clarity or scientific order. The scientists, just like the missionaries will mock, denounce, punish or try to correct this ingenuity that is the attribute of the child, the primitive or insufficiently evolved man. Religion and logic became the alibis to kill 'wonders' or to condemn lapses in the social and mental western order. Without remorse, the intellectual contributing to the writing of the Encyclopaedia will ridicule 'the closets of pedantic collectors' such as those of Thomas Browne, Athanasieus Kircher, Ulisse Aldrovandi. This surge of scientific investigation and of the affirmation of a new rationality shifted 'wonders' towards inferior and dark regions of dubious scientific quality. And the central position given to observation, to new methodological rules, or to fact finding, will relegate curiosities and wonders to an imperfect knowledge. From now on, 'Women, children and old men.' were the only people allowed to be fascinated by wonders.
And as P. Mauriès writes it:" The metaphysical passage from a miraculous nature to a uniform nature will correspond in the realm of cultural values, to the passage from a princely munificence to a bourgeois economy. "
The 'cabinets de curiosités' are abandoned, and considered by the scientist like dusty attics where a not very respectable history of the world has been accumulated. The cohabitation that existed between art and science is now negated, as science requires an independent space structured according to rigorous criteria that are contrary to the organic design of the Wunderkammer. The mysterious relations that Tommaso Campanella had established in Del Senso delle cose e della magia were refuted by the scientists of the Age of Enlightenment that were now unable to poetically unite through a generous jump of imagination, the things of art and nature.
The new collections were elaborated around an idea of rigorous completeness in which the fragment was a part of a complete system, while the collector of wonders could always, as a free creator, substitute objects in a totally 'open' collection. It will take a long time before' catalogues of objects shining in the night or of moon plants' as Bartoli Daniello did it in 1555, will be again established. Whale bones, crocodiles, meteors, extraordinary crystals were dislodged from the ceiling of churches or studioli, to be brought down to the Museum of Natural History which was organised according to the impeccable order imposed by Buffon. It was required to be sensible and scientific. Objects, just as human societies will be systematically organised into an order where emotions and the disorder of imagination will be excluded.
Folly, crime, the irrational were banned and became an offence to the Almighty Reason which in turn would justify carceral institutions such as the 'Panopticon' (proposed by J. Bentham) where obscurity was banned and each man's movement could not escape the look of the inquisitor.
One will have to wait for the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth to see the balloon of fantasy pop out violently after years of immersion under oceans of denials. Romantism and surrealism will virulently impose a renewed nobility to wonders and marvels.6* Surrealim - André Breton
André Breton who was the authoritarian leader of the surrealist movement announced immediately in his article 'Wonders against Mystery' (Le Merveilleux contre le Mystère):
" Splendid XIXth century, before which one has to jump back to the XIVth century to burst forth in the same terrifying sky made of cat-tiger skin! The refusal of a given life, be it morally or socially, orients man towards a series of new solutions concerning the problem of his nature and his end. An extraordinary fermentation that we do not know anymore (…) Lucidity is the greatest enemy of revelation. (…) To make it a law to give oneself purely and simply to wonders, and find there the only source of eternal communication with men. "
Surrealism, at the beginning of the century, reacts strongly and with determination against the yoke of social and moral conventions of western bourgeois society. The rules of academic art are shattered and booed. The precursors, Huysmans, Nodier, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Blake, Swedenborg and Poe had already sown doubts by insisting on the idea that the extraordinary world lying just underneath the fragile skin of reality, deserved to be reappraised. The anthropological interest for other cultures, the discovery that primitive people respected psychological anomalies as well as an artistic world centred on magic and 'powerful objects' stimulates a new intellectual sensitivity. This 'convulsive' and almost hysterical reaction tending to establish contacts with a 'miraculous beauty' that should bring redemption to men, becomes for the artists of the beginning of the century, a mean to discover new marvels.
