Melbourne Uni print exhibition, Radicals, slayers and villains, on tour

CRIME, punishment and moral decay are all on show in the Radicals, slayers and villains exhibition of prints.

Apollo flaying Marsyas: The judgement of Midas (1581) by Melchior Meier .

SOME of the technical aspects of printmaking, including the difference between woodblocks and engravings, were discussed here recently in connection with the Art Gallery of NSW survey of prints and drawings. Victoria is hosting another significant print exhibition, which comes from the University of Melbourne collection and, having been displayed at the university’s Baillieu Library, is at Ballarat before continuing next year to galleries in Hamilton and Latrobe.

The title of the exhibition, Radicals, Slayers and Villains, is awkward and sounds like a working title that was never refined, but in the end it may help draw our attention to the obstinate variety and disparity of subject matter in this exhibition, which in turn reminds us of something important about the medium of prints in general.

We are used to thinking of works of art as being unique. A painting is a single object, and today any given painting will be in a particular gallery, or hanging in a church or public building, in a private collection, on the art market or perhaps on loan to another gallery. In reality it is more complicated, since there are sometimes several copies of a given picture, but then there is always an original from which those copies were made. A few weeks ago, for example, it was claimed the original Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1606) by Caravaggio had been found; no fewer than 18 versions were already known, but none was previously considered good enough to be the original.

It is fundamentally different with prints, since there is no original. There may be better or worse impressions, and the sheet may be more or less well preserved, but in principle all copies are equal. This means we do not think of a print as domiciled in any particular gallery, and often we do not know exactly how many copies of any print are still extant.

These differences are intrinsic to the meaning and social role of prints. They were multiples and for that reason less expensive, especially as editions were much larger than the limited numbers of the modern fine art print. They were inherently light and portable and for that matter easily hidden.

They also appeared contemporaneously with printing, and woodblocks were used to illustrate books, since they could be printed in the same blocks as letterpress. Engravings could not be used in the same way, since the intaglio medium required far greater pressure, but they often included engraved inscriptions.

Thus printed images shared the vocation of printed books in disseminating knowledge and fostering the explosion of ideas, philology, scientific research and even controversy from the 16th century onwards. By definition, prints could deal with myriad subjects, but they had a special affinity for the propagation of ideas and the presentation of images of dramatic and wonderful things. Hence, perhaps, the sensationalism implied in the exhibition title.

The best way to enjoy an exhibition such as this is to allow each image to take us on its own journey, in which theme, style and medium weave together to achieve distinct ends. If we are attentive, we will also discover thematic connections from one image to another.

Rembrandt’s etchings are outstanding examples of the seamless union of subject and form. In the magnificent Raising of Lazarus, the figure of Christ stands dramatically in the centre of the composition, emerging from darkness, recalling to life the frail and almost disembodied Lazarus, who stirs from his tomb as though reborn in a pool of light.

Even more subtle as an example of deriving meaning from the use of the medium is his Entombment of Christ, with the dead body in the upper part of the composition and the chasm of the grave below — the two parts of the composition united by the hand that reaches upwards, small and white, a tender expression of pity, against the intense shadow of the background.

On the other hand, a number of works raise a question perhaps unfamiliar to most readers: that of decorum and the rules about what should and should not be shown in art.

Decorum — a word we associate with good manners on a formal occasion — has a particular and double meaning in the theory of literature and art. On the one hand the term is used to refer to accuracy: thus it would be simply wrong to paint Julius Caesar or James Cook with a beard. On the other hand, decorum also refers to the avoidance of the ugly, the grotesque and the obscene.

Ever since ancient literary theory, it was recognised that certain things that could be written about in literature could not be shown in painting. The eyes see too vividly, while language filters the immediacy through the abstract order of words.

Thus extreme violence, mutilations, grotesque transformations, all of which might be described by poets or historians, are seldom found in painting from the 15th to the 18th centuries (although the martyrdom of saints allows for an exception).

These rules of decorum were particularly constraining for painters; they used Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a reference work, but good taste prevented them from directly illustrating most of his spectacular stories of transformation. Titian’s The Death of Actaeon in the National Gallery in London, where the young man has a stag’s head, is a notable exception.

