Five Spirals for December - #5 Song of the Morning by Nicholas Roerich

Song of the Morning, 1920, Nicholas Roerich. Nicholas Roerich Museum, NY.
Geometry: 2023, DS.

"The Awareness of beauty will save the world."

- Nicholas Roerich

"The pursuit of refinement and beauty was sacred for Roerich. He believed that although earthly temples and artifacts may perish, the thought that brings them into existence does not die but is part of an eternal stream of consciousness—man’s aspirations nourished by his directed will and by the energy of thought. Finally, he believed that peace on Earth was a prerequisite to planetary survival and the continuing process of spiritual evolution, and he exhorted his fellow man to help achieve that peace by uniting in the common language of Beauty and Knowledge.

...Nicholas Roerich died in Kullu on December 13, 1947. His body was cremated and its ashes buried on a slope facing the mountains he loved and portrayed in many of his nearly seven thousand works.

As he wrote: 'Let us be united—you will ask in what way? You will agree with me: in the easiest way, to create a common and sincere language. Perhaps in Beauty and Knowledge.'"

 - All quoted text above was sourced from Roerich.org. - the first (and most comprehensive) port of call for all things Roerich. But, the story of Russian Symbolist painter, Nicholas Roerich and his wife Helena is unusually extensive. The couple's Neo-Theosophical spiritualism was particularly influential in the States in the earlier half of the 20th century; so influential that there is actually a term for it: Roerichism. It is hard to believe that the Roerichs somehow faded into obscurity in America during the latter half of the century but they did.

(Note: Nicholas Roerich was first introduced on this blog in the Nijinsky post.)

"In December 1923, Roerich and his family arrived in Darjeeling, India in search of a mythical kingdom called “Shambhala”. Not to be found on any map, the Roerichs travelled across 25,000 kilometres of uncharted road to find the Kingdom that the Buddhists, Hindus, Tibetans and local healers so firmly believed in.

According to legend, with the spread of materialism, humanity would deteriorate and the people of Earth would unite under an Evil leader. This leader would attack the Kingdom of Shambhala with  terrible weapons and that’s when he would be defeated, ushering in a new Golden Era of peace and harmony. "

- Via the fascinating article: Explore the Himalayas : Paintings by Nicholas Roerich. Regarding the legend of the "evil world leader"... well, if prophetic, the question might be: which one?

The Hunt, 1937, Nicholas Roerich.

"Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred."

- A paragraph from At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Interestingly, Lovecraft references Roerich's "strange" paintings of the Himalayans several times during the tale. The painting above might be an example of what Lovecraft had in mind.

"Through his spiritual journeys into the Himalayas, Roerich also developed a deep sense of the role that the feminine principle had in the evolvement of humanity. Several of his paintings depict this importance, particularly, The Mother of the World. The Letters of Helena Roerich, written by his wife, explains the importance of this work: “The ‘Mother of the World’ is at the head of the Great Hierarchy of Light of our planet. Read in the Cryptograms of the East the narrative about the Mother of the World, and accept it as the highest reality.”

Helena Roerich further explains the inspiration for the painting, 'The star of the Mother of the World is the planet Venus. In 1924 this planet for a short time came unusually near to the Earth. Its rays were poured on Earth, and this created many new powerful and sacred combinations which will yield great results. Many feminine movements were kindled by these powerful rays.'"

- Via this Theosophical article: Nicholas Roerich: The Treasures Within.

Roerich was very close to his wife Helena. One might say they enjoyed a soul-mate relationship. Both were feminists and it was their belief in the World Mother that brought them into conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church (see: Sophiology) . Inset left is one version of the Mother of the World painted by Roerich in 1937.* The reference to Venus as the Mother's Star is interesting, and in the course of this post we will meet another reference.

***

There's something very special about the woman in Roerich's Song of the Morning.

To begin with, she's extremely beautiful. She's a brown woman... possibly Mongolian... with a fruit-of-the-earth, nuts and berries kind of beauty... but, she has another outstanding feature...

Five Spirals for December - #4 The Vision of St. Cecelia by Orazio Gentileschi

The Vision of St. Cecelia, Orazio Gentileschi (1620). Geometry: 2023, DS.

