For Palm Sunday: A Palm Sunday Donkey

From the vaults: One of the most charming pieces of Easter religious sculpture is the depiction of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey.

When British General Allenby entered Jerusalem as conqueror in December 1917, he made a point of doing so on foot.

Full original post.

An 18th-Century French Nativity

Since we've been on the subject of Baroque Christmas art and depictions of the Nativity, I'll share this little piece from my collection.

It's a French eighteenth-century pencil sketch with sepia wash, on laid paper (c. 40 x 25 cm, with no apparent watermark).

The geometry suggests to me that it was a sketch for a wall painting, but that's just my best guess.

Oddly enough, the depiction of the central figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ child seems somewhat awkward in comparison with that of the flanking shepherds, who observe the miracle in quiet dignity.

In any case, the piece just radiates the spirit of the period.

Merry Christmas, 2016

Wishing a merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate the holiday!

Here, from a past post, are two images of the Nativity from southwest German eighteenth-century bibles. (Full story.)

15 October 1817: Death of Revolutionary Tadeusz Kościuszko

199 years ago, on 15 October 1817, Tadeusz Kościuszko, hero of the American and Polish Revolutions, died in exile in Switzerland.

This substantial piece from the newsletter of the Mickiewicz Institute nicely delineates the high points and significance of his career: he arrived in the new United States in 1776, and during the war, he designed the fortifications at West Point and was responsible for the American campaign at Saratoga, which was decisive for the success of the Revolution, not least because it moved the French to lend their full backing to the new nation's struggle. In Poland, he famously led his nation's forces in the revolutionary struggles of 1791 and 1794. Although Kościuszko is celebrated for his dedication to the rights of peasants and Jews, his equally passionate commitment to the rights of enslaved Africans and Native Americans in the new United States is less well known. (more on the latter topic here)

In Philadephia, the house where he resided has been preserved and turned into the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, operated by the National Park Service.
He is commemorated at West Point with a monument by John Latrobe (1828; incorrectly labeled a tomb in the engraving below), to which a statue was added in 1913.

Kościuszko became an international hero and a cult figure for Polish patriots, celebrated in images and on monuments, whenever political conditions permitted.

Marker in the main square in Kraków, at the spot from which Kościuszko announced the revolution in 1794.

Kościuszko monument by Leonard Marconi and Antoni Popiel (1900) outside the Wawel royal castle, Kraków. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy forbade such commemorations, so it was erected only during the interwar years. The Nazi occupiers, who located their headquarters in the castle, destroyed the statue. The 1960 reproduction now on the site was a gift of reconciliation from Dresden, East Germany.

Kościuszko's tomb, in the crypt of the cathedral, Wawel royal castle, Kraków. His body was moved from Switzerland a year after his death.

Traditions of Christmas Past: from boisterous to banned to bourgeois

From the vaults, via last year's Tumblr post:

“‘At Home’ in the Nursery, or The Masters and Misses Twoshoes Christmas Party,” by George Cruikshank (1792-1878)

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Etching with hand coloring.
Image dimensions: c. 214 x 267 mm (approx.  8.4 x 10.5 inches)
Signed in the plate, “G Cruishank fect” (left) and “Pubd. Augt 1st 1835, by Thos McLean, 26, Haymarket.” (right)

This is the second issue. The print first appeared in the 1826 collection, Holiday Scenes, published by Samuel Knight (active 1805-41). Thomas McLean (1788-1875) reissued it 9 years later in Cruikshankiana, an assemblage of the most celebrated works of George Cruikshank. He largely effaced the original Knight signature, but it survives as a ghost imprint above his own, at lower right:

“London Pubd Jany 3d 1826 by S Knight, 3 Sweetings Alley [{Roy[a] X'Change’}]

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Not yet "Victorian” in the strict (or any other) sense, the etching nonetheless lacks the ribaldry or bite of Cruikshank’s other early (especially political) work: it manages to be satirical and sentimental at once. We can already recognize in it our received image of Christmas as domestic idyll, familiar from Dickens to “The Nutcracker” (though the evolution of the latter is a tale in itself).

The fourteen (count 'em!) children–this, at a time when the average British family size peaked at around 6 children (1, 2)–play with a mixture of sedate enjoyment and abandon as a stout serving-woman brings in a tray of treats. The image is rich in period detail, from the toys and the copy of the Eaton [sic] Latin Grammar abandoned on the floor, to the delicate jelly-glasses (whatever possessed the parents of that day to put them in the hands of youngsters?) and the faux-bamboo “fancy chairs” on which the children sit or climb.

The etching also also suggests why the Calvinists and their American descendants held no truck with Christmas. Theologically, it was a problem for them because its celebration was not biblically mandated, and the date of Jesus’ birth was in any case unknown. The holiday was moreover associated with revelry–whether heavy drinking by adults or just boisterous behavior, as shown in our print–that seemed incommensurate with the spirit of a holy festival.

Such was certainly the attitude here in Massachusetts, where Christmas celebrations were banned in 1659, as the legislature put it: “For preventing disorders … by reason of some still observing such ffestivalls as were superstitiously kept in other countrys, to the great dishonnor of God & offence of others.” The state lifted the ban in 1681, but it took more than a century and a half before things really began to change. Under the influence of shifting national tastes, Christmas began to assume its familiar lineaments of wholesome domesticity and consumption. (In Massachusetts, Irish immigration also contributed to the shift.) The 1855 Christmas celebration at the Worcester Free Church under minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a symbolic turning point. The following year, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed, “We are in a transition state about Christmas here in New England. The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful hearty holiday; though every year makes it more so,” and the legislature officially recognized the holiday.

Christmas greetings! (and two eighteenth-century prints of the nativity)

Wishing a merry Christmas to all my readers who celebrate the holiday.



