Nice job posting those images both of you. I can see how they could represent some of the distorations and unatuaralness that were discussed in the book, also I could see how Basch may have been inpsiered by such things.
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Nice job posting those images both of you. I can see how they could represent some of the distorations and unatuaralness that were discussed in the book, also I could see how Basch may have been inpsiered by such things.
I was going to write a post comparing the church door imagery with the marginalia imagery from Adelmo's illuminations. These are going to be long posts, so I'm going to split it up. Tonight I'll give you my thoughts on the church door reliefs and tomorrow I'll post on the marginalia. Like I've said in an earlier post, the two come as extended descriptions early on, and are surely intended as a comparison. The differences between the two i think suggests the foremost theme of the novel.
Now I can't reproduce the entire six or seven pages with my commentary. That woould be too much. What i'll do is highlight prominant points and give what I think is Eco's point.
The church door description occurs on the first day Sext, page 39 in my edition. Framing the door are two columns, "straight and unadorned". The doorway is a "single great arch" which seems to lead to multiple arches. The images, "the literature of the layman" decorate the doors and walls which "plunges" Adso into a vision. The central image is that of God and here is Eco's description:
In God's left hand is a sealed book and the right lifted in a motion suggesting both a "blessing" and "admonition." Around God are four "awful" creatures, an eagle, a lion, a bull, and a kindly man. And then there are the images around God:Quote:
I saw a throne set in the sky and a figure seated on the throne. The face of the Seated One was stern and impassive, the eyes wide and glaring over a terrestrial humankind that had reached the end of the story; majestic hair and beard fowed around the face and over the chest like the waters of a river, in streams all equal, symmetrically divided in two. The crown on his head was rich with enamels and jewels, the purple imperial tunic was arranged in broad folds over the knees, woven with embroideries and laces of gold and silver thread.
And then we get this unbelievable sentence, a sentence perhaps reminiscent of those by William Faulkner:Quote:
Around the throne, beside the four creatures and under the feet of the Seated One, as if seen through the transported waters of the crystal sea, as if to fill the whole space of the vision, arranged according to the triangular frame of the tympanum, rising from a base of seven plus seven, then to three plus three and then to two plus two, at either side of the great throne, on twenty-four little thrones, there were twenty-four ancients, wearing white garments and crowned in gold.
Now that is one of the great sentences of literature! I should try to find the original Italian and read that.Quote:
And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist's skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, united in their variety and varied intheir unity, unique in their diversity and diverse in their apt assembly, in wonderous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material—there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, of all the grasses that adores the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam.
And after this we get four figures along inner columns, that of Peter and Paul and Jeremiah and Isaiah. And finally after this, and I don’t have the energy to type highlights out here, is a hell-esk description, a voluptuous woman being suffering the tortue of hell, and Satan’s bestiary, and the “whole population of the nether world” gathered together.
So what does this all mean? I’m going to put forth that these are all signs of orthodoxy, the established world view of the time. It sets a conservative frame. The stern God on a throne, projects power, the crown and purple tunic symbols of that power. God both blesses and admonishes. The four creatures, enforce that power. The ancients are arranged in a triangle, a symbol of power, and arranged in symbolic numerology, which projects harmony and unity. And the four prophets are the pillars of the world view that the age exists in. What Eco has done here is projected the established world view in an arrangement of images and signs.
Now stay tune for the contrasting imagery of the marginalia.
I will post some hightlights from the more Helish scene that was portrayed upon the door. As I found them quite intresting, the way in which the more heanvely scene was contrasted so.
I found this interesting becasue of the mention of gryphons in the marginilia as wellQuote:
I saw a vouluptuous woman, naked and fleshless, gnawed by foul toads, sucked by serpants, coupled with a fat-bellied satyr whose gryphon legs were covered with wirty hairs, howling its own damnation from an obscene throat.
