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In Den symboliska nejlikan i senmedeltidens och renassansens konst (The Symbolic Carnation in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art) Malmo, 1958 (ed. Allhems Forlag) I have pointed out a group of devotional images and portraits where the carnations included can be said in brief to signify the Passion of Christ, associated with the idea of Christ's incarnation. The flower is thus a symbol of Man's hope of resurrection and redemption. For an article in the previous issue of this journal C. G. Stridbeck has made a selection of pictures among those already dealt with in my book and claims that the carnation in some instances has other, varying significances than that just mentioned.Stridbeck thinks that the idea of sponsus-sponsa should have been particularly exposed in a Madonna by Quinten Matsys (Fig. 1), mainly because of the most affectionate embracing and kissing of the Virgin and Child, for which he refers to the gestures described in the Song of Solomon as practised betwen the bridegroom and the bride. However, those gestures are of a general acceptability for expressing emotions of the most different kinds and thus cannot be regarded as paticularly establishing a sponsus-sponsa connexion between persons represented. In the work of Matsys himself and in that of Joos van Cleve, closely related to him, the same gestures express "la joie de l'innocence” in scenes depicting Christ and St. John as children (Fig. 3).—To the Matsys Madonna which forms Stridbeck's starting point, he compares Van Cleve's Virgin and Child at Kansas City (Fig. 2). In the latter case Mary holds a carnation and in support of his sponsus-sponsa interpretation Stridbeck quotes some Medieval German texts. published by Elisabeth Wolffhardt. He believes that the passages refer to carnation flowers which would allude to the—unspecified—flowers spoken of in the Song of Solomon. However, as Elisabeth Wolffhardt has quite correctly indicated, the texts refer not to flowers but to spices, to cloves.In some cases of portraiture Stridbeck tries to show that the carnation held by the sitter should be a memento mori. He has then not considered the basic fact that a number of disguised symbols (among them the carnation) first appear in devotional images, then are placed together with donors in wings of such pictures, and finally are held by sitters. The religious significance of the symbols—which may even appear in still-life—is preserved when these symbols are represented in the different categories of pictures within the oeuvre of one and the same artist (or within the oeuvres of closely related artists). On this principle see my paper 'Disguised Symbolism in Madonna Pictures and Still-Life', The Burlington Magazine XCVII (1955), pp. 303-308, 340-349, and also the paper quoted in footnote 15 above.Stridbeck's reasoning on the presence of a proliferation in a carnation suffers among other things from the fact that two of the pictures, quoted by him as key-instances of proliferation, actually both lack this botanical peculiarity (Jan Provost, Madonna Piacenza; Netherlandish Master of the 1550's, Portrait of a Lady, Roselius-Haus, Bremen). He quite simply seems to have mistaken the stamina of the carnation for a proliferation (Fig. 6). Stridbeck has not paid attention in this case either to the above-mentioned principle and shows a tendency to regard and study a symbol isolatedly and not in its general context. |