Our aim is not to recount the genesis of Surrealism. I think it is enough to remind a few predecessors and the spirit of their words in order to understand the quivering and luminous irradiation of the artists who nourished this movement.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), Swedish mystic, author of 'The sky and its wonders and Inferno', attributes to the angels a perfect human shape, and to men the gift of being the receptacles of the sky to become angels. This visionary man who could see and enter in contact with a multitude of spirits, spoke to the 'erudites after their exit from the world, to the children, to the spirits who during their terrestrial life had renounced the world.' He witnessed marriages made in heaven, he saw the world of spirits who 'appears as a valley between rocks and mountains, here and there high and low.'" I spoke to spirits as a spirit, and I spoke with them as a man (…) thus my interiors appeared to them, when I spoke as a spirit, my material body did not appear. "
His intensely spiritual vision of love, united to an unfettered imagination allowing him to see 'assembled spirits: they had hats on their heads.', corresponded perfectly to the surrealist visions encouraged by A. Breton.
Later, W. Blake (1757-1822), poet and draftsman, will create a long sequence of verses and images that would shatter all the sensible stereotypes of established perception, as for example in the Auguries of Innocence:" To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour. "Verses which are at the same time a Zen manifesto, the expression of a Newtonian consciousness of infinite worlds within reach and the revelation of the mysteries of everyday life. It is an expression of love and desire for all what has to be discovered, that we do not know how to observe and which is waiting to be unveiled.
Like the paladins of the medieval ages, the surrealists defended the quest and the exaltation of Love as a way of revealing the wonders of the world. Loved faces, dreamed ones, present or invisible, would merge into forgotten streets of Paris that had poetical names. The body reflects clouds and becomes a winged figure. It flies as a spirit ready for all the surprises, for all the chances offered to him by the immensity of the skies and of his imagination. It can become a bird, ready for surprises and the supernatural. These tendencies which are claimed in surrealistic manifestoes come out as the echo of a medieval sensitivity where surprise and wonders were aims in themselves:" Surprise must be looked for itself and unconditionally. It can only exist when in one object, what is natural and supernatural is intertwined, or when you feel that you are holding and loosing at the same time the menurelyre. "
Another important text of A. Breton, Nadja, expresses fully this aspiration to the magical idealism of Novalis, who found it natural to see everywhere in daily life, and in usual objects, wonderful things and who considered that strangeness and supernatural situations should be familiar and accessible.
Rimbaud, often quoted by Breton was of the same opinion:" I loved foolish paintings, decorations on top of doors, paintings by acrobats, shop signs, populars lightings. "
Max Ernst who is the other central figure of this movement will submit freely and faithfully to the precepts of a creative technique which consisted mainly in: 1/ Humour 2/ Love 3/ Dream 4/ Wonder 5/ Chance 6/ Madness or alienation.
M. Ernst loved the mysteries of the forest, which he treated as a marvellous insect where man, and the nightingale could dream unimpeded. Forests and nightingales bring us back to the medieval stories.
Beauty that does not demonstrate anything, that does not want to prove anything beyond the miracle of its own poetical existence, is the wonder one has to fight for, even if it is small or hidden in obscurity. Size does not have anything to do with real beauty that according to Breton rimes with wonder." From a minuscule but unlimited place from which one could enjoy a panoramic view on everything that opens up in front of us.(…). "
Surrealism could be described as a factory producing wonders or as a school that would teach the eye and the heart to capture them and live with them with passion and intensity. It could be a vector of deep freedom.
B/THE DIFFERENT FORMS OF WONDER
After having tried to show under which periods and intellectual situations the concept of wonder was able to ferment, I would like now to give more concrete examples and show which are the elements that contribute to provoke wonderful texts or images. To believe in wonders presupposes, as I said before, a 'childish' or mystical attitude on the part of the person who lives and observes the world.
With this premise in mind, I have been able to identify a few specific characteristics that make up works dealing with wonder:1/ Eyes that penetrate an invisible reality
2/ The mystery of metamorphosis
3/ Light and darkness
4/ A magical story that enchants thru its colours and chimeras
5/ Ambiguity: reality / supernatural; beauty / monsterThese ingredients usually generate a poetical world and cast a wonderful aura on the work concerned.
1* Eyes that penetrate an invisible reality.
Marvels or miracles as their etymology (mirabilis or mirari) suggest it, are seen through the eyes. Without eyes that can be surprised, no marvel… In fact a cynical eye will accept neither miracles nor marvels.
