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After my most recent trip, I really feel like I’m getting a decent grip on the history of European painting.  If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, history has yielded a fantastic wealth of paintings that would make great heavy metal album covers.  My interest in art primarily comes from my interest in narrative and storytelling, so a lot of my attention has been on subjects that seem to be common motifs in art.

So the motif here is “Sans Head”, paintings that depict severed heads, or the severing of heads.  All four of these pieces were spotted at the Art Institute of Chicago.

above - panel 5 from Six Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist, Giovanni de Paolo - This six panel narrative tells the story of Saint John the Baptist, who lost his head on the account of Salome.  Saint John’s severed head is a pretty common theme in art, because it offered a chance for painters to depict not only a gory severed head, but the exotically beautiful (and often nude) Salome.

This series of panels is painted in International Gothic style, distinctly fantastic in it’s architecture, geography and figures.  This style of painting always reminds me of the theatre - the figures are portrayed on a stage, composed of symbols to get the key points across to the viewer.  It’s hard for me to see the figures as historical people, I perceive them as characters instead, and perhaps the highly subjective nature of Christian history acts as a reinforcement of this perception. The six panels of this piece were once part of a twelve panel set that’s been split up, but there’s an additional panel among the six on view at the Art Institute depicting John sans head, which depicts Salome with the head on a platter.

View the label here.

above - Judith, Jan Sanders van Hemessen - I’ve become somewhat obsessed with images of Judith lately.  Not too sure why, but it’s a subject that seems to really draw out the context of the painter - you can learn a lot about the painter, the client and the society from them, maybe because they tend to be arrangements of simple symbols - severed head, maidservant, Judith and sword.

What can you tell from this image?  Well, this is one of those paper doll paintings, where the artist sort of combined things as elements.  The body of Judith? That’s a man, baby, with a pre-silicon, bolt-on bosom.  The face is detailed, but looks painted in, like a flat mask.  I’m sure there’s a bunch of super-technical art history reasoning behind this, but I’d be willing to wager that the artist had seriously limited knowledge of the female figure, or, as the label supposes, by giving her a man’s body, he is attempting to draw attention away from the seduction of Holofernes and to her physical prowess.  Noticeably absent from this painting is Judith’s biblical servant, who’s job it is to dispose of the head. 

above - Judith with the Head of Holofernes, Felice Fecerelli - I think that many viewers of renaissance paintings are puzzled by the non-historical garb worn by the subjects.  I used to naively dismiss them as having little knowledge of history, and felt their deviation from supposed historical accuracy was a sign of their primitivism, but now I see them as bold re-interpreters, manipulating their symbologies to fit their aesthetics and ideals.  Human history isn’t really about “objective truth” anyways, it’s all lies, bullshit and anecdote, so why not mash-up biblical narrative with 17th Century fashions.

Here Judith is glamorous, dignified, a bit piecemeal (what’s with painters who can’t convey the proper attachment of the head to the body?), but overall there’s none of the jarring disproportions of the first painting.  Here’s Judith’s blade is down, casually held and bloodless, and the severed head that’s at the center of this narrative is being neatly bagged by her servant.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Judith narrative is Judith’s social status, symbols of which are interestingly not present in the Dutch version above this one.  While she is a rebel, a revolutionary or sorts, she is upper class, and engages in her revolution with the assistance of a servant, making her a rather unconventional revolutionary, which is probably why Judith was such an acceptable subject, and became synonymous with civic duty.  Had Judith been a woman of common, or lower status, I highly doubt that the wealthy art patrons of Florence would have been as eager to commission paintings of her tale.

View the label here.

above - Head of a Guillotined Man, Jean Louise Andre Theodore Gericault - Wow, that’s one hell of a name.  He probably had an extra-long business card to accommodate it.  Gericault is best know as the painter of the ultra-grim, political painting Raft of the Medusa, which depicts the survivors of a shipwreck at their moment of rescue.

Head of a Guillotined Man was painted in 1818/19, while Gericault was also working on the Raft of the Medusa, who’s realism he prepared for by sketching and studying corpses in a Paris morgue - perhaps this head was encountered during those visits.  While this isn’t a super-realistic painting, it depicts a far more realistic subject, an anonymous guillotined head.  In painting Raft of the Medusa, Gericault abandoned allegory in favour of a journalistic realism, which is also present in the above painting.

To me, this painting is emblematic of the age of reason that displaced the church as primary organizer of the universe.  Science, and a aggressive turn to secularism have been at the center of French identity since the revolution, and this painting, almost three decades following, shows the influence of that revolution.

View the label here.

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