This next part I just found intresting the varrious kinds of animals which were seen as being linked to hell and Satan:Quote:
I saw a miser, stiff in the stiffness of deah on his sumptuously columned bed, now helpless prey of a cohort of demons, one of whom tore from the dying man's mouth his soul in the form of an infannt, and I saw a proud man with a devil clinging to his shoulders and thrusting his claws into the mans eyes, while two gluttons tore each other apart in a repulsive hand-to-hand struggle
Quote:
goat head and lion fur, panter's jaws, all prisoners in a forest of flames whose searing breath I could almost feel. And around them, mingled with them, above thier headsand below their feet, more faces and more limbs: a manand a woman clutching each other by the hair, two aspssucking the eyes of one of the damned, a grinning man whose hooked hands parted the maw of a hydra
Though many of these animals are from mythology or have earned othersise bad reputations often for no good reason, a couple struck me as odd, in particular the mention, of the otters, and the sea turtles.Quote:
Sirens, hippocentaurs, gorgons, harpeis, incubi, dragonpods, mintours, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynohales who darted fire from thier nostrails, crocodiles, polycaudate, hairy serpents, salamanders, horned vipers, tortosies, snakes, two-headed creatures whose backs were armed with teeth, hyenas, otters, crows, hydrophora with sawtooth horns, frogs, gryphons, monkeys, dog-heads, leucrota, manticores, vultures, paranders, weasels, dragons, hoopoes, owls, basilisks, hypnales, presters, spectafici, scoripions, saurians, whales, scitales, amphisbenae, iaculis, dipsases, green lizards, pilot fish, octopi, morays, and sea turtles
Thanks DM. I got tired of typing. :)
Hehe no problem, it was quite a lengthy desciption
I found these images of some Tympanson carvings, simillar to that discussed in the book
http://www.aup-kwidzyn.ckj.edu.pl/pu..._w_Moissac.jpg
http://www.alma-larsson.de/Chartres/...rz%20klein.jpg
http://www.aup-kwidzyn.ckj.edu.pl/pu...ry_w_Autum.jpg
Great find DM. :thumbs_up Those look just like what's being described. :)
Virgil and DM thanks for posting all of that and the quotes. Wow, those are totally intriguing. I must admit this book is a fascination to me, as to the art and architectural aspects. Thanks for posting those carvings DM. They are marvelous/
I was thinking the same think in reading that list of demonic creatures. I wondered how the tortoise fit in, also. Have you ever seen moray els? They are truly demonic looking, not to mention the fact that they can be quite vicious. I didn't really know that frogs were a symbol of evil either.
Yes I wondered about the turotise as well. The frogs, I found currious, but they are considered one or the plagues in the Bibile, and they are probably considered evil becasue of thier ambious nature. As well people use to think that you could get worts from toads, and worts were often associated with witches.
Hehe yes I have seen morays, I always thought they were pretty cool, but they do resemble seprents and cane be agressive.
These images are the representations of Mattew, Mark, Luke, and John.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I kow the second of those is from Chartre Cathedral. The west facade of that cathedral is amazing! below the tymphanum is what is dubbed "The kings and Queens", and it is some of the early gothics greatest carvings because they are so graceful and lifelike.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark Muse
The last of the three images is from the great tymphanum of Autun Cathedral. It goes by two names, The Weighing of the Souls and The Last Judgement. If you look in one corner you should see the image of judas with a noose around his neck. It was carved by a man called gisellbertus, and this is know because he carved his name into the sculpture. :nod: I had to study these two cathedrals in school...
From reading the book its easy to assume that the monastry is a good few hundred years old, and from the grotesque discriptions of the tymphanum etc it would be right to believe that the church was constructed in the Romanesque period. The First one though seems to be quite similar in the discription....
:)
Thank you for the background info on the art work, quite interesting, yes I guess from the way in which the monostary was described it sounded to be of Romanesque desgin.
Eco is an enthusiast of detective novels. He was the co-author of a collection of essays about such stories. The theme of the novel is signs and logical connections among signs. Sherlock Holmes is probably the world's best known detective, and William of Baskerville is at the abbey to solve a murder, actually a series of murders, which he will eventually do. Occam was mentioned, because of his famous contribution to logic and philosophy. Occam's razor is significant to the novel, because some would try to add unnecessary complications to the solution of the murders. everything in the Name is a sign of something.As soon as I learned William's name, I knew that he was to be a detective.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Signs, the relationships among signs, and how signs relate to other things or people
Yes, I know Peter. It was a rhetorical question to Petrarch in that her reading seemed to be strictly as a historical novel of the middle ages. My point was that it's more than that. Thanks on the Occam's razor explanation. That's the first time someone has linked it with the novel's themes.Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterL
I asked this before - does the fact that Arthur Connon-Doyle also wrote the book "The White Company" tie into this novel at all? It is based on Medieval England during the 100 Years War. If you read the beginning paragraphs of that novel, you will note that a monk had a illicit affair with a woman and is expelled, exiled from the monastery. I read the novel a few years ago, but I found it curious now, that Eco is writing this novel set in a monastary and one woman has been prominently involved in the plot. I wondered about the combination of Holmes stories and this one, and if the two contributed to an influence for Eco. This might be a lame question, but I finished listening to the audiotapes and have an idea of the story now and the ideas behind it. I definitely need now to read the novel, but the audiotapes were a good introduction and aid to a better understanding of what I will read in greater depth. I do find the book quite fascinating in the aspect of influences and riddles, mysteries, symbols, images, art, etc.
Niamh, thanks for adding the historical information on the photos that Dark Muse has posted. They are amazing. I wrote a paper in college on Romanesque architecture - it is quite fascinating and beautiful. Are these carvings of the Romanesque period?
The last one definitely is. I'm not sure about the first one, i think its romanesque from the curve at the top of the tymphanum, but the second one is Gothic. The west facade of Chartres Cathedral is amazing at night time. All lit up. I really like the Tymphanum at Autun Cathedral. The images are really grotesques, and scary. I'm sure any person walking up to the west facade of that cathedral would be terrified at the sight of it. In that sense you can almost imaging the terror Adso was feeling upon looking at the tymphanum of the church in the book.