O. Redon, at the beginning of his diary, 'A soi-même' warns his reader in the following terms:" I created an art according to myself. I did it with the eyes open on the marvels of the visible world and, in spite of what has been said, with the constant intention of obeying to the laws of nature and life. "
He shows us this reality which he observes closely, through big eyes suspended in dark skies. They observe the world like hot-air balloons immersed in obscurity. In his work, it is the omnipresent eye that fixes the spectator. A winged eye, the eye of a Cyclops, an eye behind the chink of two planks of wood, an eye-globe, an eye between the earth and the sky. An eye-enigma, a flaming pupil. Between the two columns of a dark church, an eye-spectre surprises two stupefied visitors. An eye-fetish. This eye, which imposes itself as the only tool of the visionary, is his interior eye, self-portrait of the artist as a prophet of the imaginary world. These eyes set in darkness do not distinguish dream from nightmare.
The first period of O. Redon is black, as if during twenty years, he had endeavoured to penetrate the mystery of the world and the soul in order to reach the limits of conscious perception. He will illustrate Baudelaire, E. A. Poe and G. Flaubert. Then, all of a sudden, in 1890, light and colour will invade his palette. Mystery will remain, always accompanied by an intangible allusion to the spirituality of nature, joyous, sensual and velvety. He always remembered what his father had shown him when he was a child:" And he showed me in the changing skies, apparitions of strange beings, chimerical and marvellous… and, in the countryside, how the sky seemed fascinating ! "
Inspiring himself from G. Moreau, his range of pastels colours describes us a paradise composed like in the middle ages, of flowered fields and of pensive women with a spiritual sensuality. From times to times he brings out chimeras, Cyclops and wide enchanted landscapes or portraits on flowered backgrounds, alluding to all encompassing interior visions.
More expansive, less coherent, but with just as much strength, Max Ernst will also build his work around a way of looking at the world which upsets appearances. Though in his list of preferred painters, he does not mention O. Redon, their common points are numerous; In his series 'Une semaine de Bonté', Friday which is characterised by the element of sight, has a floating head surrounded by sun rays on a dark background, above two hands on a book. One cannot help thinking about O. Redon or about G. Moreau and his numerous apparitions. The title of this composition is 'The interior of sight'.
Max Ernst who went through the Dadaist experience is more inclined than Redon to develop or insist on the absurd element of his pictures. His bizarre or unpredicted associations, his puns (like la clé des chants) force your eyes to stop and further your reflexion, to deepen another type of knowledge which unveils a universe hidden behind appearances. As it happens with the immense and dark forests that he compares to a marvellous insect. He will frequently paint these jungles as obscure and impenetrable worlds above which float luminous stones, similar to impassable eyes that protect them and shed light on their mystery. These forests, as it was the case in the middle ages, provoke at the same time the marvellous sensation of breathing in a wide space and the anguishing sensation of being closed up inside a prison within which is hidden an extravagant and cruel world, without past nor future. Only inward eyes that do not fear such lack of boundaries, can penetrate these strange and lush landscapes that reach back to immemorial space and time.
More recent, but also a great master of what is wonderful and invisible, Italo Calvino, in his book 'The invisible Cities' inspires himself from the Book of Marvels by Marco Polo and guides us trough a journey where invisible things determine reality. Fabulous details decorate the description of mythical places in which he introduces the memory of his own golden and gleaming city, Venice. As if the Empire of Kublai was nothing more than a map of imaginary places. Certain towns are made only for departures, as in others the world of the dead is more important than the world of living people, others are as light as kites, transparent like mosquito nets, or follow the shape of the line of the hands. The Empire of the Khan, an immense crystallisation of the suffering of far away cities is composed of:" Towns which are like dreams: whatever fantasy can be dreamed, but also the most unexpected dream is a puzzle which hides a desire, or its opposite, a fear. "
This onirical and psychoanalytical approach of geography evidences that a trip can reveal the dreams, the wonders and the monsters that live inside us.
Let us jump back in the past. Cervantes was the author of a collection of marvellous visions that constantly popped up behind the most sordid reality. He mocked them on the surface, but his irony is of such quality that it can only complement his great familiarity with this extraordinary world. When Don Quijote comes out of the cave of Montesinos and says:" It is not hell, it is the abode of wonders. Sit down children, listen carefully and believe. "
It is evident that Cervantes had himself understood that seeing wonders requires an act of faith that depends on the power of our mind or imagination to go beyond appearances.
