Adriaen van Utrecht

Still Life with Bouquet and Skull, 1642, Oil on canvas, 67 x 86 cm, Private Collection; Courtesy The Richard Harris Art Collection

The Shadows of Time

Commentary by Malcolm Guite

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You may think this still life gives more insight into the book that precedes the Song of Solomon in the canon than into the Song itself. After all, its title, Vanitas, is an allusion to the opening verse of Ecclesiastes and its central theme:

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
   …All is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

But the meaning of the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, partly arises from its context in the canon. Canticus Canticorum, the Song of Songs, has been read as a response to ‘Vanitas Vanitorum’, vanity of vanities, the central theme of Ecclesiastes (Gregory of Nyssa, Song 1). The mystical experience which both rabbinical and early Church traditions found embedded and symbolized in the love poetry of the Song of Solomon is often preceded by a sense of the emptiness of all our experience in the fleeting, timebound world we entered with the loss of Eden. This is what makes the frail flowers in Song 2, and the way the speaker identifies herself with them, so poignant:

I am a rose of Sharon,
     a lily of the valleys. (Song 2:1)

Adriaen van Utrecht’s still life depicts a bouquet in all its beauty, yet these are cut flowers and we know they must decay. Indeed a rose, already fallen, droops over the edge of the table which it shares with the pearls, the watch, and the coins: symbols of the wealth we must leave behind, the time we inevitably lose, the life that must end.

And yet the extraordinary light in this painting, which illuminates even the skull of mortality, finds its intensest concentration in these flowers, as though eternity were shining through them.

Bouquets in still life paintings were often ‘impossible', because the flowers gathered in them could never all be in bloom at the same moment. In this, such works suggest a resistance to time’s constraints even as they acknowledge decay; they gather together what is temporally distributed; perhaps, even, lift us a little out of time and towards eternity.

Now, over 300 years after the artist saw them, we still gaze on them. In the same way the phrase ‘[u]ntil the day breathes and the shadows flee’ (2:17), at the end of this chapter, has for over two millennia spoken to readers of a day when the shadows of time itself will flee away, and the soul will be with the Saviour she loves.

 

References

Wright, J. Robert. (2014). Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 9 (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press)

See full exhibition for Song of Solomon 2

Song of Solomon 2

Revised Standard Version

2I am a rose of Sharon,

a lily of the valleys.

2As a lily among brambles,

so is my love among maidens.

3As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,

so is my beloved among young men.

With great delight I sat in his shadow,

and his fruit was sweet to my taste,

4He brought me to the banqueting house,

and his banner over me was love.

5Sustain me with raisins,

refresh me with apples;

for I am sick with love.

6O that his left hand were under my head,

and that his right hand embraced me!

7I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

by the gazelles or the hinds of the field,

that you stir not up nor awaken love

until it please.

8The voice of my beloved!

Behold, he comes,

leaping upon the mountains,

bounding over the hills.

9My beloved is like a gazelle,

or a young stag.

Behold, there he stands

behind our wall,

gazing in at the windows,

looking through the lattice.

10My beloved speaks and says to me:

“Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away;

11for lo, the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

12The flowers appear on the earth,

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove

is heard in our land.

13The fig tree puts forth its figs,

and the vines are in blossom;

they give forth fragrance.

Arise, my love, my fair one,

and come away.

14O my dove, in the clefts of the rock,

in the covert of the cliff,

let me see your face,

let me hear your voice,

for your voice is sweet,

and your face is comely.

15Catch us the foxes,

the little foxes,

that spoil the vineyards,

for our vineyards are in blossom.”

16My beloved is mine and I am his,

he pastures his flock among the lilies.

17Until the day breathe

and the shadows flee,

turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle,

or a young stag upon rugged mountains.

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