Iakov Levi

Truth Is a Woman: Bernini - Giorgione - Manet

Oct. 23, 2004

Supposing truth is a woman - what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: - and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. (F.Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil, Preface).

Courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive - so wisdom wisheth us; she is a woman, and ever loveth only a warrior. (F.Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, 7)
 

Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Truth Unveiled by Time 1645-52

The association between Truth and Mother - Woman is omnipresent in mythology. In Egypt, Truth was represented as a goddess, Maat the sitting goddess.  In Hebrew, the same goddess became the word Emeth, which means "Truth". In Mesopotamia, Inanna, the goddess of sacred harlots and fertility, was associated with wisdom. In Greece, the goddess of Wisdom was Athena, who was also called Meter (mother). She is a later evolution of Medusa, herself strongly associated with primal wisdom. Sophia, which in Greek means "wisdom", is feminine, and became also a personal name. In Hebrew, where official censorship was able to repress every image of a goddess, all the concepts associated with truth, wisdom, intellectual penetration etc. are feminine: Torah (the written law), Mishnah, Gemarah (the oral law), Emeth (truth), Chochmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), Da't (knowledge). Theodor Reik wrote a paper on the Torah as the symbol in Judaism of the unconsciously repressed Mother.

In our unconscious, as in archaic minds, there are no "similarities", but only equivalences. When we dream, we never intend that one thing is like another, but that it is the thing itself. For instance, if we dream a horse, and by the chain of associations it becomes clear that the image represents a person, the meaning is not that that person is like a horse, but that he actually is a horse.
In the same way, in our unconscious there are not particles and prepositions: "as", "like", "non" et. As Freud stated: "our unconscious knows no grammar". For being non - existent, something must exist, in the first place. Henceforth, the denial is always a later overlay, product of a mechanism of defense against drive - contents, which are unacceptable to consciousness. The denial is learned by the Ego during the process of education, namely during the process of interaction of the Id with the environment.
The instinctual drives are channeled by the Ego into representations through censorship, distortions, and isolation. What had been the thing, becomes similar to the thing (metaphor), an abstraction (allegory), and even the non - thing (denial). It took a long time to mankind to learn to take distance from its original drives. Still in historical times, with the introduction of writing, it was impossible to discern between a concept and its opposite, because to the primitives a thing could not be a non - thing. Only later, the ancients introduced prepositions, as an addition after the hieroglyph or the ideogram, in order to make place for the denial or the metaphor.
Allegories, being a further abstraction, are even much later.

Henceforth, truth is not like a woman, but it is a woman. The later overlay, namely the metaphor or the allegory, is engendered in the concrete thing.
Once upon a time, in our repressed childhood, we were eager to see the female genital, to unveil it and to understand its substance. Later, we transferred and sublimated that urge into the desire to know the world and how it works, but that urge refers to a repressed but very concrete thing: the female genital. The naked woman (the concrete need) became “Truth” (the abstraction), and not the other way around.

During the Counter - Reformation allegories were much in fashion, in order to enlist unconscious images which reconnect to concrete libidinal needs, and therefore are always charged with libido's energies, to the "Truth" that the Catholic Church wanted to reiterate. Today, the same device is used in commercial advertising. The difference is that the Church pretended that the image is not what was represented at the manifest level, but a higher spiritual concept. Modern advertising has not such pretensions.

Bernini's statue of Truth Unveiled by Time represents a naked woman. Everyone can see that the representation is a naked woman. The desire is immediately activated at the sight. It is very concrete, indeed. Now that the libido has been fixated on the woman's flesh, it is enlisted to the educator's aim of delivering a religious message: the object of your lust must be the Church's Truth. As Nietzsche said: "The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must still seduce the senses to it" (Beyond Good and Evil, 128).
Under the pressure of Luther's Reform, the Catholic Church tried to seduce the believers' senses as much as possible to the purpose of enhancing its own cosmic Truth. The concrete thing (the female genital) became an abstract concept. However, the abstract concept, which is an overlay, could not take hold if the source of our craving for truth was not a voyeuristic instinctual drive towards the female body. Successful propaganda (and advertising) is in activating a repressed drive and in enlisting it to the purpose of convincing. The libidinal drive cannot be invented out of the blue. It can only be activated.

