Lemons, insects and goldfinches
4 days ago (christopherpjones.medium.com)
The language of art can sometimes be an enigmatic business. Allusions in the form of flowers, fruit, animals and other objects might sit in plain sight, yet their meaning is only “readable” if you know what signals to look for.
For me, this is one of the great joys of looking at art: to uncover a hidden intention in a painting, apparent only when the symbols have been identified and unravelled.
Here, I‘d like to share three surprising symbols from art history that might make you think twice about the next artwork you look at.
Lemons
For artists, lemons have long been an appealing subject due to their ability to play a dual role. Plump and vibrant on the outside, yet holding sourness within, they carry something of a sting in the tale.
Therefore, the presence of a lemon in a painting should alert us principally to two conflicting ideas: that life can be a splendid, succulent thing, yet it can also be laced with bitterness.
To emphasise the point, lemons in painting are often shown in a part-peeled state, with their rind winding over the edge of a reflective pewter plate, glistening and withering in the same instant — as in Pieter Claesz’s superb Still Life with Two Lemons shown above.
Overwhelmingly, it was the Dutch still life tradition that favoured lemons as a subject matter. The fruit seemed to have a specific level of ubiquity in 17th-century Dutch society to make it both rare and familiar. Sufficiently exotic, lemons naturally indicated luxury and prosperity, whilst also being not too rare as to be obscure: lemons were both imported and grown in orangeries and hothouses in ample numbers to become a popular recipe ingredient in food and drink, as contemporary cookbooks attest.
In Dutch art, lemons crop up often. Another painting, Still Life with a Glass and Oysters by Jan Davidsz de Heem, shows us a partly-peeled lemon draped somewhat provocatively over a wine glass, ready to add zest to a pile of oysters and a bunch of grapes.
The arrangement perhaps suggests a Carpe Diem principle — fresh, sparkling food that should be eaten in the here and now, representing a sophisticated sense of pleasure and also its short-lived time span.
And so lemons tend to carry a bitter warning, as in this somewhat riotous scene painted by Jan Steen in 1663, titled Beware of Luxury.
The image gives us a whole series of indulgent practices, excesses of food, drink and philandering that threaten to capsize into chaos and lawlessness if they go on for much longer.
And on the far right of the painting is a lemon, again with its rind spiralling over a ledge. It sits alongside a type of drinking glass known as a roemer, and becomes emblematic of the idea that good times can sour if you take them too far.
Musca depicta
It’s not uncommon in the history of paintings to find a representation of a life-size fly or bluebottle resting somewhere on the canvas as if it had landed there just moments ago.
The first thing to consider about these unusual symbols is that they tend to trick the eye, having been painted to deliberately look like a component of the viewer’s reality rather than the painting’s.
This layering of reality is a sort of game: a playful trompe-l’oeil, a sleight of hand on the part of the artist to make us think again about the nature of paintings and our willingness to believe in the world they present.
A fine example occurs in this portrait, painted in about 1470 by an unknown artist, in which a fly can be seen perched on the folds of the woman’s prominent headdress. She seems to be unaware of its presence, whereas for us, the viewer, the fly is marvellously conspicuous.
The artistic conceit became known as a musca depicta (“painted fly” in Latin) and was especially in vogue during the mid-1400s, in both northern and southern traditions of European art.
A memorable musca depicta appears in this 1480 painting by the Venetian artist Carlo Crivelli, which shows Mary and the Christ Child together, with Christ sitting on a stone ledge.
Sharing the shelf with Christ is a fly, which appears to have caught the Madonna’s eye — thereby providing another instance of the layers of reality overlapping, and also an indication of the painter’s ability to deceive.
There may also be an underlying symbolic meaning to the appearance of flies in a painting, as a protective talisman against real life insects, bugs and other adversities marring the venerated person depicted.
The idea seems to have come from the homeopathic tendency of medieval medicine, expressed in the Latin phrase similia similibus curantur, or “let likes be cured by likes”.
And so, when a painted fly appears on what looks like the picture frame in this 1446 painting Portrait of a Carthusian by Petrus Christus, it might be best understood as an amulet against misfortune.
Goldfinches
In the splendid Crivelli painting above, you may have also noticed that the baby Christ is holding a small bird, specifically a goldfinch. This is another fascinating symbol that’s worth digging deeper into.
Unusual for a European species of bird, goldfinches are brightly coloured birds. Their black wings are specked with white, and have a burst of vivid yellow on the edges, whilst their head is marked with a splash of deep red.
Thanks to its vibrant plumage, the goldfinch became a common sight in urban households during the Renaissance era. As a favourite plaything of children, it tended to be kept uncaged but tethered to long strings. These birds could be trained to perform tricks, including opening feeding boxes, retrieving water with tiny buckets and ringing bells.
When carried over to paintings, the goldfinch was fused with the wider traditions of avian symbolism, which had been a long-standing symbol of the soul: to the ancient pagans, the image of a bird in flight signified the path of the soul at the point of death.
In Christian symbolism, we find something of the same meaning applied to goldfinches, with the specific indication of Christ’s crucifixion.
And so in a painting like Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch, made in 1506, the goldfinch held between the young John the Baptist and the Christ Child is supposed to foreshadow Christ’s later sacrifice.
Popular legend connected the bird’s bright colours with the Passion: legend told of Christ’s journey to Calvary carrying the cross when a compassionate goldfinch alighted upon his crown of thorns. In an act of mercy, the bird attempted to remove a piercing thorn, causing a drop of blood to fall and forever staining its head red.
Thus, like the lemon and the fly, the goldfinch transcends its role as a commonplace object, becoming a symbol of something more allegorical and portentous.
And as with all the symbols mentioned here, the lesson worth taking is that there’s nearly always more to a painting than meets the eye.
If you enjoyed this you may like my latest book Great Paintings that Tell Stories, an examination of some of art’s most enthralling images.
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Written by Christopher P Jones
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