We can now come back to O. Redon. The grotto, huge black eye, deep cave, stimulates the eyes of the visitor who 'at first looks at the black hole. The cave, in turn, fixes the eyes of the dreamer with its black eye. The cave is the eye of the Cyclops. ' Infinite game of mirrors into which the eyes are absorbed before being swallowed into this mysterious tomb which arouses fear and amazement. Darkness, as the womb of light. One discovers the invisible and its mystery after having striped off its dark veil.2* The mystery of metamorphosis (into birds ?)
Another way of creating wonders can be found 2000 years before Christ, in the Book of the Dead that is a kind of guide made of propitiatory formulas that the soul of the dead (body of bird and human head) would take with him with the hope of undergoing an osirian metamorphosis.
" I fly like a falcon
I shout like a wild goose
Like Neheb-kau I will never perish. "This supernatural capacity of transforming oneself is a sign of immortality and of the solar luminosity of the great god Osiris.
Later Ovidio will present a genealogy of the World, the Gods and men which will be an infinite sequence of transformations. Here, the immortal gods had the privilege of metamorphosis, which they used either to punish or to reward the poor mortals incapable of reacting against their whims. Daphne was transformed into a laurel tree, Jupiter presented himself as a golden shower (Danae), wonders which were metaphors of desire and fear.
Apuleo with his Golden Ass offered the marvellous story of a man metamorphosed into an ass and obliged afterwards to undergo a series of trials that would force him to know the world before being able to get back to his initial shape and be initiated to the Mysteries of Isis. It is only then that his soul will deserve the protection of the Gods. Lucio wanted to be transformed into a bird (always the bird) but ends up by error in the body of a donkey that will have to eat a crown of roses in order to put an end to this charm. After the prodigy of this second transformation, the hero will have the right of enjoying knowledge and eternity.
Much later, Shakespeare in a 'Midsummer Night's Dream' will create a play in which three levels of reality will be intertwined in order to confuse and marvel the spectator that will be obliged to simultaneously think about love, folly and poetry: the three main elements that create wonders. After Bottom's allusion: 'Masters, I am to discourse Wonders but ask me not what. ", Theseus, the mythical king will explain:" The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman: the lover all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. "Misunderstandings and monstrous loves compose this adventure where the moon and lion are " left to bury the dead ".
Among the artists who practised metamorphosis, J. Bosch, who is one of the most extraordinary among them, has created images the meaning of which is still mysterious. The numerous transformations he imposes on his creatures are still enigmas. The mind, amazed by them, starts wondering about their meaning. He might have thought like a number of pedagogues of the XVIth century that if an image is sufficiently enigmatic, it will incite the soul to wonder and to want to know more. The message seeps in and remains longer after a long effort of deciphering in which work and pleasure are united. One supposes that he admonished his fellow men by showing them their foolishness. His fabulous and overwhelming imagination puzzles the mind of the person who starts wondering about those disturbing images. How can one explain the 'Garden of Pleasures' where animals remind us of the rabbits and the cats of 'Alice in Wonderland'? How can we interpret the scene where a melancholic naked woman capped by a big dice holds a pitcher above a blue dish in the centre of which a hand holding another dice in precarious balance has a knife jagged in its centre? What is going to happen? Simultaneously on the right, a man with a bird's head like an Egyptian divinity is swallowing a body from whose buttocks escapes a swarm of swallows. One thinks about Max Ernst and his 'Semaine de Bonté', hesitating between anxiety and joy in front of the instability of his ambiguous universe, half paradise, half nightmare, filled with birds and monsters.
Max Ernst also obsessively used birds in his paintings. He designed naked women's bodies penetrated by birds or men like birds. It seems that he represented himself as a bird. And in his primordial forests, women, trees and birds melt into each other, generating strange transformations that encourage us to discover the magical and mysterious force that wraps up the world.
André Breton's collage "'Poème-objet en souvenir du désert de Retz' (1955) confirms this intention by means of the phrase written in the painting:" A black owl. Marvellous bird by means of which one discovers inevitably all the precious things of the earth. "
The transformation of man that frees himself from gravity and becomes aerial guarantees wonders, he is suspended between sky and earth, light and shade.
3*Shade and the reflections of light
A tense thread
A shadow comes down
A butterfly explodes
Chrysalis or glow-worm
(P.Soupault, 'Bulles, billes, boules')
Works that are involved with marvels play with light and shade in such a way that they allude simultaneously to blazing worlds and abyssal depths.