For instance, if the statue, instead of being a naked woman, were an elephant, the title Truth Unveiled by Time, would have no meaning, because our unconscious does not associate truth with elephants but with naked women.

At this point, in order to prevent the original urge of staring at the female genital emerging to consciousness, we trigger a mechanism of defense called isolation (or insulation). Namely, the real thing (the emotion - lust - libido) is repressed. The image is sterilized from its real substance, which is the emotion. The libido is displaced from its original source, and transferred to the abstract concept. Now the statue becomes an allegory, and priests, bishops, cardinals, and saints can stare at the naked woman, at the same time denying that they are actually doing just that.

Now we can better understand why in 1863, Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'herbe", based on a work by the Italian Old Master Giorgione (some scholars say by Titian), caused a scandal among Parisians by showing men in contemporary dress with a female nude. Giorgione's "Concerto campestre" did not cause any scandal more than three hundred years earlier, even if the female nudes represented by him are no less erotic than the one painted by Manet.

Moreover in Manet’s painting the female genital is concealed by the woman’s leg whilst in Giorgione’s it is explicitly shown. 

Giorgione continued the trend established by the Masters of the Renaissance. Masaccio, Masolino and Michelangelo did not paint allegories. However, their nudes reconnected to the ideals of the Classic world, and therefore did not cause any scandal. Their alibi was that if the Masters of the ancient world did it, they could not possibly intend the "real", brutal thing, but an ideal of the real thing, and therefore sterilized from "unsocial" connotations. After all, Plato had shown how the real thing might easily be transformed into its ideal. Projected into Heaven, the human genital loses its beastly appeal. It becomes a concept. The process of sterilization and isolation of human instinctual drives through art has a long story.

Giorgione and the Venetian Old Masters represent a change of style from their Florentine counterparts. Instead of the classic plastic harmony, they used the language of color, in order to create a heavenly atmosphere of idealization of human forms. In Concerto campestre, the event is still an earthly one, but it is idealized by the uncharacterized, stereotyped images, which reconnect to an ideal timeless world.
However, whilst Prassiteles, Masaccio, Michelangelo, and even Giorgione still intended real nudes, human nudes, even though their idealization, the Counter – Reformation's artists and Bernini among them introduced an inversion. It is not the human nude represented in its ideal form, but it is the religious concept, which enlists the human form in order to make its revelation (epiphany). At this point, under the pretension of nullifying the human, the go - ahead was also given to the enlisting of the senses to their extreme excitement. The Baroque is the style of the orgy of flesh representations: "if it is not flesh but an abstract concept, we are allowed to represent it to satiety".
It is possible that Nietzsche was thinking of Roman Baroque, when he said: "The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must still seduce the senses to it".

Bernini's statue represents the perfect allegory. We see the nude of a very erotic woman, but the isolation sterilizes the original drive through the declaration of faith: "we are staring at cosmic Truth". The isolation process is facilitated by the stereotyped Dionysian smile of the woman (very similar to the smile of Bernini's angel in the famous Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome).
There was only one caveat: the genitals themselves could not be shown. At difference of their Renaissance predecessors, Baroque painters pumped the flesh but covered the genitals, to the point that where Masaccio and Masolino had painted them in their nudity, the censors of the XVI century added fig leaves as a cover up. The Catholic Church had learned very well Plato's lesson: art must be enlisted but not trusted.
Having encouraged the senses' excitement, now the real thing became too dangerous to the isolation process: the senses must be excited, but must also be kept under control. Otherwise, the real repressed instinctual content might show its substance and emerge from the removal.

