Colour in Five Wounds

‘Painters complain, art historians complain, that everyone these days sees only transparencies, which are the colours of light, not the colours of pigment. And so they get the wrong ideas, they see wrong, these people say. I say, this is new, it exists, we all see this light – we can learn from it – we could even learn to paint things to be transparent – ’
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower, p. 227

In this excerpt from Babel Tower, the painter Desmond Bull is talking about the effect on his students of encountering oil paintings only via photographic reproductions, which take the form of projected colour transparencies: as if the original canvas had been miraculously transformed into stained glass. The setting for this part of Byatt’s novel is an art school in the late 1960s, so it is probably necessary to point out that the transparencies in question were analogue slides: i.e. positive colour images approximately 35mm by 24 mm on a transparent celluloid base, which were backlit by a projector to be displayed at enormous magnification on a white screen. The effect is similar to digital Powerpoint projection but the technology is quite different.

Bull’s remarks relate to a basic distinction in optics between reflection and transmission: between looking at light bouncing off an opaque surface, and looking at light passing through a transparent surface. An image perceived via transmission - e.g. a colour slide - will always seem more intense, even though it is also, in a sense, more immaterial than an image perceived via reflection - e.g. a painting on canvas. In analogue black-and-white photography, negatives and prints are similarly distinguished. It is notoriously difficult to preserve all the information from a negative in a print, not only because of chemical differences between celluloid and paper, but also because a negative is perceived via light transmission through a transparent celluloid base, and a print is perceived via reflection off an opaque white base.

So the translation from a negative to a print always involves a loss of information; conversely, as Bull points out, the translation from an opaque painting on a canvas to a transparent projection on a positive colour slide arguably adds something that cannot be found in the original. According to the guardians of art historical tradition, it is therefore a bad or garbled translation, which misrepresents the original. Bull disagrees: or rather, he argues that this misrepresentation has interesting consequences.

The translation from paintings to photographic reproductions not only means changing from reflection to transmission. It also involves converting unique, individual pigments into mathematical combinations of cyan/magenta/yellow. Colour photographs are made up of three layers (these are separate emulsions in a colour slide), which are sensitised to different wavelengths of light, and the combination of these three layers creates all the hues in the final image.

The use of colour in Five Wounds is mainly confined to the novel's heraldic coats-of-arms, in which the various tinctures stand for the book's protagonists: blue for Gabriella; red for Cur; black for Cuckoo; silver for Magpie; gold for Crow. However, colour is also used in a few other illustrations: notably the Synesthetic Diptych (above), which I have discussed before (including an explanation of how its composition is based on a section of Tintoretto's Paradise). Here I want to think more about how colour works in this illustration.

The pigments used in the original painting by Tintoretto, with their highly specific and heterogeneous ingredients (some of which are indicated in the written description of the painting in the novel), and with their own chemical histories, are transformed for the purposes of the visual reproduction in Five Wounds, which restricts itself to the heraldic tinctures of blue, red, black, silver and gold. Is this transformation analogous to the combination of dyes on a colour slide?

In the language of heraldry, it is only the idea of ‘red’ that counts, and not the particular pigment that embodies that idea. As in the passage from oil painting to projected slide, colour therefore becomes an entirely abstract category in heraldry, almost equivalent to number in mathematics, or a phoneme in linguistics (or a verse in the Bible?): an atomic element that cannot be subdivided or analysed further.

So in fact the analogy is not quite right. The conversion of any hue or pigment into a combination of constituent CMY elements in a photographic reproduction is not consistent with the conception of colour in heraldry, in which any given tincture cannot be expressed in terms other than itself, and also cannot be mixed with any of the other tinctures.

In keeping with this conceptual singularity, when the various tinctures are combined in a heraldic shield, they are never ‘mixed’ like paints on a palette, or like the dye layers that make up a colour slide: rather, their combination, in, for example, a division of the field, is a matter of juxtaposing independent segments, all of which by definition contain only a single tincture (as in a painting-by-numbers exercise). In any given shield, the constituent tinctures are therefore articulated like words in a sentence. The borders between them remain inviolable conceptually, even when (as in the heraldic shields Dan created for Five Wounds), the actual paint overruns the indicated borders.