Bosch in his Garden of Delights, painted birds, quadruped and human beings that swarm, dance and end up in crystal balls, cylinders or half-spheres. Mysterious transparent cylinders that are referring to God's irradiation, which represents the immense abyss of essential light that man faces. In Inferno none of those spheres remain. Bosch includes them only in Paradise or in the Garden of Delights where birds are as numerous as men. Light, the reflection of crystal clear surfaces point out to a mystery: is man light, a bird or a flower? His metamorphosis through light seems to be a continuous possibility. Or is it an allusion to the fragility of beauty and happiness as an old proverb had it :Gluck und glass / Hapiness and glass,
Wie bald bricht das… / How fast they break…Another master of spheres, reflection and shade is Joseph Cornell. This secret and isolated artist has produced hundreds of 'Universe boxes' in which he would install glass objects set on a background of sand or maps. By means of this reflected light and the shadow of his 'Shadow boxes', he makes us travel through time and space in long trips that start from a small glass, a bubble or a marble. His secret associations of light and shadow, force our imagination to discover the wonders hidden in everyday life. A thousand reflections produced by the luminous balls in dark boxes, in deep blue skies, next to figures waiting for something to happen, tell us that mystery lives in this passage between light and shade. In the 'Soap bubble sets', in the 'Lunar sets' or in the 'Pharmacies', the allusion to an immaterial world, to lightness or to infinity is constant. 'Metaphysics of Ephemera: Novalis' (1941) is the title of a dark box with blue shadows, containing a white feather, a quote of Novalis and a fob watch where the hours are replaced by a spiral. With this delicate composition he alludes to the importance of this author for the Surrealists, reminding us of two sentences of Novalis:
" All chance is marvellous - light contact with a superior being. "
and " All transparent bodies are in a superior state, they seem to possess a kind of consciousness. "O. Redon who has less limpidity, nevertheless shares a similar desire to give to light its pre-eminence in the dark world that surrounds it.
All the drawings of his first period are night landscapes in which loom up luminous and disturbing apparitions. Ubiquous eyes float in a sea of gloom, suggesting that even in darkness, the light of spirituality is the only valid one. His visions that blossom within velvety and deep blacks give life to skulls with rose crowns, to mother of pearl feminine bodies or starry shrouds. Death and life, light and shadow mate in a poem which oscillates between a cruel grin and luminous ecstasy and tell us that the adventure of seeing is just as perilous as it is wonderful.4* A magical and enchanted world .
" So I can be happy and free, for all the birds belong to me. " (Papageno in the Magic Flute, Mozart.)
The Thousand and One Nights told by Scheherazade who postpones her own death and the death of other young girls of her town, are completely nourished by marvellous and wondrous feats that her imagination creates to entertain the sultan. In this case, the wonders surge in uncommon worlds, inhabited by magicians, black genies that spring out of crystal cases. The chiaroscuro that Redon loved is replaced by the gemmed lusciousness of his second period. Here luxury and sensuality reign:
" And he then passed in a marvellous living room, in the centre of which was placed a great basin with a lion in solid gold at each corner. The four lions spat water form their mouth and this water as it fell, formed diamonds and pearls. (…) At these words, after having raised his skirt, he showed to the sultan that he was a man from head to waist, and that the other half of his body was of black marble. "
Fabulous universe where all the strangeness and metamorphosis are possible, but where spiritual quest is not as important as the fight against death led by the imagination of Scheherazade who must entertain her master.
At the LXIst night, nine marvellous doors successively open on a garden filled with roses, jasmine, violets, buttercups, lilies, then onto a huge aviary in which live 'an infinity of nightingales, goldfinches, canaries, and skylarks.'. Other rooms are filled with precious stones, pearls, coral, gold, silver, opals and topazes. It is a paradise of colours and marvellous sensations.
