news

From Perfume to Smoke: Transforming Salubrious Scents in a Renaissance Perfume Burner

by Madison Clyburn

A classically inspired bronze incense burner from a Paduan workshop, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, speaks to the multi-sensory meditations that once occurred in an early modern Italian home (fig. 1).¹ This particular incense burner measures just over a foot tall, is pyramidal in shape, and is comprised of four different parts: base, central column, drum, and finial (fig. 2).²

Like rising perfumed smoke, the decoration is aligned vertically and its fantastical satyrs, sphinxes, grotesque masks, and scalloped shells invoke Bacchic theatricality. The incense burner’s form and iconography derive from the famed Italian sculptor Andrea Riccio’s (ca. 1470–1532) humanistically informed Paschal Candelabrum (1507–16), made for the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua.³ Such erudite iconography was popular in Padua—a city celebrated in the sixteenth century for its humanist culture, bronze production, and medical university.

The transformation of a solid perfume into smoke through the application of fire had a multi-dimensional effect on the Renaissance home and body. In the early modern period, scented air was critical to maintaining good health; the affective, ephemeral substance, infused with the divine power of plants, drifted through city streets and infiltrated domestic halls and bodies, influencing the health of those living in Padua.⁴ Today, this incense burner is admired solely as an art object, devoid of its once fragrant social life. Centuries earlier, though, one would likely find it in a home, infusing a camera (multipurpose bedroom) or studiolo (study) with salubrious scents.⁵ Within such a space, the Renaissance user would place dried perfume (sticks or pastilles) in the incense burner’s internal compartment or external apertures and set them aflame. The resulting embers would subsequently release energizing swirls of aromatic smoke while tossing delicate light across the bronze surface, encouraging the scholar to meditate on the dramatic transformation unfolding before them. This once-fragrant object—truly a feast for the senses—exemplifies the Renaissance humanist’s philosophical interests, urban lifestyle, and desire for good health.

The New York incense burner’s iconographic pattern mirrors the humanist antiquarian’s interest in the philological and archaeological evidence of the classical past.⁶ From the bound and rugged satyrs to the wise and alluring sphinxes, these creatures blur the line between coarse animal and cultivated human, philosophically questioning an individual’s true nature.⁷ The hybrid imagery encourages the owner’s contemplation of the concept of transformation—an idea made vividly real by the metamorphizing act of burning a solid pastille or incense stick into smoke. The transient, sweet-smelling vapor that would curl up and around the burner, together with the object’s iconographical design, conjure a multi-sensorial fantasy appealing to upper-class consumers residing in sixteenth-century Padua.⁸

Attached to the corners of the base are feet made from satyr masks surmounted by a bound satyr (fig. 3). In his Sileni of Alcibiades (1515), the Dutch humanist Erasmus (ca. 1468?–1536) deviates from the satyr’s classical association with lust and mischief.⁹ Instead, he argues that if the satyr Silenus is “opened,” that is, his divinely interior self is unbound, he reveals his “great and lofty spirit worthy of a true philosopher.”¹⁰ Three decorative plaques alternate between the satyrs’ bound spirits; each one depicts a classicizing Bacchic mask with deeply set forehead wrinkles, wild, twisting hair, and a curled tongue flanked by bunches of grapes, signaling its relation to the fantastical concept of the grotesque (fig. 4).¹¹ Meanwhile, the bordering fruit marks the transformation of grapes to wine but also from sobriety to drunkenness.¹² This transition allows one to access the permeable state of divine “madness,” described by the priest and Neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–99).¹³ In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium titled De amore (On Love; 1469), he meditates on the soul’s continuous rise and fall through four states: Intellect, Reason, Opinion, and Nature. Bacchus’s drunkenness, and by extension, the Renaissance humanist’s intellectual inebriation activated through meditation on the smoldering incense burner, simultaneously draws the scholar to the lower world of the senses—smell, taste, and touch—and the higher world of the mind.¹⁴ In this revelatory state, inspired by Neoplatonic philosophy, the humanist’s cerebral drunkenness illuminates his rational soul, allowing him to perceive God more closely.¹⁵

Attached to the central column are a triad of alternating volutes and winged sphinxes—classical symbols of wisdom and death—with a scalloped shell nestled between their wingtips.¹⁶ The figures recall the sphinx from the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex.¹⁷ Each female hybrid’s scrolled feet unfurl into lion’s fur incised on the base and torso as lusciously layered, feathered bird wings taper into the bust and head of a woman (fig. 5).

In Renaissance architectural style, sphinxes often merge architectural forms with female bodies. In this case, the sphinxes’ lion paws are transformed into miniature volutes. Together with the full-size volutes, they figuratively support the pierced, gadrooned drum above.The third tier features a series of arched windows that allow fragrant smoke to pass through. Laurel festoons fill the space between each opening, topped in the middle with scalloped shells—classical and Christian symbols indicative of transformation and rebirth.¹⁸ Like the Greek sphinx, who challenges those she meets to a riddle on the transformation of human life, the symbolic shell may also signal the owner’s mystical journey.

The top of the incense burner showcases a finial in the form of a satyr whose relaxed posture, vacant expression, pitcher of wine, and discarded panpipes suggest the drunken revelry of Dionysus or Pan (fig. 6). However, the satyr’s soft and elongated limbs, distinctive from those of the energetic and tightly bound satyrs at the base of the burner, suggest that this finial was made separately and added later.¹⁹ The original finial is likely a statuette of a satyr and satyress copulating like that found on a sixteenth-century Paduan inkwell cover (fig. 7).

An eighteenth-century illustration of a Paduan pyramidal perfume burner (fig. 8) from the same workshop as the New York incense burner helps us imagine its original esoteric theatricality.²⁰ The initial finial suggests the humanist scholar’s interest in philosophy and the cathartic transformation from the captive body to the unbound soul and its harmony with nature, or simply a taste for the erotic in a period saturated with amorous images of satyrs and satyresses in pastoral settings.²¹

Once burned, the intoxicating and energizing aroma of agarwood, benzoin, cedar, and clove-scented pastilles or sticks would waft up from the perforated heads of the bound satyrs and rising sphinxes (fig. 9) and out of the dome’s arched windows to envelope the satyrs atop the burner. The scented air continues upward, past the ambiguous but symbolically loaded finial, and up to God or a higher principle.

We must imagine—as historical audiences would have understood—the scented air eventually permeating the humanist’s porous body, sitting nearby. After entering the body, the aromatic molecules course through the scholar’s arteries and travel to the brain and heart. In doing so, scented air, facilitated through the use of a perfume burner, infuses the individual’s pneuma (air or life force) with salubrious scents to nurture the soul.²²

The sixteenth-century Paduan would have been cognizant of the stimulating, therapeutic effects of scent in a city teeming with students, pilgrims, rubbish, disease, and fragrant imports. Academic and economic influences from Venice and the Levant contributed to Padua’s olfactive mindfulness during this time. When our unknown maker fabricated the New York incense burner, the University of Padua (founded in 1222) was already internationally renowned as a center for medical innovation. Andrea Vesalius’s (1514–64) anatomical text, De humani corporis fabrica (1542), corresponds with the Professor of Practical Medicine, Giovanni Battista da Monte’s (1489–1551) hands-on clinical teaching and the 1595 opening of the first permanent anatomical theatre.²³ In 1545, the Venetian Republic founded the first teaching botanical garden for students enrolled at the University of Padua (fig. 10).²⁴ In this erudite atmosphere, professors combined theory and practice using translated ancient Greco-Roman and medieval Islamic texts by Aristotle, Galen, and Avicenna and specimens from the University’s botanical garden to teach about the transformative power of therapeutic scents.