The unfortunate Neo - Classic period was a trial to temperate the excesses of the Baroque through the impossible endeavor of imitating classic and Renaissance models. Imitating is always a bad receipt for enhancing artistic talent. Nevertheless, idealizing the human, or enlisting the human to abstractions enhancing the divine, remained the devices through which the isolation process was implemented.

Then, came Manet and his Dejeuner sur l'herbe.
As we have seen, representing a naked woman was nothing new. However, looking at Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, the spectator has the sensation of confronting a nude more naked than the ones in Giorgione's Concerto campestre. It is very strange, because in Giorgione's painting, the genital of the woman is explicitly shown whilst in Manet's work it is covered by the woman's leg. The same can be said on the second Manet's nude Olympia. Though Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe sparked controversy in 1863, his Olympia stirred an even bigger uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Conservatives condemned the work as "immoral" and "vulgar."

Through a characterization of the protagonists' faces, Manet rendered the images more vivid and present to our unconscious. Moving away from the stereotype and removing the cover of idealization, he threatened to invalidate the mechanism of isolation. The original lust might now emerge to consciousness. He called the bluff: "The Emperor is naked".
Indeed, we find a perfect example of a collapse of the isolation's mechanism in Hans Andersen's tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes". The isolation's mechanism is an Ego overlay, and in children is weaker, because they are more connected to the original drives. Children are more natural and spontaneous than adults, who invested more energy in taking distance from the original contents through mechanisms of defense. As narrated by Andersen, the Truth, in its double sense, erupted spontaneously through the mouth of a child.

In dreaming, we use up too much of our artistic capacity
and therefore often have too little of it during the day
(F.Nietzsche, "The Wanderer and its Shadow", 194, in II Human All too Human)

Artistic representations, as dreams, work their way by synthesis and condensation.
Different layers of psychic contents condense in the same representation.
Presenting to us a woman and a man with a characterized expression, Manet threw the spectator into a dimension of reality, which gives a different level to the nude, more present, and therefore more threatening to the mechanism of isolation.
However, there is another level, which condenses with the sensation of "here and now", and adds to the Uncanny of the work of art.
At first glance, female genitals look very similar one to another, simply because, at difference of the male's, the female organ is internal, and not external. I suppose that at a confrontation, police station style, it would be very difficult to recognize the culprit with a high degree of certainty. What render women recognizable is the face. That the issue is the face, and there we should search for the clue, is hinted by the repetition of the intense glance of the woman in the glance of the man sitting by her. As stated by Theodor Reik: "the unconscious behaves like the ancient languages. Both express the importance and significance of a process by means of repetition" Most interesting to compare with: "The dream was doubled to Pharaoh, because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass ( Genesis, 41:32).
The glance is the same, hinting that the meaning of the surrealist situation (a nude with two completely dressed men) is to be searched in the face, particularly in the eyes, and the face of the woman expresses a presence, not an idealization, nor an allegory.
The naked woman speaks to us: "You want to know whether my nude is an allegory? Look at my face, and you will understand".

The libido energy was displaced from the genital to the face (transference), as is the case in the myth of Medusa.

Staring at Medusa's face, the young Greek heroes were petrified by terror.
The public's indignation at the Paris exposition was a mechanism of defense against the emerging terror triggered by the collapse of the isolation's process. Perseus could defeat Medusa only staring at her face (i.e. at her genital) through a mirror, namely isolating the true substance of the representation. A face reflected in a mirror is not the true thing but only a reflection. And so had been female nudes in art, until Manet and his Dejeuner sur l'herbe.
Freud said that the "Uncanny" (Das Unheimliche) is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar:

For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. 

The Uncanny of Manet's painting is the repressed drive (familiar and old-established in the mind), which ought to have remained hidden but came to light, and now threats emerging from the repression. Henceforth, the angry and scandalized reaction of the public when Manet's painting was first exposed.

As is written in the Gospel: "And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away" ( Matthew 18:9). Therefore, it is the eye the sinful organ, which must be punished (torn out = castrated), as in Oedipus' tragedy, where there is an obvious displacement from the genital to the eye.
Mark states the same: "If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out! It is better to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell" (Mark, 9:47), and Nietzsche commented to this verse: "It is not exactly the eye that is meant..." (The Anti - Christ, 45). In his peculiar irony, Nietzsche disclosed that he had captured the real meaning of the displacement.

