The Garden of Earthly and Heavenly Delights

In the Song of Solomon, the Zionist illustrator Zeev Raban found the perfect voice for his devotion to the landscape of Palestine. The effort to develop a modern Jewish artistic idiom which could draw its inspiration from the soil was the project of the Bezalel School of Art, where Raban taught. His work conjures a biblical Israel idealized in the present, blending European Art Nouveau with Persian miniatures and a fascination for Yemenite faces.

Raban’s illustrated The Song of Songs (Shir Hashirim) exactly captures the twin longings of the biblical book itself. In these poems, the lovers’ yearning for the body of their beloved merges with an equally lyrical yearning for the land of Israel (Davis 1998: 539–41). In this passage, the beloved woman and the land infuse each other. She is many topographies in one: at first remote and wild, with a terrible beauty which ravishes the lover’s heart like the hungry lions and leopards on the mountains of Song 4:8.

Looking out ‘from the peak of Amana’, the contours of the woman’s figure merge into the lines of the scenery. The sweep of her yellow robe curves into the tawny skin of the leopard, and then opens out into the wide slope flecked with the gold of crocus flowers and every kind of spice (‘nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon’, 4:14). Here in the foothills, she morphs from a jagged peak into a bubbling garden (‘his garden’, she says, v.16). Behind, the snowy heights of the north send down ‘flowing streams from Lebanon’ (v.15), to irrigate her greenness.

The fruit tree and the date palm of the picture turn the charms of her limbs into the loveliest of cultivated trees (‘Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with all choicest fruits’, v.13), in an exchange of figuration which exactly echoes the mode of the poem (Alter 2011: 252–4). The milk and honey of the Promised Land are eaten in kissing her (v.11), and her love yields the wine and nectar of a fruitful harvest in a place of plenty (v.10).

References

Alter, Robert. 2011. ‘The Garden of Metaphor’ in The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books), pp. 231–54

Davis, Ellen. 1988. ‘Romance of the Land in the Song of Songs’, Anglican Theological Review, 80: 533–46

Goldman, Batsheva et al. 1982. Raban Remembered: Jerusalem’s Forgotten Master (New York: Yeshiva University Museum)

James, Elaine T. 2017. Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place (New York: OUP)

Like the Song of Solomon, the story of Susanna offers us a beautiful woman in a biblical garden—a figure whose story was attached to the book of Daniel in Jewish antiquity. As in many artistic responses to the Song, here too a fountain springs into a pool, birds sing, deer play; there are green trees, roses, a secret leafy bower. Susanna’s story in Daniel 13:19–21 even works like a midrash on the Song: Susanna/shoshanna means ‘lily’, and the rabbis liken Susanna to the ‘lily between thorns’ of Song 2:2, caught between two lecherous elders who spy on her and try to blackmail her (Fisch 1996: 35–41).

But the elders’ illicit viewpoint is relativized in Jacopo Tintoretto’s painting: they are awkwardly skewered by the trellis between them, like ugly bugs in paradise. The powerful perspective here is Susanna’s own, like the unbearably strong glance of the woman in Song 4:4. The woman of the Song saturates what she wears with her own self: the flash of her eyes radiates out from her jewels (4:9), her love vaporizes in the scent of her perfume (v.10), and the smell of her clothes is sweet like the taste of her mouth (v.11).

Just so, Susanna’s subjectivity seems to be the organizing consciousness within Tintoretto’s painting. The things within the sphere of her senses come into granular relief: curls of smoke drift up from her incense burner, her gems emit a dull gleam, her comb and lace resolve into acute detail. We are invited to feel the water and sunlight on Susanna’s body. When the woman of the Song eventually speaks (4:16), she commands the wind on her skin, drawing us inside her own sensations in the same way.

And like the woman of the Song, Tintoretto’s Susanna is in the garden of her lover—her husband Joakim. As she looks into the mirror, nested within her own sight of herself is another viewer, in her mind’s eye. This is the look of the husband for whom she prepares herself in this toilette scene (Apostolos-Cappadona 1998). That anticipated look is one both given and received (Exum 2005: 22): the domestic eroticism of Tintoretto’s painting is much more like the mutual gaze of lovers in the Song than it is like the voyeurism of the elders.

References

Apostolos-Cappadona, Diane. 1998. ‘Toilet Scenes’, in Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography, ed. by Helene E. Roberts, vol. 2 (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn): 869–74

Exum, Cheryl. 2005. Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox).

Fisch, Harold. 1996. ‘Susanna as Parable’, in The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness, ed. by Ellen Spolsky (Atlanta: Scholars Press), pp. 35–41

The Song of Solomon encourages us to imagine a woman who is a landscape and who is in a landscape, both at the same time. That doubleness lies behind a scene which became a popular one in late medieval art, found here on an altarpiece from Colmar, France.

That scene is the Annunciation, imagined as taking place in an outdoor paradise. ‘A garden locked is my sister, my bride; a garden locked, a fountain sealed’ says the lover of the Song (4:12), and the hortus conclusus (closed garden) typical of Annunciation scenes, with a sealed fountain among its emblematic symbols, takes especial inspiration from this verse (Daley 1986: 253–78). The walled garden, with its tower and oak door, creates a hidden world like the lovers’ closed circle of two. Like theirs, it is an enchanted realm of natural beauty. The ground is a quiet riot of botanical charm, minutely variegated like the orchard of Song 4:13–14: here not spices but herbs, clover, grasses, wild flowers.

But the walls and gates of the garden on this altarpiece also speak of the woman at the heart of the garden. Here is Mary, the mother of Jesus: the turrets and bolts signal her virginity just as locks and seals speak of the exclusive fidelity of the beloved in the Song. At the centre of this garden grows a lily, a symbol for purity with a distant echo of Susanna; but the visitor who surprises the woman alone here is of a different kind to the spying elders. It is the angel Gabriel: suddenly, he is in the garden, a hunter blowing his horn.

A medieval hymn (the sequence Imperatrix gloriosa) finds here a reply to the woman’s command. ‘Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden’, she calls, and the answering breath is Gabriel’s, blowing like the gentle south wind and breathing word of the blossom and fruit she will bear.

References

Blume, Clemens S.J. 1915. ‘Imperatrix gloriosa’, in Analecta hymnica medii aevi 54 (Leipzig, O.R. Reisland), pp. 351–53

Daley, Brian E. 1986. ‘The “Closed Garden” and the “Sealed Fountain”: Song of Songs 4:12 in the Late Medieval Iconography of Mary’, in Medieval Gardens, ed. by Elizabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks), pp. 253–78

Wyss, Robert L. 1960. ‘Vier Hortus Conclusus-Darstellungen im Schweizerischen Landesmuseum’, Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, 20: 113–24