Knowledge of perfumed medicines reached Padua primarily through the Republic of Venice, given its political control of the city since 1404.²⁵ Venice—a cosmopolitan maritime center that thrived on trade relationships with Levantine mercantile partners—imported a variety of aromatics such as aloeswood, musk, civet, and ambergris from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Cyprus.²⁶ These substances were transported to nearby Padua for distribution to various institutions and vendors, allowing students and long-term residents to purchase ready-made perfumed pastilles, pastes, waters, and oils and “simples” (single ingredients) to create perfumes at home using tried-and-true recipes. A genre of books called Libri di Secreti (Books of Secrets) provided many perfume recipes to use in an incense burner, such as ones “to make a fragrant perfume to scent the house” and a “moist perfume for the room.”²⁷ Both recipes from Giovanventura Rosetti’s Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria incorporate fragrant ingredients admired for their medicinal properties, including rosewater, aloeswood, olibanum, styrax, cloves, sandalwood, and cedar. Many recipes never made it to the printing press but existed in household manuscripts. Recipes for “soft perfumes in pans to scent rooms,” “perfumes to burn in ten ways,” and a “very noble room perfume” indicate ways to burn inspiring, transportive, salutary scents in domestic spaces.²⁸

Surrounding oneself with sweet-smelling air was critical to maintaining or correcting one’s health—physically, spiritually, and mentally. The fortifying properties imbued in the air also played a crucial role in creating healthy, protective, and pleasant homes. The New York incense burner invites us to consider its placement among other coveted but ephemeral aromatic goods made of fragrant plant and animal-based substances complete with “personal, cultural, and social meaning” used to beautify and sanitize upper-middle-class Italian homes in the early modern period.²⁹ For example, perfumed pastilles sheltered in bed warmers encouraged soothing sleeping quarters; floral-scented powders sewn into pillows placed on one’s lap while sewing transported them to fields of roses; while a pungent, disinfectant mix of pitch, styrax, and myrrh scrubbed over walls and floors secured dwellings against infectious air.³⁰ Such perfumed mixtures act as transformative intermediaries capable of offering pleasure and protection. Considering this, the owner of the New York incense burner might set alight aromatic pastilles or sticks for a myriad of reasons, such as tempering the air, regulating the bodily humours, energizing the brain, fortifying the heart, stimulating sex organs, and meditating on metaphysical questions.³¹

Suppose we imagine a humanist scholar, like this ecclesiastic (fig. 11), sitting in his study, surrounded by books and antiquities, contemplating the philosophical text in his hand while some spiritual imbalance unsettles his humors.³² In that case, the incense burner’s presence on a shelf or desktop speaks to the myriad transformative abilities of perfume. Emblematic of a thriving academic community’s interest in wellness, sixteenth-century Paduan incense burners reflect a sensorial appreciation for tactile delights and tasteful homes mediated through perfumed air.

^{____________________}

Madison Clyburn is an Art History PhD Candidate at McGill University. Her work focuses on medicinal perfumes and the material culture of women’s wellness in late medieval and early modern Italy. She has written for The Recipes Project, Ornamentum magazine, and the SSHRC-funded project Hidden Hands in Colonial Natural Histories.

^{____________________}

1. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are the author’s.

The burner’s manufacture from a wax sculpture to its bronze casting is loosely attributed to Desiderio da Firenze (active Padua, 1532–45), who worked in the Veneto around the time of its creation, or an unknown Paduan workshop. Twelve variations of pyramidal and drum perfume burners produced in this Paduan workshop are located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (invs. 41.100.78a-d and 1982.60.108); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (unknown inv. number and inv. 1942.9.140); the Wallace Collection (S66); the Victoria and Albert Museum (M.677-1910); the Rijksmuseum (BK-1957-3); the Louvre (OA.7406, .8256); and the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig (unknown inv. number). Drum burners are found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (invs. 1975.1.1396 and 1975.1.1397) and the Ashmolean Museum (WA2004.1).

2. I do not address the incense burner’s casting technique in this essay. For an analysis of the New York incense burner’s casting technique, see Madison Clyburn, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Object File (ESDA/OF), the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a study I wrote in a Bard Graduate Center seminar on bronzes held at the the Met and taught by Denise Allen, Elyse Nelson, and Jeffrey Fraiman in Spring 2020.

3. Giovanni Battista de Leone (ca. 1480–1528), Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531), and Livio Maggi da Bassano (active 1506)—three of the five Humanists who served as massari (presiding members) on the Council of the Arca del Santo—contributed to the Paschal Candelabrum’s iconographic program, which promoted complex theological and philosophical concepts. The Candelabrum was meant to mark the first light of Christ on Easter morning. Read philosophically, the candle’s flame is akin to divine light, which “illuminates the intelligence and kindles its innate appetite at the very moment when, moved by love, it turns to God.” See Davide Banzato, “Riccio’s Humanist Circle and the Paschal Candelabrum,” in Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze, eds. Denise Allen and Peta Motture (The Frick Collection, 2008), 41–45, 58. For an image of Riccio’s Candelabrum, see Web Gallery of Art, https://www.wga.hu/html_m/r/riccio/candelab.html.

4. According to the proto-feminist Venetian author, Moderata Fonte (1555–92), “…God has even thought to place these [assistive] powers in plants to aid us in our infirmities. How grateful we should be!” See Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 168 for the complete passage. On the importance of “healthy” air, see Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially “Chapter 3: Worrying About Air,” 70–112.

5. The studiolo had many functions in sixteenth-century Italy: it was a room for reading, writing, introspection, sociability, business, and diplomacy but also a curated space that functioned as the “innermost secret chamber of an individual’s personal world”; see Chriscinda Henry, Playful Pictures: Art, Leisure, and Entertainment in the Venetian Renaissance Home (Penn State University Press, 2021), 43. On the relationship between an individual’s studiolo, their possessions, and mental stimulation, see Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (Yale University Press, 2004), 31–32.

6. Robert Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), 59.

7. Jessica Hughes, “Dissecting the Classical Hybrid,” in Body Parts and Bodies Whole, eds. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, and Jessica Hughes (Oxbow Books, 2010), 109.

8. While many of these tabletop perfume burners were used in Northern Italian homes, international students and tourists from England, France, Germany, and Poland (to name a few locations) likely purchased similar burners to take back to their home countries. On the demand for small, luxury, utilitarian bronzes that decorated upper-class homes in sixteenth-century Italy, see Denise Allen and Peta Motture, eds., Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze (The Frick Collection, 2008) and Peta Motture, The Culture of Bronze: Making and Meaning in Italian Renaissance Sculpture (V&A Publishing, 2019).