But, interestingly, this prohibition did not apply to illustrations in books, or prints more generally. Somehow, perhaps because they were more ephemeral and not intended for public display, they benefited by the greater latitude afforded to literature, so books could be illustrated with pictures of things that could not be reproduced in painting.

A prominent example here is Agostino Musi’s almost disconcertingly direct image of the evil king Lycaon approaching a sleeping Zeus with an axe to test whether he really is a god and thus immortal. He is already endowed with the head of his namesake the wolf (lukos) — into which the waking Zeus will transform him in punishment for his outrage against a guest. Even more striking is the orgy of violence in Hendrik Goltzius’s engraving of Cadmus’s men slaughtered by the dragon, with a tangle of limbs that is virtually impossible to interpret.

Also extremely violent is Melchior Meier’s Apollo, Marsyas and the Judgment of Midas. The satyr Marsyas had the temerity to challenge the god to a musical contest and is punished by being flayed alive, while King Midas, who failed to appreciate the god’s musicianship in a separate but analogous story, is punished with ass’s ears. If the tone of the picture is strangely ambivalent, it is because the horrible punishment of flaying was allegorically interpreted in neo-Platonic philosophy as signifying the liberation of the soul from the shackles of the body.

Another Apollonian image shows the god slaying the serpent Python in the foreground. But what is really interesting about this picture is the other equally famous story that is implied but not directly told. In a cloud on the upper right we see Cupid and Apollo arguing about the power of their respective bows, and in the centre Cupid fires an arrow of desire at the god, who looks down to a tiny female figure on the ground below. We are left to remember the rest of the story of his pursuit of Daphne.

In the 18th century, Hogarth’s “modern moral pictures”, as he called them, illustrated another use of the printed image — the public addressed here was wider and less erudite, and the aim was one of moral instruction. Two of his most famous series are represented here by single sheets: from A Harlot’s Progress (1732) we see the first plate, in which a young country girl comes to London where she is greeted by the blousy, pox-ridden madam of a brothel; young Moll is already on a path to corruption.

The other is from the symmetrical story of a young man’s undoing, The Rake’s Progress (1735). The third plate in the series shows the wealthy but initially naive young man now wasting his money carousing with whores and scoundrels, unaware that he is being robbed by a pickpocket. In the conclusion of the story, he will be tormented like a damned soul in the hell of Bedlam.

There are two plates from a less well-known series by Hogarth, about the evil career of Tom Nero, who begins by tormenting animals as a child and grows into greater crimes. In one plate we witness his arrest after he has cut the throat of his pregnant mistress. In the other, after his execution, we watch his body being torn apart in an anatomical theatre while in the foreground a dog is about to devour his heart.

Equally dreadful is Goya’s Esto es peor, in which a peasant has been mutilated and impaled by French soldiers. The utter inhumanity of the man’s fate is horribly emphasised by the formal recollection of the great Belvedere Torso in the Vatican.

Another fine Goya is Que viene el coco, in which a woman and child cower in the shadow of an advancing bogeyman. This plate is interestingly juxtaposed with Rembrandt’s Faust and reveals the different approaches to chiaroscuro, the drama of light and shade, in Goya’s medium of aquatint and Rembrandt’s of etching.

The most extreme darkness, however, is achieved by another technique invented in the 17th century but especially popular in the 18th century, mezzotint, in which the whole plate is covered with tiny pits. Areas of light are then produced by burnishing back into what would otherwise be absolute darkness.

Here, in one of his illustrations for Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Martin imagines Satan presiding over the Infernal Council in Pandemonium, the capital of the fallen angels (1825). The image is sinister, but not least for the dimly delineated rows of councillors, extending into the background on several levels. The massed rows of figures are a sight Martin could never have seen but that eerily foreshadow totalitarian party congresses of the 20th century.

Radicals, Slayers and Villains

Ballarat Art Gallery to January 18, then tours to Hamilton Art Gallery and Latrobe Regional Gallery.