From the vaults:

Artifact of the Moment: Reflections on Nativity Scenes in Two Eighteenth-Century German Bibles

A Tale of Interfaith Cooperation and Historic Preservation from Old Jerusalem

The seventh-century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is arguably the archetypical emblem of the city. And because it stands on the Temple Mount, it has since medieval times served as a representation of the Temple of Solomon in Christian art.

Scottish artist David Roberts depicts its dominant place on the skyline in "Jerusalem From the Mount of Olives" (color lithograph; London: Day & Son, 1855).

(late 19th-century engraving)

Because the month of Ramadan is traditionally a time of introspection and charity, it seems appropriate to relate an interesting tale of interfaith cooperation on the Temple Mount in the service of what we would nowadays call historic preservation or restoration.

Some years ago, Yehuda Litani recounted a fascinating discovery made in 1992-93, when a team of artisans from Northern Ireland was refurbishing the dome in a project funded by King Hussein of Jordan:

On a visit to the site during those renovations I discovered a story that wasn’t known until then, regarding the Jewish-Ottoman-Palestinian connection to the mosques on Temple Mount.


Story of the iron panel

The Dome of the Rock was surrounded with scaffolding, and before ascending one of them a friend of mine drew my attention to an iron panel that lay on the floor and was inscribed in French. The foreman of the Irish construction company said the panel had been found between the two halves of the crescents at on top of the mosque, and was temporarily dismantled so that the dome could be coated in gold.

The words in French revealed that the Mosque had been renovated in 1899 during Turkish rule, and that the works had been assisted by the Jewish community in Jerusalem led by a public figure called Avraham (Albert) Entebbe, who among his numerous other activities was also the principal of the city's "Kol Israel Haverim" school.

Entebbe, who was the undersigned on the French inscription, was known for his courageous ties with the heads of the Ottoman rule, and the inscription noted that for the purpose of renovating the mosques on the Temple Mount five acclaimed Jewish artists had been invited to Jerusalem. The Jewish stone carvers, wood carvers and iron mongers from various cities in the Mediterranean basin, shared their skills with their Muslim brothers during months of work.


Zenith of Jewish-Muslim cooperation

The inscription also noted that all the students at Entebbe's school were given a three-month leave in order to assist their Muslim brothers in the renovations works on Temple Mount. In the last lines of the inscription, Entebbe described the ideal cooperation and understanding that prevailed between Jews and Muslims in the Holy City, which reached its zenith when the Jews undertook renovations of the Temple Mount mosques in 1899.

Of course, not every story has a perfect happy ending.  When Litani returned to make a photograph, as he had requested, the foreman explained that the Waqf (Islamic trust that administers the holy sites) had taken the panel. When he went to the officials of the Waqf, they denied knowing anything about it.


As for the experience of visiting the site today: physician, scholar, and Muslim feminist activist Qanta Ahmed has written a moving four-part account of her pilgrimage:

The Dome of the Rock: A Muslim’s requiem
Part 2: Reaching the Dome
Part 3: Inside the Dome
Part 4: The farthest Muslims

Cairo Minarets and Mosque

Colored lithograph by the great David Roberts, whom the Metropolitan Museum of Art calls "the first professional artist to visit the Near East without a patron or a connection to a military expedition or missionary group." Roberts's meticulous depictions of Middle Eastern scenes are among his most famous works.

"The Minarets at the Bab Zuweyleh, and entrance to the Mosque of the Metwalis, Cairo," Plate 218 of The Holy Land, with historical notes by William Brockedon (London: Day & Son, 1856), vol. 6, Egypt and Nubia.

Quarto edition, sheet size: 295 x 205 mm (11 5/8 x 8 1/16 in.)

Palm Sunday Donkey

One of my favorite genres of medieval sculpture is the so-called Palm Sunday Donkey (German: Palmesel), a tradition that thrived in particular in Central Europe from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, when the rise of the Enlightenment and new ideas of propriety led the Church to suppress the increasingly raucous behavior that accompanied it. Palm Sunday processions commemorating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem are documented beginning in the seventh century. At first, it seems, a priest or villager rode a donkey in these processions, but there were concerns over the vanity of the performer and hubris of imitating Christ. In any case, it eventually proved more practical to substitute a dependable sculpture for a sometimes recalcitrant beast. Both the use of the live donkey and the wooden substitution are documented since the late tenth century. The typical Palm Sunday donkey thus consisted of a figure of Christ seated on a donkey mounted on a wheeled platform. Most such sculptures were large if not life-sized and carved of limewood or oak, decorated with colored paint.

The Cloisters and other sources speak of some 50 surviving examples at the end of the nineteenth century, but modern inventories cite 190 examples in the German-speaking lands alone. The earliest, in Switzerland, dates from circa 1200, and there are a few other examples from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but most are late-medieval.

I honestly forget where I first encountered this phenomenon: I believe it was in college while spending a summer studying German in the Catholic region around Freiburg, with its great museum of medieval art. It was probably only after my return that I discovered we had one in the University of Wisconsin art museum. (My photos are not accessible to me at the moment, but this one shows it nicely.) At any rate, the genre always appealed to me, for it perfectly embodied both the humanity and the majesty of Christ in church doctrine, and the donkey (much like a nativity scene) had a wonderful way of bringing home the nature and naive charm of popular religion in rural medieval society.

Palmesel (15th-century Germany), The Cloisters

Read the rest on the Tumblr.

The biblical entry into Jerusalem had its modern historical resonances, as well: When British General Allenby captured the city in December 1917, he made a point of entering on foot: not only out of humility vis-à-vis Christ--but also as a rebuke to the Kaiser, who on his visit had ridden in on a grand horse.