9. Ovid offers a more traditional account of the satyr in his Metamorphoses, describing “old Silenus, drunk, unsteady on his staff; jolting so rough on his small back-bent ass,” amid a Bacchanal. Ov., Met. 4.1.

10. Italics mine. Erasmus, “Adages: 1 Sileni Alcibiadis / The Sileni of Alcibiades – 100 Intersecta musica / The music is cut off,” in Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages: II vii 1 to III iii 100, trans. R.A.B. Mynors (University of Toronto Press, 1992), 263. For the satyr’s various meanings in early modern humanist culture, see Anthony Parr, “Time and the Satyr,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2005): 451–53.

11. For an overview of the concept of the grotesque in early modern Italy, see Alessandra Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque: Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau (Thames & Hudson, 2008). On the metamorphizing aspect of the grotesque, see Luke Morgan, “The Grotesque and the Monstrous,” in The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

12. For Bacchus’s role in early modern philosophical conceptions of drunkenness, see Charles H. Carman, “Michelangelo’s ‘Bacchus’ and Divine Frenzy,” Notes in the History of Art 2, no. 4 (Summer 1983): 8, and Florence M. Weinberg, The Wine & the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity (Wayne State University Press, 1972), 45–52.

13. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Spring Publications, 1985), 168–71.

14. The Italian humanist philosopher, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), influenced by Neoplatonic theories of metaphysical unity and the Soul, suggests that Bacchus, the “leader of the muses, in his own mysteries, that is, in the visible signs of nature, will show the invisible things of God to us as we philosophize, and will make us drunk with the abundance of the house of God.” See Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Hackett Publishing, 1965), 13–14.

15. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Platonism and Neoplatonism influenced humanist thought, art, music, and literature, especially through the concept of Beauty. The contemplation of Beauty stimulates the soul’s transcendence through the material world to achieve revelation in a spiritual one. See, Umberto Eco, History of Beauty, trans. Alastair McEwen (Rizzoli, 2005), 48–51, 90 and Paolo Euron, Plotinus, Neo-Platonic and Christian Conception of Beauty (Brill, 2019), 25–28, 41–45.

16. Yuan Yuan, The Riddling Between Oedipus and the Sphinx: Ontology, Hauntology, and Heterologies of the Grotesque (University Press of America, 2016), 51–52. On the sphinx motif in Northern Italian bronzes, see Charles Avery, “The Riddle of the Sphinxes,” in Il Bresciano Bronze Caster of Renaissance Venice (1524/25-1573) (Phillip Wilson Publishers, 2020).

17. The earliest extant version of the story is found in the Greek scholar Athenaeus of Naucratis’s Deipnosophists (c. 200 CE). The riddle goes: “On earth there is a two-footed and four-footed creature, whose voice is one. / It is also three-footed. It alone changes its nature of all the creatures / Who move creeping along the earth, through the sky or on the sea, / But when it walks relying on the most feet, / That is when the speed in its limbs is most feeble.” Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, trans. David Mulroy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 91–92.

18. Shells’ association with a “mystical journey” derives from ancient Greek and medieval Christian narratives. In the classical tradition, shells signify Venus’s birth from the sea and subsequent transport to land via a scallop shell. In Christian practice, scallop shells have long been used as pilgrim badges to represent a pilgrim’s physical and spiritual journey. See, Rebekah Compton, Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 215-216, and Ann Marie Rasmussen, Medieval Badges: Their Wearers and Their Worlds (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 123–126.

19. Without X-ray fluorescent (XRF) testing on the entire incense burner, we cannot determine if the bronze’s metal content is uniform or different in each of the four parts, preventing a definitive answer as to its homogenous manufacture. See Robert H. Tykot, “Investigating Ancient “Bronzes”: Non-Destructive Analysis of Copper-Based Alloys,” in Artistry in Bronze: The Greeks and Their Legacy (XIXth International Congress on Ancient Bronzes), ed. Jens M. Daehner, Kenneth Lapatin, and Ambra Spinelli (The J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty Conservation Institute, 2017), 289–299.

20. Nineteenth-century European cultural modesty led to the hasty creation of more decorous finials. For an explanation on the finial’s offensive iconography and replacement, see Jeremy Warren, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Italian Sculpture: Volume One (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016), 294–95; Tilmann Buddensieg, “Die Ziege Amalthea von Riccio und Falconetto,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen (1963): 148–50; Bernard de Montfaucon, Supplément au livre de l’antiquité expliquée et representee en figures Vol. I (Paris, 1724), 139–41. For a drawing of the original finial with smoke emanating from the top in a similar dome-shaped perfume burner, see “Drawing of a perfume burner, sent from Hamburg to the abbé de Montfaucon in Paris in 1718,” (Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; photo Bertrand Jestaz) reproduced in Jeremy Warren, Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum: Volume 1 Sculpture in Metal (Ashmolean Museum Publications, 2014), 202.

21. On the production and dissemination of erotic imagery in sixteenth-century Italy, see Sara F. Matthews-Grieco, “Satyrs and Sausages: Erotic Strategies and the Print Market in Cinquecento Italy,” in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (Ashgate, 2010), 19–60. By nature of utilitarian bronze objects’ multifunctionality, it is important to note that the original finial’s erotic imagery of a copulating couple may speak to its potential use as a therapeutic object in which prescription aphrodisiacs meant to encourage male and female fertility were burned.

22. Though Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen all differ to varying degrees in their beliefs on the origin and location of the soul within the body, they all agree that pneuma is a vital substance, necessary for life.

23. For more on Padua’s medical curriculum, see Jerome Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” in Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 344–45.

24. By the end of the sixteenth century, the University’s botanical garden contained more than one thousand species of medicinal and non-medicinal plants. See Elsa M. Cappelletti, “The Botanic Garden of the University of Padua 1545-1995,” Botanic Gardens Conservation News 2, no. 4 (1994): 23–6.

25. After the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–17), the Republic of Venice effectively managed Padua’s educational activity. Fabio Zampieri, Alberto Zanata, Mohamed Elmaghawry, et al., “Origin and Development of Modern Medicine at the University of Padua and the Role of the ‘Serenissima’ Republic of Venice,” Global Cardiology Science and Practice no. 2 (2013): 151.

26. Leah Clark, “From the Silk Roads to the Court Apothecary: Aromatics and Receptacles,” in Courtly Mediators: Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 196–262.

27. “A far profumo odorifero da profumar una casa” and “Profumo humido per camere,” in Giovanventura Rosetti, Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria… (Venice: 1555), 7, 48.

28. “Profumi Molli in Padellette per odorare le stanze” and “profumi da Abbrucciare in dieci modi,” Wellcome Collection, London, MS.485, ff. 124-6, 213-5; “Profumo camere nobilissimo,” BNCF, Florence, Palatino 915, f. 8r.

29. Paula Hohti Erichsen, Artisans, Objects, and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 39.

30. For scented wall and floor cleaners, see Fabrizio Nevola, Street Life in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 2020), 91.

31. The central tenet of Hippocrates’s humoral theory relies on balancing the four bodily fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Humoral theory differs from Galen’s complexion theory, in which the body’s combination of heat, moisture, coldness, and dryness determines a person’s temperament—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic—and overall balance tempered by food, drink, cosmetics, medicine, and air, each believed to contain degrees of hot, dry, cold, and wet. For more, see Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (Ecco, 2007).

