A Brutal Lesson in Humility

William de Morgan’s ostrich-type bird looks out at us cheekily from a design from his Chelsea period of ceramic tile manufacture. This was a highly productive time in his career, when de Morgan was experimenting not only with the chemistry of the procedures involved, but also with the artistic potential for creating domestic objects that were aesthetically pleasing. He was a close friend of William Morris: the two men shared a passion both for the profusion of the natural world and the need to offer beauty to an increasingly industrialized society whose members were often reduced to drudgery and removed from the life-enhancing qualities of good art and craft.

Beautiful designs on the apparently humble tile that might surround a fireplace or decorate a kitchen was, in this period, de Morgan’s solution.

He also, like the author of Job, saw the humorous, crazy, or inexplicable in the natural world. This fantastical bird is a composite, with something of the crest of a secretary bird and the curved beak of a hornbill. But its short wing and tail feathers and powerful high ‘heel’ or ’ankle’ are distinctively ostrich, as is the deliberate reference to its nesting behaviour. By its pointed gaze, this bird, already a mockery of the avian world by the fact of being flightless, dares us to challenge what it is doing. The egg’s unprotected position on the bare earth (‘she leaves her eggs to the earth, and lets them be warmed on the ground’; Job 39:14) makes it clear it is an ostrich egg that is being broken open and devoured. It is an extreme instance of the lines, ‘She deals cruelly with her young, as if they were not hers’ (v.16).

The river and the pyramids clearly visible here are details relevant to God’s blast at Job. This ostrich is scavenging in the vicinity of one of the world’s greatest life-giving rivers, a river that humanity may have tamed to some extent already in biblical antiquity but whose flux and fall are still entirely dependent on winter snows far to the south. In other words, the uncontrollable forces of nature. Further off, the pyramids, those massive monuments to the human desire to preserve life for ever, have shrunk to two small triangles on the horizon that fit between the bird’s ravaging bill and stalking leg. It is not only nature’s foolishness that is being mocked here.

The Great Black Bull, or aurochs, in the Axial Gallery in Lascaux is rightly one of the most famous images associated with Paleolithic parietal, or cave, art. Archaeologists place this artistic complex in the Magdalenian period, making it c.17,000 years old, a late stage when compared to Chauvet cave in the Ardèche, which has an estimated age of 30,000 years. Humankind has been awestruck by the otherness of the natural world for a very, very long time.

At over 4 metres long and 2 metres high, the aurochs of Lascaux is one of the largest animal depictions in the gallery. It is meant to overwhelm by its power, which the painters knew intimately from close observation of the aurochs’s behaviour in its natural environment. Attempts to back-breed this ancient ox, extinct as recently as the seventeenth century in Poland, have produced a modern approximation that is still majestic in its massive bulk and beauty, even if it is not quite the real thing.

The bull is seen galloping, his forelegs outstretched, his nostrils wide, his eyes alert, his elegant, but deadly, horns pricked forward, almost like ears sounding the world around him. Smaller bovines tuck under his very belly, as if riding alongside under his protection.

This is a herd in motion: you can hear the thunder of hooves, hear their bellow, smell their musky scent. This is not an animal who, in Job’s words, ‘will spend the night at your crib’ (39:9), nor one to be bound with ropes or pull a plough. This wild ox is ferocious, untamed and untameable. He defends his territory and his family from other males and from predators who are themselves formidable: contemporary re-wilded back breeds of the aurochs in Eastern Europe have recently been seen forming a defensive circle round their young, those pricked-forward horns lowered against a frustrated pack of wolves.

This bull is completely other, there to be wondered at and worshipped, an object of spiritual awe and dread that is very far from his domesticated descendants who meekly ‘bring grain to your threshing floor’ (v.12).

Verse 18 of this passage from Job continues the overall theme of this chapter, the vanity of human knowledge, by pointing out the surprising fact that the swift-footed, but daft, ostrich, can outrun horse and rider: ‘When she rouses herself to flee/ she laughs at the horse and his rider’ (39:18). These lines introduce a poetic disquisition on the mighty and admirable qualities of a warhorse. The choice of this animal differs from all the others in this chapter, insofar as here the focus is on a clearly domesticated type, albeit an imposing one, demanding respect. This reflects the fact that wild horses were not native to the Near East: when the human populations there first encountered the horse, it was through trade and domestic use.

The fighting horse described by the author of Job shares, however, many characteristics with the fearsome animals of the wild. He is unafraid in the face of the fabricated weapons of humans, ‘he goes out to meet the weapons. /He laughs at fear, and is not dismayed; /he does not turn back from the sword’ (v.22). Indeed, he has supernatural powers; like the eternally charging aurochs of Lascaux (elsewhere in this exhibition), he is unkillable, ‘Upon him rattle the quiver,/ the flashing spear and the javelin’ (v.23). Humans are the enemy, sounds and smells from far off, from an inferior, alien world, there to be defeated, ‘When the trumpet sounds, he says ‘Aha!’/He smells the battle from afar, /the thunder of the captains, and the shouting’ (v.25). It is significant that, unlike in real life, nowhere does he appear controlled by his rider, who remains shadowy, merely a name.

So it is in Elisabeth Frink’s lithograph, Horse from 1967. This image is dominated by the disproportionately large head of the horse, the seat of its intelligence, fearlessness, and power. It has no saddle, bit, or reins; its head and neck are raised, taut, signifying both aggression and apprehension, as do its flattened ears. Yet its eye is wide open, bold, alert, fixing the spectator who, we must understand by virtue of the horse’s body language, is clearly the foe. We are the ones who are going to be trampled here.