Images, Imagination, Procreation, and Immersion

Premodern assumptions about the weaker and impressionable nature of women suggest that the decoration of domestic interiors, and bed chambers in particular, must have been considered critical to the generation of healthy children. Renaissance domestic decorations frequently include Cassone, chests historiated with tales of virtue, but leave little room to determine traces of Jacob’s husbandry practised on consenting wives. In some case, however, we know what men were made to see during sexual intercourse.

Working for his father-in-law for nothing (or perhaps, for the love he bore towards Laban’s second daughter, Rachel), Jacob persuaded Laban that in lieu of wages he should be allowed to keep all the lambs and goats in Laban’s flocks born with piebald coats. Then, through an exercise in what might be called ‘sympathetic magic’, Jacob gave the livestock something to look at in the form of spotted and striped wooden rods which in turn has a direct physical effect on them. Strong and speckled offspring in abundance were his reward.

Like Jacob’s rods, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, initially known as La Bella, was visible during the act of procreation as it hung in an aristocratic bed chamber. The identity of the reclining figure, who may have been called Aurora for her rosy fingers, matters less than her expected effect on male imagination through a convocation of olfactive, tactile, and optical engagement.

In the present, context her assertive gaze is a reminder that premodern doctrines and theories about the weakness and impressionability of women are ‘man-made’ pseudo-scientific fabulation. Yet the sitter also stands out as evidence of the ability of images to interact actively with sensation and thought.

References

Bayer, Andrea. 2008. ‘From Cassone to Poesia: Paintings of Love and Marriage’, in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Andrea Bayer (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 230–32

Goffen, Rona. 1997. ‘Sex, Space, and Social History in Titian’s Venus of Urbino’, in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, ed. by Rona Goffen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 63–90

Sol LeWitt began his Wall Drawings in 1968 and continued the series throughout his life. Though he began the series in black and white, he later began to include colour, as in this work.

Bartolomé Murillo’s ‘Jacob series’ (elsewhere in this exhibition) meant to immerse spectators in idyllic landscapes, with their monumental dimensions reminiscent of highway advertisements. LeWitt’s Wall Drawings share a similar immersive purpose. This is accomplished, however, through the impact of non-figurative shapes on the mind and the senses.

Furthermore, in a way that invites comparison with Jacob’s husbandry method (in which what is shown to the animals indicates to them what their own ‘productions’ should look like), the Wall Drawings are primarily sets of instructions. Indeed, as works of conceptual art, the Wall Drawings can be reproduced by anyone carefully following the artist’s directives, and LeWitt himself acknowledged the range of variations produced as part of the work itself. By setting dotted rods intended to trigger ovine imagination and affect their offspring, Jacob was in some way inaugurating this conceptual practice.

In modern and contemporary art, however, the lines, colours, and patterns overwhelm the viewer, triggering questions about the nature of space, art, and its ability to penetrate and move humans.

References

Carlin, John. 1982. ‘Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings: 1968–1981’, Art Journal, 42.1: 62–64 <https://doi.org/10.2307/776500>

Roberts, Veronica. 2012. ‘“Like a Musical Score”: Variability and Multiplicity in Sol LeWitt’s 1970s Wall Drawings’, Master Drawings, 50.2: 193–210

In various ancient traditions, the belief that images could affect generation led to their introduction in husbandry. Isidore of Seville's Etymologies (12.1.58–60), after quoting the example of ewes watching the reflection in water of handsome rams mounting them, mentions mares being shown images of stallions, and doves surrounded by depictions of the most beautiful specimens of their kind.

According to Bartolomé Murillo’s first biographer, the picture of Jacob Laying Peeled Rods before the Flock of Laban was part of a five-work cycle representing the story of Jacob, along with The Blessing of Jacob, The Dream of the Ladder, The Search for the Idols, and Jacob Meeting Rachel.

These last four subjects feature frequently in Jacob cycles, but the episode of the peeling of the rods is rarely illustrated. A mosaic at Santa Maria Maggiore, two Byzantine manuscripts, one Bible Historiale (c.1400–25), as well as one set of early sixteenth-century tapestries attributed to Barend van Orley, comprise more or less all known earlier representations. Nothing in Murillo’s painting suggests awareness of these distant antecedents, and the personal relevance of the Jacob story to members of the Manrique-Santiago family, who commissioned the cycle, is unclear.

Unlike earlier artists who situated the flock horizontally across the width of the composition, Murillo has arranged the animals in the borders of the image. And Jacob’s rods—dotted or striped in appearance after his partial peeling of them—line the bottom of the composition. Water is placed between them and the viewer.

Murillo has depicted the rods in two aspects, when dry, and when immersed. As the eye moves from right to left, the rods lose their defined shape as they enter the ‘runnels’ (v.38) and become instead floating dots of irregular brushstrokes, mimicking the visual distortion of objects in water. It becomes as though the animals are looking at, and drinking, the painting itself.

One distinctive feature of Murillo’s ‘Jacob cycle’ is its large size, which is comparable to that of a tapestry. Old Testament subjects in seventeenth-century Seville were frequently depicted as landscapes-with-figures (indeed, this picture has often been praised as a ‘mere’ landscape). This green and lush universe—totally unrelated to the dry and rocky landscape of Andalusia—thus offers an immersive experience; one in which the spectator mirrors the animals on the other side of the water—drinking in the transformative power of painting.

References

Barney, Stephen A., W.J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, et al. (trans.). 2006. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

‘The Index of Medieval Art’ <https://theindex.princeton.edu/> [accessed 15 March 2022]

Mulcahy, Rosemarie. 1993.‘“The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel”: Murillo’s “Jacob” Cycle Complete’, The Burlington Magazine 135.1079: 73–80

Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Antonio, and Nina A. Mallory. 1987. Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)