32. This room’s contents—books, vases, a bronze bell and candlestick, a carved face, a figurine, and boxes, including one of medals—evoke an appreciation of the classical past. They also reveal the sitter to be an educated and cultivated man of the Church well-versed in humanist collection practices in a time where classical philosophy and Christianity co-existed. For a reanimation of this drawing using the 1586 inventory of the Venetian patrician, Francesco Duodo (1518–1592), see Dora Thornton, A Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 1997), 38.

The Allure of Vision: The Act of Seeing in Albert van Ouwater’s The Raising of Lazarus

by Sunmin Cha

Albert van Ouwater’s The Raising of Lazarus (ca. 1460–1475) is a spectacle in every sense of the word. This rare surviving work by the pioneering Haarlem painter is not only a visual feast for the viewer but also a profound meditation on the act of seeing itself.¹ The painting is populated with carefully rendered figures dressed in vibrant, richly detailed attire, their varied poses and expressions drawing the eye across the composition. In the foreground, the viewer encounters the striking figure of Lazarus himself. His pale, lifeless body, now restored to life, is depicted in a vulnerable state of nudity, drawing immediate attention to the miraculous narrative from the Bible. Arriving in Bethany four days after Lazarus had died, Christ met Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s two sisters. After reaffirming the faith of the sisters, Christ called upon the dead man. When he said, “Come forth, Lazarus,” in front of the cave where he had been buried, Lazarus came out with his hands and feet bound in graveclothes.

Previous scholarship refers to Rogier van der Weyden’s The Exhumation of St. Hubert (fig. 2) in the National Gallery, London, as the direct model for Ouwater’s panel, explaining his innovative composition as an imitation of the master.² However, such an interpretation does not fully account for Ouwater’s distinctive approach. In this essay, I argue that Ouwater deliberately rendered Christ’s miraculous act as a visual spectacle. In doing so, he juxtaposed the biblical narrative with the contemporary liturgical spectacle of the Eucharist.

It should be noted that the moment of Lazarus’s resurrection had rarely been depicted in independent panel paintings in the Netherlands during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Traditionally, this theme was confined to illuminated manuscripts, particularly within the Office of the Dead in Books of Hours, where its placement underscored the narrative’s relevance to prayers for the deceased.³ Ouwater’s—or his patron’s—decision to isolate this moment from its traditional narrative context and depict it as an independent panel painting marks a significant shift. It transforms the scene from a private devotional aid in small-size manuscripts into a striking large-scale visual spectacle.                                                        

Moreover, Ouwater’s panel strikingly departs from the biblical description as well as the pictorial tradition.⁴ He moved the event to the choir of a Romanesque church.⁵ This indoor setting of the scene contradicts the biblical account of the event, which precisely refers to Lazarus’s tomb as a “cave.”⁶ To the best of my knowledge, Ouwater’s painting is the only fifteenth-century Netherlandish panel to set the Raising of Lazarus within an architectural interior.⁷ For instance, two Flemish manuscripts, roughly contemporaneous with Albert van Ouwater, depict the resurrection of Lazarus in a distinctly different manner from Ouwater’s panel. One is found in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry which was illuminated by the Limbourg brothers between 1411 and 1416 (fig. 3). Another manuscript, known as the Salting Hours, was made in the workshop of Simon Marmion around 1470 (fig. 4). In both manuscripts, the Raising of Lazarus appears in the opening page preceding the Office of the Dead. While architectural elements are present, the open fields, trees, and expansive sky clearly establish the outdoor setting.⁸

In Ouwater’s panel, the inner space of the Romanesque church is occupied by the biblical figures. The painter clearly separated the spectators into two contrasting groups. To Lazarus’s right stands Christ, who has raised him from the dead with his hand in blessing. Mary kneels at Christ’s side, facing her brother in prayer. Martha—the second sister of Lazarus—and three disciples complete the group of people gathered around Christ. Each of them is depicted in humble gestures of devotion and reverence. In stark contrast, the figures on Lazarus’s left—lavishly dressed Jews—add an element of opulence and skepticism to the scene. Among them, two individuals vividly cover their noses, recoiling from the stench of the decaying body of Lazarus.⁹ The visceral response not only heightens the realism of the scene but also evokes a multi-sensorial dimension, inviting viewers to imagine themselves present in this miraculous moment.

In the immediate foreground, the protagonist of the narrative, Lazarus, emerges from his grave in a strictly frontal position, directly facing the viewer.¹⁰ In the miniature examples, Lazarus is depicted rising out of the grave in an oblique pose as he gazes at Christ (figs. 3 and 4). This is also visible in a later painting by Geertgen tot Sint Jans (ca. 1465–1495), who was a disciple of Ouwater (fig. 5).¹¹ In these instances, the pictorial emphasis is on Christ, not Lazarus. As Lazarus’s body and gaze guide the beholder’s attention to Christ, they emphasize that the miraculous resurrection of the dead was made through the intervention of God. On the contrary, Ouwater put a greater emphasis on Lazarus. In his painting, Christ is relatively invisible compared to Lazarus whose centrality and frontality immediately capture the beholder’s attention.

The unusual prominence given to Lazarus may allude to the Mass.¹² Since the earliest days of Christian theology, Lazarus’s resurrection has been understood as a prefiguration of Christ’s own resurrection and, by extension, the Eucharist. Just as Lazarus emerged from his tomb after four days, Christ rose from the dead. During the Mass, this resurrection was symbolically reenacted each time the priest elevated the host above the altar, emphasizing the transformative power of the sacrament.¹³ Twelfth-century theologian Simon Tournai likened Lazarus’s resurrection to the miraculous transubstantiation at the Eucharist, emphasizing that both events defied natural order through divine intervention.¹⁴

Indeed, the prominent place of Peter in Ouwater’s painting alludes to the priestly role in the sacrament of the Eucharist.¹⁵ Behind Lazarus stands Peter, who uses an expressive gesture to point out to the Jews the deep meaning of the miracle that is taking place before their eyes. Ouwater has given Peter an unusual position at the very center of the composition. Not only does he conspicuously occupy the middle of the painting, but his wide-open arms also introduce the resurrected Lazarus to the spectators in the painting and to the viewer outside the painting. His significant role in the resurrection of Lazarus is testified neither in the Bible nor in the preceding images.

Behind him, the remaining part of the building is separated by a wall-like structure. Behind this structure, the crowd trying to witness the event is seen through the grate of the window, and these figures form a dynamic, densely packed group. Their presence suggests the widespread fascination and curiosity surrounding Lazarus’s resurrection. Yet these figures are not merely decorative; they become participants in the drama, as they bear witness to the climactic moment of Lazarus’s resurrection.