And so to return to the written description of Tintoretto's Paradise in Five Wounds, Cur, standing before that painting the Ducal Palace, actually experiences it in a manner that is opposed to colour theory in both its photographic and its heraldic versions. For Cur, there is no absolute separation between pigments; but also, things are identifiable in terms of their history and their usage as well as their abstract, theoretical relations to other things. To return to the analogy with language, one might say that, while both photography and heraldry are interested exclusively in how colours may be combined within a closed system, Cur is interested in the etymology of colours (their origins and derivations), but also in the ways in which new combinations of pigments can generate new meanings.

The visual translation of Cur’s experience in the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych introduces these various ideas on colour theory into the subtext of the image, even though they are alien to Cur’s own way of thinking, because these theories place Cur’s experiences within the broader conceptual universe of the novel: that is, the images do not in fact reproduce Cur's experience so much as they relate it to that of the other four protagonists in the novel, who are represented in the diptych not only by their likenesses (which substitute for the four evangelists and Christ in the original painting) but by their associated heraldic tinctures.

I am not sure that any of this makes sense, but it all relates to the idea of translation. To the extent that certain nuances or concepts may be ‘lost in translation’, other nuances or concepts may be added, as Desmond Bull suggests. The Synaesthetic Paradise diptych translates both the original painting by Tintoretto and the written description of its constituent pigments on pp. 28-29 into its own visual idiom: one that draws on heraldry and photography as well as on painting. In doing so, it both removes aspects of the original painting and adds elements that are not in the original; similarly, it both reinterprets and adds to Cur’s experience of the painting (as described in the text) by superimposing several entirely different conceptions of colour onto it.

To summarise, the various conceptions of colour at play in the Synaesthetic Paradise are:

1) Colour as the product of the chemical properties of particular pigments. This conception underlies the written description, in which Cur perceives colour in terms of the smells of these pigments rather than their appearance.

2) Colour analysed in terms of optics and physics as the product of particular combinations of primary colours (cyan. magenta, yellow) or wavelengths of light along a spectrum. This conception of colour remains implicit in Five Wounds, in which the only available photographic technology is that of daguerreotypes, which are purely monochromatic images. However, Cur’s character is always opposed to / linked to that of Magpie, who is the novel’s daguerreotypist, so Cur's experience of the painting therefore implicitly invokes an opposed possible photographic reading of its contents.

3) Colour as a grammatical element within a semiotic system: i.e. heraldry. Individual colours therefore have no positive meaning, but instead only acquire meaning in combination with other colours, and only when they are articulated into grammatical statements (i.e. heraldic coats-of-arms). In terms of this system, the Synaesthetic Paradise is nonsensical: a gobbledy-gook visual statement that uses the heraldic tinctures, but fails to articulate them in any coherent or meaningful way, like a word salad. In that sense, it does correspond directly to Cur's initial impression of the picture.

4) Colour as one term in a binary opposition, which in this case is that proposed by Giorgio Vasari’s theory of art, which opposes Florentine disegno to Venetian colore: rational form to sensual content. This opposition corresponds to several other analogous binary oppositions, all of which can be used to organise elements within Five Wounds. Thus: disegno is to colore as line is to tone; as reason is to the senses; as theory is to data; as transcendence is to immanence; as the picture space is to the picture plane; etc.

The written description of the Paradise involves conception 1, and, implicitly, conception 4 (hence the accompanying running head is COLORE); the visual translation of this description into the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych involves conceptions 3, 4, and, implicitly and of necessity (since the book was actually printed using a CMYK process), conception 2.