Gustave Moreau, in his watercolours and in his brightly decorated paintings could very well have been inspired by the One Thousand and One Nights. But his objective is different. He does not refuse death. He is looking for the poet. Colour and line work together to compose the shape of apparitions, of the Muses, of Orpheo, Saint John the Baptist in surroundings that recall gothic stained glass. Shades and colours, delicate arabesques on quick wash drawings, obsessive architectural details with Turner-style watercolours are the contrasted techniques that Gustave Moreau uses to stage 'these fairy-tales blossomed in the head of an opium-eater.' His paintings that have elements of jewellery, mosaic, niello, embroidery and wild watercolours, transport the mind into the enchanted country of the Chimera and the dream. Orpheo, Sapho, the poet are the unquestionable rulers of a realm of crimson flowers, and obscure visions. Silence, the moon, the sky and water lilies create a melancholic atmosphere where blood red, indigo blue, emerald green, saffron yellow, shades and absolute whites recall certain poems of Baudelaire. But G. Moreau, the 'gatherer of dreams' is best placed to speak about himself:" For my Sapho (…) I scatter on her dress, flowers, birds and all the objects of creation that appear in a poet's head. It is a concrete way of painting such a varied and complex being as the man of poetry and thought. "
Another enchanted trip guided by the flute of Tamino and Papageno is proposed by Mozart in his last Opera (1791). This initiatory journey, during which massonic allusions, popular fairy-tales and music are intertwined, is similar to a magic ritual that transports and marvels the listener towards a world of divine ideas.
As in many other wonderful contexts, the bird (the flute) and the man-bird (Papageno) hold a central place. Papageno sings with carelessness and ingenuity, ready to accept what destiny offers him:" The birdcatcher am I,
always merry and bright, tra la!
As a birdcatcher I am known
To young and old throughout the land. "This simplicity of mind will lead him to the Temple of the initiates. The magic flute entrusted to Tamino increases the happiness of men and protects them against the danger of the forest. Guided by love and music, they will successfully face the monsters and the obstacles. The veil will fall, they will cross the threshold and the sun rays will destroy the power of the impostors. Mozart suggests through these magical scenes that love lived sincerely will be followed by miracles. The hardships undergone with courage will lead to the blissful blooming of the soul and to a kind of marvellous harmony generated by music:
" Through the power of music we step
Lightly through the dark night of death. "Mozart suggests that love and music produce wonders. G. Moreau tried to suggest a similar mystery through colour and line; and Sheherazade had the power through her enchanted stories to conjure death.
But wonders that abide in love, music, poetry and imagination mainly stem from ambiguous situations.
5* Ambiguity : reality/supernatural ; Beauty/monstrosity" Merry and tragical?
Tedious and brief,
That is hot ice, and wondrous strange snow. " (Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare)Strange situations mostly belong to ambiguous worlds where evidence and confusion, monstrousness and beauty, reality and supernatural melt into each other. The themes considered are all double sided, inciting us to question or to wonder about the lack of evidence that is presented to us.
In Perceval for example, the Bed of Wonders is a 'bed where no one sleeps, rests or sits, for he will never rise from it alive.' A few lines later, the author ironically specifies that these wonders are hundreds of arrows that try to hit the hero…
The Wunderkammers were the depositories of wonders and offered an accumulation that was both monstrous and extraordinary. There were books about the history of monsters, rocks full of jewels, treasures of craftsmanship, corals, shells, rare animals, cat-men, embryos in jars, baby heads crowned with lace, mummies, fetishes, automatons that reminded you of life and death. This accumulation of objects was neatly tidied into cupboards, organised on shelves, or suspended from the ceiling with the aim of showing the correspondences that existed between what was natural and supernatural, between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The observer could only get lost and be puzzled in front of this abundance of contradictory messages. Fantastic, bizarre and natural things (like this carnation coming out of a globe set on the back of a lobster…) were assembled in order to manipulate reality, experiment and invent. The grotesque paintings which were contemporary, also played in a luxuriant way with an iconography that nourished itself with hybrid figures that pushed to its extreme the ambiguity that could exist between monstrosity, wonder and a playful and realistic naturalism.
Let us switch to a totally different world, 'Alice in Wonderland'. The story starts with a dream during which Alice goes about, at the same time, as herself and another person. She thinks as she did in the real world, but lives in a strange world which changes constantly, frightens her and forces her to wonder. Perpetuum mobile. Like in our daily life. She meets a caterpillar that smokes opium and helps her to find a way to control her size and to continue her surrealistic and absolutely logical journey. Madness and reality weave a web through which the reader stumbles enchanted and puzzled. A nasty baby yells and transforms itself into a charming little pig. Then the mythical Cheshire cat, explains to her in a perfectly clear way that she is mad:" À la mode that direction " the cat said, waving its right paw around " lives a hatter and in that direction " waving the other paw " lives a march hare; visit either you like they are both mad. "
" But I don't want to go among mad people " Alice remarked.