Compared to the onlookers in The Exhumation who surround the entire ambulatory behind the screen, they occupy only a small part of Ouwater’s painting (figs. 6 and 7). However, the meticulous depiction of their gestures and faces effectively conveys their desire to witness the miraculous event in front of them. Given the approximately nine people tightly squeezed into a small window-like frame, one can almost feel how they push each other to get a better view of the miracle. For instance, one man raises his chin to look beyond another person in front of him, which shows his intense desire to witness the event. Even though Rogier van der Weyden’s panel is much more crowded, the onlookers behind the choir screen do not show any eagerness to see the event happening before them. Their calm and even aloof attitude strikingly differs from the spectators in The Raising of Lazarus who indeed illustrate the dynamic act of seeing.

Together, the figures of Lazarus and Peter, along with the spectators arranged along the vertical centerline of the painting and set within a Romanesque building, visually evoke the ritual practice of the Eucharist as understood in the late medieval period. As Miri Rubin has argued, at the center of the whole religious system of the Late Middle Ages lay a ritual which turned bread into flesh.¹⁶ The Eucharist serves as a means for believers to recall Christ’s past sacrifice while making it present and accessible to them. Through this reenactment of the original sacrifice, the ritual renews and imparts grace.¹⁷ However, the participation of the laity was limited to viewing the sacrament, as they rarely consumed the Host on days other than Easter.¹⁸ Instead, they regularly attended church to witness the Elevation of the consecrated Host.¹⁹

The exceptional level of desire to see the resurrection of Lazarus figured in Ouwater’s painting, in fact, parallels contemporary worshippers’ yearning to participate in and see the Elevation of the Eucharist. The Elevation was essentially a moment of the display. Introduced in the twelfth century, the ritual of raising the Host was designed to visually engage the laity and mark the moment of transubstantiation—especially since most worshippers had little understanding of Latin prayers.²⁰ To enhance its visibility, measures were taken such as suspending a brightly colored cloth behind the altar or using candlelight to silhouette the raised Host.²¹ In fact, according to a fifteenth-century Augustinian monk, some worshippers even called out to the priest, urging him to raise the Host higher.²² To see the Host was the most important element for late medieval devotees during the celebration of the Mass. This was to see the real presence of Christ.

Albert van Ouwater’s The Raising of Lazarus captures a dual spectacle: the viewer outside the painting marvels at Ouwater’s technical mastery and vivid storytelling, while within the painting, the spectators themselves behold the miracle of life restored by Christ. The late medieval viewer of Ouwater’s painting could identify with the onlookers behind the window, who embody the visual experience during the Mass. Indeed, a man clothed in red, looks directly at the viewer and urges us to join him. In this sense, the real spectators and painted spectators converge in Ouwater’s painting. This multi-layered interplay between seeing and being seen transforms the theme of the Raising of Lazarus into a deeply immersive experience, inviting the audience to reflect on their own role as spectators of the miraculous.

^{____________________}

Sunmin Cha is a PhD candidate at Columbia University focusing on the intersections between religious iconography and artistic production in sixteenth-century Haarlem, with a particular emphasis on the Man of Sorrows. She is currently writing her dissertation which examines how artists like Maarten van Heemskerck, Cornelis van Haarlem, and Hendrick Goltzius responded to the religious and political shifts of the time through their paintings.

^{____________________}

1. The attribution of The Raising of Lazarus to Albert van Ouwater (ca. 1415–1475) is largely based on the description of Karel van Mander: “I have seen a grisaille copy of a large, upright painting done by Albert, portraying the Resurrection of Lazarus. The original had been taken to Spain in a tricky way, without any payment having been made, after the siege and surrender of Haarlem. The figure of Lazarus was beautiful for its time, a remarkable nude painting. An architectural detail in this picture was a temple, of which the columns were rather small. On one side, apostles were shown, on the other, Jews. There were pleasing female figures in the picture, too. In the background some people could be noticed looking through a colonnade of the choir. (Daer was vam hem een paslijck groot stuck in de hooghte, waer van ick heb ghesien een ghedootverwede Copie, en was de verweckinghe van Lasarus: het principael werdt nae d’Haerlemsche belegheringhe en overgangh, met ander fraeyicheyt van Const, van den Spaengiaerden bedrieghlijck sonder betalen ghebracht in Spaengien. Den Lasarus was (nae dien tijt) een seer schoon en uytghenomen suyver naeckt, van goeden welstandt. Daer was een schoon Metselrije van eenen Tempel: doch de Colomnen en t’werck wat cleen wesende, op d’een sijde Apostelen, op d’ander sijde Ioden. Daer waren oock eenige aerdighe Vroukens, achter quamen eenighe, die toesaghen door Choor pilaerkens.)” Carel van Mander et al., The Lives of the illustrious Netherlandish and German painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603-1604): preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and works of Karel van Mander, painter and poet and likewise his death and burial, from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck (1616-1618) (Davaco, 1994). 1: fol. 205 v. The original Dutch is cited from James Snyder, “The Early Haarlem School of Painting: I. Ouwater and the Master of the Tiburtine Sibyl,” The Art Bulletin 42, no. 1 (1960): 42.

2. Stephan Kemperdick, “Albert van Ouwater: The Raising of Lazarus,” Oud Holland 123, no. 3/4 (2010): 241–43. Kemperdick convincingly demonstrates that the motif of the onlookers placed behind a grate in the ambulatory, the brightly lit ambulatory itself, and the open grave placed parallel to the picture plane in a tiled floor are noticeable in both paintings. However, his research likewise focuses on creating lineage between the artists. Based on Ouwater’s familiarity with the van der Weyden panel, he assumes the possible training of Ouwater in the southern Netherlands.

3. Kathryn M. Rudy, “A Pilgrim’s Book of Hours: Stockholm Royal Library A233,” Studies in Iconography 21 (2000): 250. Books of Hours were personal prayer books modeled after the breviaries used by monks and religious communities. Typically, Books of Hours included a variety of prayer sequences or offices, such as the Little Office of the Virgin Mary, the Office of the Holy Cross, and the Office of the Holy Spirit. The Office of the Dead was a specific sequence of prayers intended to be recited for the souls of the deceased, particularly aimed at reducing their time in purgatory. It was often visually introduced by scenes of death and resurrection, such as scenes of Hell, Purgatory, and the Raising of Lazarus.

4. Jacqueline E. Jung, “Seeing Through Screens: The Gothic Choir Enclosure as Frame,” in Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens East and West, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection: Harvard University Press, 2006), 185–88. In her research on the Gothic choir screen, Jung specifically points out that the indoor setting of the painting contradicts the biblical description of the tomb of Lazarus. She compares the wall-like structure in Ouwater’s The Raising of Lazarus with the Gothic choir screen, which does not only conceal the sacred event from the laity but also reveals it to them.

5. Kemperdick, “Albert van Ouwater,” 235. Carved reliefs on the Romanesque capitals of the ambulatory depict scenes from the Old Testament—the Flight of Hagar and Ismael, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Moses Before the Burning Bush, and God Giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses. Snyder argues that Ouwater placed the event in the choir of a Romanesque church to show that the Old Testament period is ended by the age of the Messiah. Snyder, “The Early Haarlem School of Painting: I,” 39–55.

6. “Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.’” (John 11: 38–39).

7. Although I have not encountered any other depictions of the Raising of Lazarus set within an architectural interior from any period or region, given the vast scope of surviving visual material, I remain cautious about stating categorically that Ouwater’s panel is entirely unique in this regard.