Five Wounds: Dogs

 

Dogs occupy a prominent and sinister role in Five Wounds, partly because of events in the autobiographical backstory to the novel. But there are other reasons for this canine presence. Dogs are ubiquitous in modern Venice, which is actually quite baffling given the lack of parks in the city. Hence Venetian streets are notoriously littered with dog shit, which no-one ever bothers to clean up. Considering this, I imagined a variation on Kipling's animal tales ('How the cat got his tail', 'How the camel got his hump', etc.), in which a child might ask her father, 'Why are there so many dogs in Venice, daddy, and why are they so spoilt?', and the answer might be, 'Well, daughter, once upon a time, the dogs ruled this city, and they still have their ancestral privileges, although they have no real power any more'.

Below I review a menagerie of fictional and literary dogs, many of whom were barking away down in my subconscious as I wrote. I am just listing the ones that come immediately to mind now as I write. I didn't ever make a comprehensive list, and I omit here several relevant examples already mentioned in Dan's post about the Black Dog.

The most explicit historical reference to dogs in Five Wounds is to a passage from the Hierogylphics of Horapollo, which is quoted by Crow in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds', as follows (I may have tweaked the text slightly to fit the context; I don't have the original in front of me):

When the Egyptians wish to indicate a scribe, or a prophet, or an embalmer, or the spleen, or a judge, they draw the hieroglyph of a dog. A scribe, since he who wishes to become an accomplished scribe must bark continually and be fierce and show favours to none, just like dogs. And a prophet, because the dog looks intently beyond all other beasts upon the images of the gods, like a prophet. And an embalmer, because he looks upon the bodies which he has taken care of naked and dissected. And the spleen, since the dog alone among other animals has a very light spleen. If death of madness overcomes him, it happens because of his spleen. And a judge, because as the dog gazes intently upon the images of the gods, so the judge of ancient times contemplated the king in his nakedness.

Horapollo's treatise is a neo-Platonic interpretion of Egyptian hieroglyphs from the early Christian era. It was very influential in the Renaissance, but it is based upon almost entirely erroneous premises, a fact that was not proved conclusively until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. Horapollo therefore fits the theme of interpretation / misinterpretation that runs through Five Wounds, which is why I was reading the treatise in the first place, but then I came across the passage on dogs, which could be made to fit my five protagonists.

Other dog references are less openly acknowledged, like the famous last line from Kafka's The Trial, 'Like a dog', which is quoted above in a comic-strip version of the novel, adapted by David Mairowitz and Chantal Montellier. The phrase is Joseph K.'s final reflection upon himself, and upon his treatment at the hands of the law, as the executioner's knife descends. Here the dog is a figure of the abject, of the pariah, who is excluded from human society, like the outlaw of medieval legend, whose figure is the wolf.

Several dogs in Dante's Inferno are rendered below in William Blake's illustrations. The first image is of the three-headed Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld from classical mythology (Dante's text, like Five Wounds, jumbles its mythological and historical frames of reference). In the Inferno, Cerberus torments the souls of the gluttonous, whose fate is elucidated in Dorothy L. Sayers' commentary, as follows (p. 107):

The Gluttonous: The surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence. Of this kind of sin, the Gluttons are chosen as the image. Here is no reciprocity and no communication; each soul grovels alone in the mud, without heeding his neighbours - "a sightless company", Dante calls them. .... [Cerberus] is the image of uncontrolled appetite; the Glutton, whose appetite preyed upon people and things, is seen to be, in fact, the helpless prey on which that appetite gluts itself.



Later in the Inferno, Dante and Virgil travel through the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of the inhabitants are imprisoned in sterile trees. The trees cannot speak, unless their branches are broken, whereupon they bleed, and they can whistle through the coagulating blood, until it clots, when they are once again condemned to silence. Also trapped in the Wood of the Suicides are the Profligates, who run through it, pursued eternally by black dogs (aha!), and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees as they pass.



In the Inferno, dogs are therefore associated with the gluttonous and the profligate, and the latter group is also associated with suicide: All these ideas can also be linked to the theme of addiction.