" Oh! you can't help that " said the Cat : " We're all mad here. I'm mad, You're mad. "
" How do you know I am mad? " said Alice
" You must be " said the cat " or you wouldn't have come here. "Lewis Carroll who was the author of 'Symbolical Logic' carries us into an apparently childish fable where logic and absurdity marvellously marry each other, offering us thus an ironic metaphor of our world. The scale of the world changes constantly, Alice communicates with animals that behave like men and the king and the queen are nothing more than fragile playing cards.
The ambiguous world of wonders is found in Italo Calvino, Gustave Moreau, J. Cornell and all those who try to unveil an infinity of unsuspected worlds behind the screen of reality. O. Redon underlines that he wanted to produce in the spectator's mind 'a kind of attraction in the obscure indeterminate world .'
Calvino speaks to us about extraordinary cities that might exist but that have more chance to be Marco Polo's projections of his own town. These invisible and mysterious towns are in fact landscapes composed of things real and dreamed by a memory that cannot help but re-elaborating what it knows to discover new places.
This 'indetermination' is in some ways the distinctive seal that P. Mérimée gives to his short story 'La Vénus d'Ille' in which the uncontrolled passion that this statue stimulates in men is fed by an evil ambiguity:" In fact the more one looked at this admirable statue, the more one had the unpleasant feeling that such a marvellous beauty could be allied to a total absence of sensitivity. "
Gustave Moreau who was obsessed by the figure of the poet gives him feminine traits. His own painting technique that mixes both abundance of details and rapidly sketched painted fields, allows him to evoque a world divided between the riches of the Orient and the melancholy of poetry.
Joseph Cornell made 'ghost boxes' where the reflected light of the marbles contrasted with dark backgrounds. And Shakespeare, in his fairy-tale, confuses us. Are we awake, are we asleep, love changes at each moment, between a dream and Bottom's visions!
As if indetermination and the enigmas that it understates were the biggest creators of wonders.
CONCLUSION
" What could he tell? Besides, they demanded marvels of him and marvels are perhaps incommunicable. " (J.L. Borges, 'Labyrinths', " Averroes's Search ")
Evanescence and instability are the substance marvels are made of. They belong to the world of children, of primitive people, of madmen, poets and lovers. They are not very serious.
Mirabilis, mirror and miracle have the same ethymological root. L. Carroll knew that when he wrote 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice Through the Looking Glass'. The eye and the double it sees transform the world into a magical reality. One must be able to enter in contact with what is outside of us." Wonders take advantage of the weak points of the organizing intelligence, like the fire of the volcano seeps into the flaws of the rocks; they illuminate the attics of childhood; they are part of the strange lucidity of delirium; they blaze above the masses at the time of revolts. "
The virtue of wonders resides in the shade and in the indetermination that compose them. Our times that employ themselves to eliminate shade from the museums, from the forests and from obscure countries in a frenzy of order and control, might well have to rethink its importance if they want us to regain our health. Darkness, the uncontrolled, the great forest, the attics, small dusty and disorderly museums instead of the great transparent and minimal architecture imposed on art….
Walter Benjamin would say that the 'aura' of the image, which is not overexposed and which still belongs to ritual, could aspire to the world of wonders.
Wonders are important because they help imagination enter into communication with the soul of the world.
Wonders stimulate contemplation, and induce those who wonder to deepen their thoughts about what they have seen.
The Surrealists affirmed it: what is wonderful is beautiful because it is also subtle and delicate poetry. We said it before: Wonders and Love go perfectly together. While horror and fantastic visions belong to another world.
A wonder can be a monster that suggests another world and against which one has to fight in order to deserve the Grail?. It can be a crocodile, a whale bone, or a body composed of miscellaneous elements, in the style of Arcimboldo. It is then an allusion to an unknown world or the symbol of a myth.
But all the Surrealists do not produce marvellous works, just as all the monsters are not wonderful. Magritte, for example, does not produce paintings where wonders abide. He paints flat surfaces, very clearly delimitated, and devoid of further allusions. His composite bodies, half man, half animal, half sky or half cloud are extraordinary but without the ambiguity that makes up wonders.
His paintings are not allusions, but rather affirmations where doubt and uncertainty have little space. In a way, they are too dogmatic.