8. In the miniatures, the architectural elements play only ancillary roles compared to the Romanesque building in Ouwater’s panel that encompasses the entire biblical scene. The destroyed Romanesque building in The Raising of Lazarus from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry implies the coming of Christ and the transition from Judaism to Christianity. Simon Marmion also depicted architectural detail in the background which looks like the wall of a city or the exterior of a building.

9. This does not imply that the negative depiction of the Jews is the original invention of Ouwater. In fact, the hostile depiction of Jews and negative connotations were highly prevalent in the religious images of northern Europe. However, they usually appear in the Passion cycle, especially as the tormentors of Christ. The scholarly discussion on Jews in premodern European society and their visualization is extensive. See Moshe Lazar, “The Lamb and the Scapegoat: The Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery,” in Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, eds. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (New York University Press, 1991), 38–80; Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (University of California Press, 1993); Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History, trans. John Bowden (Continuum, 1996); and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton University Press, 2003).

10. His frontal view strikingly contrasts with the almost horizontal body of St. Hubert in Rogier van der Weyden’s painting, an alleged source for Ouwater. Without any mediating help, Lazarus stands up. The rigid frontal body of Lazarus and vertical direction recall the body and movement of Christ in his own resurrection.

11. Henry Martin Luttikhuizen, “Late Medieval Piety and Geertgen Tot Sint Jan’s ‘Altarpiece for the Haarlem Jansheren’” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1997), 192.

12. As the resurrection of Lazarus prefigures that of Christ, the tomb in Ouwater’s painting also reminds the viewer of Christ’s sarcophagus. Given that the altar was commonly interpreted as Christ’s allegorical tomb since the Carolingian period, the parallel placement of the tomb is significant. Godefridus J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (E.J. Brill, 1995), 186–202.

13. Luttikhuizen, “Late Medieval Piety,” 192.

14. Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event, 1000–1215 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 15.

15. Even though he does not carry his attributes, Peter’s physiognomy is recognizable. By the fifteenth century, St. Peter was commonly portrayed with a distinctive bald patch on the crown of his head. Since the ninth century, only priests were permitted to handle the host, which led to the widespread practice of the priest placing it directly into the worshipper’s mouth. This reinforced the priest’s role as a mediator between the divine and the laity. Luttikhuizen, “Late Medieval Piety,” 196.

16. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.

17. Luttikhuizen, “Late Medieval Piety,” 194–5.

18. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 64. The laity seems to have avoided communion at least in part due to concerns about placing Christ in their unworthy bodies. They worried about whether they could have sexual intercourse upon receiving the sacraments without stripping Christ of his virginity and wondered what would happen to Christ if they became ill.

19. Luttikhuizen, “Late Medieval Piety,” 198.

20. Robert W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400-1800) (Brill, 2001), 90. A gesture of elevation came to mark the moment of consecration to offer its meaning to the audience, the real presence of Christ. As medieval theologians agreed that the transubstantiation occurred after the priest’s consecration of the Host with the words, the Elevation after consecration signifies Christ’s corporeal presence at the Mass.

21. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 54–63.

22. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (University of California Press, 1987), 55. The Augustinian monk, Gottschalk Hollen, vividly attested to such enthusiasm as “they come when they hear [the] bell, entering to see elevation, and when it is over they leave running and fleeing, as if they have seen the devil.”

David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and (Other) Worlds Past a “Pre-Invented Existence”

by Gillian Yee

When Peter Hujar died from AIDS-related complications on November 26th, 1987, David Wojnarowicz’s first inclination was to photograph his mentor and former lover’s body in excruciating detail. In the chapter “Living Close to the Knives,” from his memoir Close to the Knives, he recounts his experience with Hujar’s death: the rapid decline in his physical and mental health, his angry outbursts as he sought last-ditch attempts for treatment, and Wojnarowicz’s attempts to talk to him as he coasted in and out of consciousness on his hospital bed. This chapter further describes Hujar’s last living moments in painstaking detail. Following the twitching of his eyelids, the final slow, steady intake of breath, and an all-encompassing stillness of his body, Wojnarowicz’s ensuing impulses managed to surprise even himself:

… I barely cried. When everyone left the room I closed the door and pulled the super-8 camera out of my bag and did a sweep of his bed: his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble, the full sense of the flesh of it. Then the still camera: portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again—I kept trying to get the light I saw in that eye—and then the door flew open and a nun rushed in babbling about how he’d accepted the church and I look at this guy on the bed with his outstretched arm and I think: but he’s beyond that.¹

In a whirlwind of quickly intensifying emotions, Wojnarowicz’s impulse was to visually capture this intimate encounter with death that would heavily influence the rest of his artistic practice. Although the 23 resulting photographs taken in these moments allude to his lifelong occupation with human consciousness and mortality, they also permitted him to reside in an in-between space where both life and death coexist, and where Wojnarowicz was unrestricted by society’s expectations to grieve properly.

Living during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz resented the idea of “properly” dealing with these experiences of tremendous loss. This meant grieving quietly and out of sight, thus following a Euro-American tendency to deny, ignore, and avoid death and its resultant indicators. Many of the works he would create in the following years would directly respond to the deaths that resulted from the overt, widespread neglect and maltreatment of populations most affected by HIV/AIDS. Wojnarowicz’s photographs of Hujar show how this exploration into the “essence of death” acts also as an exploration into existence beyond the grasp of the “pre-invented,” which he describes as: “A place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies.”² The pre-invented existence is therefore one that, in its ascription of white cisgender heterosexuality as the norm, commonly restricts life and marginalizes individuals based on race, class, gender, and sexuality in its promises of false histories and futures.

In using death and the corpse as the subject for his work, Wojnarowicz utilizes that which is typically considered abject as visual provocation for unraveling the boundaries between interior and exterior, self and other. In questioning the processes of subjectification—the defining of the ever-transitory, networked, indeterminate, and ephemeral self—this work offers an alternative ontological viewpoint regarding human existence, refusing to be bound by commonplace definitions of what being human is and how one should exist.³ That is, death and life are not two ends of a binary where cross-contamination (the “infection” of life with death) signifies abjected Otherness but are intertwined in a never-ending dance of feelings, sensations, intensities, and memories.

Both in their galleries and online collections, the Whitney Museum of American Art commonly displays three of these photographs as a triptych (fig. 1). Each black and white print shows its respective body part in complete isolation from the rest of Hujar’s figure; there is nothing else within the frame to focus our gaze on aside from the rumpled fabrics of his hospital gown and the bed linens below him. By isolating and centering the body parts almost perfectly within each frame, Wojnarowicz’s intimate shots of the (dead) body force the viewer to focus on details that might have gone unnoticed if he had captured the complete form. With the shot of Hujar’s head, for example, one’s gaze may catch at the places where shadows dance underneath his unkempt beard or the dip of his clavicle. In this same photograph, his vacant, unfocused stare interrupts a viewer’s gaze and discomforts them; it looms out from underneath half-lidded eyes, cast far beyond the picture plane. In their invitation for contemplation and close looking, the parts of the body presented in each photograph almost take on a life of their own, eliciting different sensations in their viewers and pointing to the reality that although we idealize our identities as whole concepts, they are often naturally incomplete and without borders. Wojnarowicz’s practice of separating the body into pieces through the camera lens, then, enforces the multiplicity of the human form, bypassing common perceptions of identity and knowledge as each piece holds distinct meaning and value for the photographer.