At the beginning of the Inferno, dogs are also associated with avarice via the figure of one of the three beasts that terrify Dante in canto 1 (see illustration below): the She-Wolf, who can only be vanquished by the prophesied Greyhound, the Master-hound. Here is Sayers again on this image (p. 75):

The Beasts [Leopard, Lion and She-Wolf]: These are the images of sin. They may be identified with Lust, Pride, and Avarice respectively, or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age; but they are perhaps best thought of as the images of the three types of sin .... The Greyhound has been much argued about. I think it has both an historical and a spiritual significance. Historically, it is perhaps the [p. 76] image of some hoped-for political saviour who should establish the just World-Empire. Spiritually, the Greyhound, which has the attributes of God (“wisdom, love, and power”), is probably the image of the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth – the visible Kingdom of God for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.



The following passage from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 152, refers to Albrecht Durer's engraving of Melancholy (which features a sleeping - no doubt dreaming - dog), and which 'portrays the dangers of excessive study', a highly relevant theme for Gabriella and Crow:

One of the properties assembled around Durer's figure of Melancholy is the dog. The similarity between the condition of the melancholic, ... and the state of rabies, is not accidental. According to ancient tradition 'the spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog'. This he has in common with the melancholic. If the spleen, an organ believed to be particularly delicate, should deteriorate, then the dog is said to lose its vitality and become rabid. In this respect it symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy complexion. On the other hand the shrewdness and tenacity of the animal were borne in mind, so as to permit its use as the image of the tireless investigator and thinker. 'In his commentary on this hieroglyph Piero Valeriano says explicitly that the dog which "faciem melancholicam prae se ferat" [bears a melancholy face] would be the best at tracking and running'. In Durer's engraving [of Melancholy], especially, the ambivalence of this is enriched by the fact that the animal is depicted asleep: bad dreams come from the spleen, but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the melancholic.

 

Coincidentally, Dan also discusses Durer's Melancholy in relation to another illustration for Five Wounds, although it was not a reference that either of us ever mentioned to each other.

Another source I came across in the British Library in 2006, while I was researching Goya, is an English translation by Abraham Fleming of a Latin treatise by Johannes Caius, On English Dogs, first published in 1576. The following passage is from p. 17:

Of the dog, called the Thievish dog; in Latin, Canis furax.

The like to that whom we have rehearsed, is the Thievish Dog, which at the mandate and bidding of his master fleereth and leereth in the night: hunting conies by the air, which is leavened with their savour; and conveyed to the sense of smelling by the means of the wind blowing towards him. During all which space of his hunting he will not bark, lest he should be prejudicial to his own advantage. And thus watching and snatching in course as many conies as his master will suffer him; and beareth them to his master’s standing. The farmers of the country, and uplandish dwellers, call this kind of dog a Night Cur; because he hunteth in the dark.

I took one of the running heads in Five Wounds from this passage: 'Leavened With Their Savour'. Interpreted in the context of the novel, this passage might also be a way of linking the character of Cur, the dog-man, to that of Magpie, the nocturnal thief.

Finally, the barking of dogs represents the idea of non-sense or 'noise' (as opposed to 'signal' in information theory), as in the following passage from A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower, in which an expert witness testifies in court during an obscenity trial that serves as the novel's climax. The book on trial here is Babbletower, an allegory written by one of the characters within Byatt's novel, excerpts of which interrupt the frame narrative, along with several other competing, interpolated texts:

Well, let us start with the title. La Tour Bruyarde translates as the noisy, or shouting, or howling tower – the word ‘bruyard’ suggests the noise made by hound dogs. It is an image of the Tower of Babel which was constructed to displace God from Heaven, and was punished for its presumption by having a spirit of discord sent amongst its members, so that their languages were confused, they could no longer understand each other.

'John Saturnall's Feast' by Lawrence Norfolk

A long time ago, I chaired a discussion on historical fiction featuring A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk. I'm a great admirer of Norfolk's work, and it's been a long time since his last book, so I am very excited about the publication of John Saturnall's Feast:

'There's this boy and he's an orphan and he becomes a chef in the 17th century. He falls in love with the wrong girl. The civil war happens so he loses everything but they can be together. Then when the Restoration happens, he gets everything back: he can be the greatest chef of the age and she can be lady of the manor and they have to decide what to do.' Carole said: 'Well what do they do?' I didn't know at that point but I knew I had to write the book to find out.