Our actual museums, inheritors of the esoteric accumulations of the XVIth century world, are constructed on premises that have nothing to do with wonders. On the contrary, the blinding light that banishes all shades from the objects presented on an ascetic wall are similar to the spots used in police stations. They show evidence and kill imagination. The visitor cannot invent or use serendipity to create his own little museum within the big one. Humility, vulnerability are refused, while wonderful objects are often small and delicate and often require that the eyes concentrate on them in order to capture their mystery.
Is there any hope left for 'wonders'?
Pierre Mabille thinks that the fish of unexplored depths that appears in the 'Chants de Maldoror' is a Wonder. But it is not an answer.
You need eyes that see in the dark, that search alone, outside the prescribed path of mass-communication, in hidden and secret streets. One must not necessarily travel very far to find silence, darkness and a few fireflies that twinkle in a summer night.
Imagine a town where fireflies could live. Fragile lights that blink during fifteen days and then disappear for a year! Delicacy and poetry. Nostalgia.
Lautréamont compared the depth of oceans to the depth of hearts. In the dark, very deep inside the cave, not too clean, as in the depth of an old church lit by candles, will appear the quivering of a velvety colour. Lost in the dark, we encounter the tender and indestructible gloss of wax that breathes like animated flesh. An instant and forever in the heart.
To wonder, might be as Redon suggests, to glimpse immortality in the blossoming of a flower that is at the heart of all beauty. Or can it not be simply the capacity of confusing the objective and subjective, the adult and the childish mind, ordered reality and disruptive imagination? Of seeing invisible things?
But it is also the Barnum Circus, all the Luna-parks and the immense contemporary art shows where everything is deconstructed, disembowelled, recomposed according to a nomadic eye greedy for new associations of ideas… You have to choose!
A FEW DATES
Ovide 43 av. J.C. - 17/18 apr. J.C.
Apulée 125 - 180
Shakespeare 1564 - 1610
J.Bosch 1450 - 1516
Marco Polo 1254 - 1324
Cervantes Saavedra M. 1547 -1616
Wunderkammer XVè - XVIIè siècles
Premières études Duc de Berry ( 1340-1410)
Premiers studioli : Lionelle D'Este (1407-1450)
Pierre de Médicis (1414-1469)
Federico di Montefeltro (1422-1482)
Isabelle d'Este (1474-1539)
François Iè de Médicis (1541-1587)
Collectionneurs : Rodolphe II de Habsbourg (1522-1612)
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605)
Mozart 1756-1796
Novalis 1772-1801
E.T.A. Hoffmann 1776-1822
P. Mérimée 1803-1870
C.Baudelaire 1821-1867
L. Carrol 1832-1898
A. Rimbaud 1854-1891
C. Huysmans 1848-1907
G. Moreau 1826-1898
O.Redon 1840-1916
A.Breton 1896-1966
M. Ernst 1891-1976
J. Cornell 1903-1972
A FEW BOOKS
Aristote Poetica
André Breton : La clé des champs
Max Ernst : Ecritures
Catalogue, rétrospective à la Tate Gallery 1991
Huysmans : L'art Moderne. Certains.
Là-bas
A Thousand and One Nights
Shakespeare : A Midsummer Night's Dream
Roland Barthes Fragments d'un Discours Amoureux
Italo Calvino : Le Città Invisibili.
Lewis Carrol : Alice In Wonderland
G. de Nerval : Les Chimères
W. Blake : Songs of Innocence and Experience
O. Redon : A soi-même
J. Cornell : catalogue de E. Jaguer. Paris. 1990
Gustave Moreau : Carnet de dessins.
A. Scwhartz : Max Ernst et ses amis. Catalogue
Rubin : Dada, surrealism and their heritage, Museum of Modern Art
G. Bachelard : La poétique de la rêverie.
La terre et les rêveries du repos.
Y. Duplessis : Le Surréalisme
A. Breton : Nadja
L'amour fou.
P. Soupault : Georgia, Epitaphes, Chansons.
Mozart/Schikaneder : La flûte enchantée
C. Baudelaire : Oeuvres complètes
A. Rimbaud : Oeuvres complètes
P. Mabille Le miroir du merveilleux
P. Mérimée : La Vénus d'Ille.
Marco Polo : Il Millione
E.T.A. Hoffman : Le vase d'or