As Tomasz Sikora asserts in his analysis of Wojnarowicz’s work, death and mortality play a vital part in the artist’s oeuvre by producing an array of sensory and affective responses not commonly associated with the lifeless body, called “queer life-worlds.”⁴ Refusing to gloss over what we consider bad experiences that produce negative feelings, Sikora argues that Wojnarowicz used photography and the subject of the lifeless body in tandem to propose these experiences as an avenue toward extending our existence past our corporeal forms. As such, his work subverts the expectation of death as a bad experience; in its place is an embrace of “the cosmic dance of photons and images and bodies and sensations,” where a focus on lived experiences with new ways of feeling, living, and being affected give way to possible life-worlds that are alternative to pre-codified attachments in a necropolitical state.⁵

Hujar’s body is an exploration into these worlds through Wojnarowicz’s take on the essence of death: “the fears and joys of it the flight it contains … just all the thoughts and sensations this death this event produces in bystanders more spirituality than any words we can manufacture.”⁶ Undeterred by a reductive life/death dichotomy, Wojnarowicz utilizes these photographs to emphasize the ability to connect within a larger matrix of human existence. The close-up shots of his body—perhaps replicating a gaze that carefully and lovingly regards another’s body one final time—contribute towards a sense of absolute veneration, grieving the loss of one of the most influential men in Wojnarowicz’s life and capturing, in simple shots, all the wonderful memories and joy this body brought him over the years. It is a radical gesture of love and intimacy, an expression of life and death simultaneously, and a transformation of death from an all-encompassing endless void to a liminal state of being that allows temporary freedom from what he calls a pre-invented existence.

Wojnarowicz’s response to Hujar’s death is immediate artistic action, turning towards the reception and production of aesthetic sensations instead of rendering the dead body a passive, powerless object. As he lands his photographic gaze on different parts of Hujar, he releases the parts from the organic unity of the body, as if they’ve “become their own little persons” with their own subjectivities, histories, and sensations.⁷ In each shot, Wojnarowicz lays bare his relationship to this body so informed by love, intimacy, respect, and raw connection that it goes far past what should be conceivably possible in a pre-invented world of self-regulation and carefully codified rules. The photographs of Hujar’s body thus unravel the boundary between “I” and “Other” rather than reinforcing it, sharing contemplative, quiet, life-changing moments suspended in time, as if they represent the artist’s eyes traveling over Hujar’s corpse for the first time. They seek to capture the amalgamation of beauty, joy, and acceptance within a subject commonly associated with ugliness, trauma, and rejection.

As self-regulatory subjects within a pre-invented existence, we reject death as the supposed antithesis of life and avoid signifiers of death (i.e., aging and disease) because they threaten to violate a life/death binary. In contrast, the mournful quality of Wojnarowicz’s photographs is, as Marietta Radomska states in their discussion of queer death studies, an example of “practices that transgress the effects of white humanist melancholia and establish a relational ethics apt for unlocking congealed power matrices, and opening towards alternative futurities.”⁸ These images of the corpse become a conduit for alternative ways of being, inhabiting a liminal space where one isn’t cast into the outer bounds of society due to attributes of race, gender, sexuality, and able-bodiedness.⁹ Such an alternative is apparent in these quiet moments after Hujar’s last breath, when Wojnarowicz is alone with his body and captures all the things he finds beautiful and captivating. There is, in these alternatives, a certain freedom from a pre-invented existence that can only be seen and witnessed in death.

^{____________________}

Gillian Yee (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at Temple University specializing in global contemporary art history from 1980 to the present. Their goal as a scholar is to explore the realm of queerness, transness, and “non-normative” identities within art practices, thereby circumventing a traditional canonical understanding of the discipline.

^{____________________}

1. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Open Road Integrated Media, 2014), 111-12. Super-8 cameras are typically for recording video, but in this instance Wojnarowicz only used one for photography.

2. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 96.

3. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond. Abjection Incorporated (Duke University Press, 2020), 19.

4. Tomasz Sikora, “Queer Life-Worlds and the Art of David Wojnarowicz,” Journal of Gender Studies 29, no. 1 (December 15, 2019): 76-87, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692194. 

5. Sikora, “Queer Life-Worlds,” 82.

6. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 111-12.

7. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 82.

8. Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke, “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective,” Australian Feminist Studies 35, no. 104 (April 2, 2020): 92, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952. 

9. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 118.

Echoes of Shamanism: Reimagining Tradition and Chance in South Korea

by Hamin Kim

As part of its New Year’s event, Hyundai Artlab commissioned artist Maia Ruth Lee to create a set of symbols predicting fortunes for 2024. This virtual project, titled Glyphoscope 2024, invited participants to select three cards from a set of twenty, each resembling ancient hieroglyphs (fig. 1). The experience, similar to drawing tarot cards, presented a brief interpretive text and a series of keywords that were drawn both from the selected glyphs as well as the initials of the participant’s name, offering a personalized set of affirmations to carry into the New Year. The interactive nature of this project, which combines algorithmic patterns with chance elements, reflects the enduring desire to find clarity amid the uncertainties of the future. Practices like fortune-telling, which are carried out with varying degrees of sincerity, remain deeply ingrained in contemporary society. We continually “test” our luck in various ways, from opening fortune cookies to seeking advice from clairvoyants.

Notions of chance and future prediction have often been dismissed as magical, unscientific, and illogical. Traditional faith systems that embrace such values have been in perpetual tension with the scientific worldview that emerged during the Age of Enlightenment. Especially in many countries that experienced colonization, this tension led to the suppression or transformation of indigenous traditions in favor of modernized (and often Westernized) visions of the future. South Korea followed a similar trajectory. Despite the influence of Confucianism during the Joseon Dynasty (13–19th centuries), and the introduction of Christianity in the late 19th century, shamanism, the primordial religion of Korea derived from Siberia and Northeast Asia, remained deeply embedded in the base of the country’s cultural terrain.¹ Even during the period of rapid modernization during the 1960s to 1980s, when the authoritative South Korean government promoted uniformity and the Western standard of development while simultaneously stifling individual creativity, people continued to turn to shamans in times of crisis or uncertainty, relying on the power of luck to avoid misfortune.²

Shamanism saw a resurgence in the early 21st century in the arts as South Korea gradually globalized after the end of the Cold War in 1989 and established a democratic government shortly after. Authoritative values in the past gave way to diversity and cultural heterogeneity, and the contemporary art world moved towards a “global pattern of flow and resistances” rather than the dichotomous view of center versus periphery.³ Artists started to take notice of the potential of shamanism as an apt alternative to a strictly rational, scientific worldview. Their reexaminations found a more fluid, empathetic approach to considering human nature. This new understanding of shamanism was a central theme in the 2014 Seoul MediaCity Biennale, titled Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers. The Biennale’s director, Park Chan-kyong, focused on marginalized yet potent entities in society. He explained his decision to juxtapose three seemingly disparate figures:

Spies seen in the movies look attractive, but “spies” (gancheob) in the news are terrifying.⁴ One should worship god in ancestral ceremonies but stay far away from the ghosts you encounter during the night. Grandmothers should be respected, but in reality, they are expelled outside the huge wave of praise for the young. You notice them sometimes, but they are generally difficult to spot; or one does not wish to see them, or should not see them. They are skilled in silence and possess top-level information. Hence they cry out, confess, disclose or testify. They easily become paradoxical beings according to the situation.⁵

The convergence of the three symbolic figures—ghost, spy, and grandmother—underscores Asia’s ongoing effort to transcend forcefully inserted Westernized influences and reclaim its original heritage by positing a “modernity against modernity.”⁶ Park’s theme was not incidental; it was the culmination of his own documentary, Manshin: Ten Thousand Spirits (2013), which unraveled the complex and ambivalent emotions surrounding shamanism in Korea through the life of Kim Keum-hwa, the country’s most renowned manshin (shaman). The predominantly female demographic of Korean shamans ties to the figure of the “Grandmother,” who venerates shamanistic deities or “Ghosts,” and who has witnessed the tumultuous 20th-century history in Korea, where many formative and socio-political events were often centered around “Spies.”

Shamanism experienced another resurgence during the 2020 Covid pandemic. In 2021, the Ilmin Museum of Art opened their exhibition entitled Fortune Telling, which provided an outlet for exploring and processing collective anxieties in a time marked by uncertainty. The exhibition drew on shamanistic practices as well as traditional East Asian philosophies, including the concept of yin and yang, and the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), which comprised the fundamental categories in Chinese cosmology to understand the universe. The harmony and balance of these forces were thought to govern the natural world and human life. This exhibition exemplified how what was once seen as occult has been recontextualized in contemporary art as a way to bring comfort to the audience. As part of the show, a shaman with an art educational background produced a museum audio guide and artists invited participants to engage in saju readings (fortune-telling based on one’s birth date) as part of a performance.

The exhibition space was divided into two sections, “fate” and “counseling,” suggesting that for the curators, these concepts are interrelated: fate serves as the foundation of existence, while counseling offers therapeutic guidance in navigating fate and finding inner peace. Indeed, the exhibition is also living proof that what was once viewed as an occult practice of communicating with otherworldly entities became more accessible with the popularization of diluted forms such as saju, tarot readings, and face readings—practices that were considered safer and relatively more scientific—grounded in statistical reasoning rather than ghostly communications. Fortune Telling offered visitors a way to reflect on the emotional and psychological challenges of the pandemic, bridging ancient philosophies with contemporary concerns (fig. 3). This renewed interest in shamanism and traditional cosmology highlights how people seek comfort and meaning from deeply rooted cultural practices, especially during times of crisis.

Although shamans remain somewhat intimidating figures due to their perceived possession by spirits, artist Haegue Yang offers a more sympathetic interpretation. She notes that “today’s shamanism has been tainted by a culture of unscientific superstition or prayers for personal prosperity. In the past, shamanistic rituals (guts) were performed for communal well-being—to bring rain, end droughts, or ensure the safe return of those who had left their homes.”⁷ Her ongoing project, Mesmerizing Mesh (2021–), folds and cuts pieces of traditional Korean paper, evoking symmetrical ritual paper props used by shamans (figs. 5-6). The mass of works explores shamans as intermediaries between the divine and humanity, although the artist laments that shamans themselves often remain marginalized.⁸

However, Yang also poignantly points out that the preservation of tradition may have political connotations, particularly in parts of Europe, where it is sometimes used to justify exclusion and anti-immigration sentiments.⁹ Nonetheless, many non-Western countries, especially in the Global South, share similar sentiments toward shamanism as those illustrated above in the case of South Korea, including an ambivalence toward rooting their historical narratives that were once superimposed by imperialism and capitalism. The quest to reconnect with their roots remains ongoing.

Understanding shamanism and its reception in the contemporary world is far from straightforward. It is a complex and multi-layered process, entangled with the legacies of imperialism, questions of legitimacy and self-doubt, and the unpredictable nature of future prediction. Despite this complexity, the exhibitions and participating artists highlight the potency of shamanism as a transgressive and healing force embedded in the lives of many. By looking into works on both institutional and individual levels, Korean contemporary art in the context of shamanism deals with defying logical explanations and offering a path for those seeking meaning in an increasingly uncertain world.

^{____________________}

Hamin Kim (she/her) is a PhD student at Boston University whose research centers on modernization and globalization in Korean art from the 20th century onwards, with particular emphasis on Korea’s cultural exchange with Japan and the United States and the history of performance in Korea.

^{____________________}

1. The survival of Korean Shamanism amidst the influx of Christianity is detailed in Oak, Sung-Deuk, “Healing and Exorcism: Christian Encounters with Shamanism in Early Modern Korea.” Asian Ethnology 69, no. 1 (2010): 95-128.

2. Although sporadically, artists continued to investigate shamanism in their practices during the 20th century. The most salient efforts were made in the Minjung (People’s) arts movement during the 1980s but also through individual efforts including the photographer Lee Gapchul’s Confliction and Reaction series (1990-2002) as well as Lee Seungtaek’s Wind series (1967- ) etc.

3. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 46-47.

4. In the original Korean statement, Park differentiates between Western “spies” and “spies (gancheobs).” The former evoke Hollywood’s James Bond archetype—sleek and glamorous—while the latter refer specifically to North Korean operatives who infiltrate South Korean society to steal sensitive information. These North Korean spies are often portrayed as petty and unrefined, embodying a dirtier, more sinister image.

5. Park Chan-kyong, “Why ‘Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers’?”, Accessed September 23, 2024, http://archive.mediacityseoul.kr/2014/en/introduction/2014theme/ghost-spy-grandmother/.

6. This is not to suggest that all Western influences introduced in Asia were imposed by force. However, the remnants of colonialism, as opposed to voluntary cultural exchanges, have left more profound impacts on later generations. My aim is to highlight the involuntary aspects of Western influence rather than to dismiss Western influence in Asia as wholly negative. Additionally, the phrase “modernity against modernity” is derived from the original Korean title of the Seoul MediaCity Biennale.

7. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are the author’s. Jaeyeon Cho, “Double Souls, Dialectic of the Truth: SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst Haegue Yang solo exhibition, Double Soul,” Art in Culture [translated from Korean], April 2022, 166-67.

8. “Beyond Paganism and Shamanism: Haegue Yang in Conversation with Kirsty Bell on Mesmerizing Mesh”, July 2, 2022, Haegue Yang, accessed on September 2, 2024, http://www.heikejung.de/list_of%20texts/KirstyBellHaegueYangMM.pdf. 

9. “Haegue Yang: Handles, Haegue Yang Interview,” W Magazine [translated from Korean] (November 4, 2019), https://www.wkorea.com/2019/11/04/%EB%A7%9D%EA%B0%81%EC%9D%98-%EC%86%90%EC%9E%A1%EC%9D%B4/ (accessed on September 20, 2024).