Furthermore, it is not casual that for hundreds of years women have been taught to lower their glance, as a sign of modesty and decency: a straight glance is equivalent to an erection, and only men are supposed to have erections.

The eye is the lamp of the body.
So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light
(Matthew 6:22)

I found only one previous case, not casually contemporary of Giorgione and Titian, in which the woman is staring with the same intense glance as in Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, and the painting did not cause any scandal: "La Maddalena" by Gerolamo Savoldo:

Gerolamo Savoldo, La Maddalena (London National Gallery)

The reason is clear: the eyes are very immodest, but Mary Magdalene, who is otherwise usually represented half – naked, in this painting is over - dressed. Her too chaste Islamic dress, counter - balances the "indecency" of her seducing glance.
Even so, she is more "uncanny" than Giorgione’s, Titian’s and other painters’ naked women, whose eyes are quite inexpressive and staring aside.
 

NOTES

1. "The Re-Emerging Mother-Goddess", in Pagan Rites in Judaism, Farrar & Straus, New York 1964, pp.66 - 68)

2. In exciting the senses of the believers, the Catholic Church achieved also another aim. As Freud has shown, an excited libidinal need, which is frustrated, triggers a sense of guilt.
Exposing the public to the over - stimulation of senses, and then declaring that "the desire of the flesh" is to be considered sinful, the Church triggered that sense of guilt and need of atonement, which is the best instrument for controlling people. Luther and his Reform represented a serious threat to the rule of the Church, which was losing control on the masses. Exciting the senses, and then frustrating them, was a very astute device for regaining control through the people's sense of guilt.
After the council of Trent, for the first time artists were actually instructed by the Church on what should be the purpose of art: not the vehicle for expressing a need, but the enlisting of the need in order to seduce the spectator into religious beliefs. To the puritan challenge of Luther, the Catholic Church responded by seducing the senses.

Nietzsche captured the substance of the enormous pressure Luther's Reformation acted on the Catholic Church. As he says:

Renaissance and Reformation. The Italian Renaissance contained within itself all the positive forces to which we owe modern culture: namely, liberation of thought, disdain for authority, the triumph of education over the arrogance of lineage, enthusiasm for science and men's scientific past, the unshackling of the individual, an ardor for veracity and aversion to appearance and mere effect (which ardor blazed forth in a whole abundance of artistic natures who, with the highest moral purity, demanded perfection in their works and nothing but perfection). Yes, the Renaissance had positive forces which up to now have not yet again become so powerful in our modern culture. Despite all its flaws and vices, it was the Golden Age of this millennium. By contrast, the German Reformation stands out as an energetic protest of backward minds who had not yet had their till of the medieval world view and perceived the signs of its dissolution-the extraordinary shallowness and externalization of religious life-not with appropriate rejoicing, but with deep displeasure. With their northern strength and obstinacy, they set men back, forced the Counter Reformation, that is, a defensive Catholic Christianity, with the violence of a state of siege, delaying the complete awakening and rule of the sciences for two or three centuries, as well as making impossible, perhaps forever, the complete fusion of the ancient and modern spirit. The great task of the Renaissance could not be carried to its completion; this was hindered by the protest of the now backward German character (which in the Middle Ages had had enough sense to redeem itself by climbing over the Alps again and again) (Human All Too Human, I, Par. 237).

3. The Puberty Rites of Savages", in Ritual, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946, p.140.

4. Freud Sigmund, "The Uncanny" [Das Unheimliche], 1919, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 240-243.

5. For more on the eye as a genital substitute, cf. Abraham Karl, Restrictions and Transformations of Scoptophilia in Psycho - Neurotics; with Remarks on Analogous Phenomena in Folk - Psychology, 1913.

Copyright © 2004 Iakov Levi