In ways, this post is an addendum to my previous (2022) Gentileschi post where the image above was first introduced. At the time, I had just had an automobile accident and my computer was stolen from the trunk of my destroyed vehicle. So, I wasn't able to overlay a spiral.

But, I have that capability back again, and, once tested, The Vision of St. Cecelia proved to be as golden as I suspected; and, actually, a little bit more! Orazio's spiral accomplishes what every good spiral ought to; it behaves like a clockwork.

As you can see from the images above, inset left, and inset below - and to see them best, click on any one of them for a sort of slide show - regardless of the spiral's size or orientation, its basic relationship to the image is not changed; it's proportions are, instead, systematically measured.

The spiral's activity in relationship to the painting, in this case, is determined by the apex (or acute tip) of the triangle and its direction in relation to the angel. The smallest spiral - and the most basic - informs us of the general focus of the design, which, as we might suspect, begins with the angel - Cecilia's "vision" - but  inevitably terminates on the body St. Cecilia.

But, Orazio has gone one step further. His spiral can be rotated (clockwise) and he shows precisely where it ought to go. First, the apex is turned from the angel's waist - its robes tied up in what appears to be an enormous bow - to the end of the white fabric. Note that the triangle's side is now facing Cecilia's pipe organ (inset right). Note also that, after every shift, the spiral still terminates on some portion of Cecilia and/or her clothing. How well this works, of course, relies on the size of triangle - the further the spiral has to turn will require a larger spiral.

Lastly, we carry the spiral to the furthest notch: indicated by the end the palm branch held in the angel's hand. The spiral is now enlarged (see below) and the triangle's side is up against the pipes of the organ... a perfect alignment. Is this significant? Well, yes, because, as it happens, Saint Cecilia is the Patron Saint of Musicians and Music. So, the spiral has made a cryptogram.

Of course, it might help to know Saint Cecilia's official story. But, I'll have to be brief, because I can't quite get it myself.

In Orazio's painting, the man in red facing Cecilia is most likely her formerly pagan husband, Valerian (who converted to Christianity), and the man in the doorway is her brother-in-law. All that's missing from the frame is the Roman soldier who was eventually martyred along with the rest of them. (although I haven't the faintest idea why). In any case, she and her husband must've never consummated their marriage before their untimely deaths as Cecilia died a virgin. She also "sang in her heart to the Lord"... and, along with martyrdom and her virginity is how she became a saint.

BTW, the 2 small wreaths of flowers - in the angel's hand and behind Cecelia, on the pipe organ - are chaplets of roses and lilies.

Another image that appeared in the first Gentileschi post in which I also found a spiral is the painting of Mary Magdalene, created by Orazio's daughter, Artemisia... an artist rediscovered, perhaps, fifty years ago or less. And they are still discovering her! (Image is below the jump.)

Anyway, Artemisia has finally come into her own in the modern world, and, if you have little prior knowledge of her, I suggest you read this older Green Women post...

Five Spirals for December - #3 One Winter's Night... by Erté

Winter (1 of 4 from a seasonal suite), Erté. Geometry: DS.

One Winter's Night

As I walked along my favorite path through the trees that night, a path almost entirely obscured by drifts of snow, I stopped once to look at the crescent moon - for it was huge in the sky - when I saw something very curious on the slope below me. Leaning against an old tree and enveloped in its shadows was the form of a woman - sans clothing - lying in the snow, her white face faintly glowing against its trunk. Uneasily, I began to walk towards her. It was then that I realized she was never a living woman at all. She was made of snow; a snow-woman!

Of course, upon this realization, it also came to me that someone must have created her. My first thought was that some juveniles had vandalized my property. Who else but a teenaged boy would build a naked woman out of snow? And, then I thought my would-be Picasso must know quite a bit about human anatomy; the snow-woman was fashioned far too well. But who? There are no young people in the neighborhood... certainly no vagrant artists. I chose this part of the country for it's solitude.

But, the story gets stranger... because scraping against her frozen torso was a tree branch. At least, it appeared to be a tree branch animated by the wind, but it behaved like a hand; a hand with twigs for fingers. I can still remember this dark branch hand moving like an enormous insect shadow against the snow. It was as if the tree itself was perfecting the snow woman's form; a form it had created! Shivering, I turned and would have half-ran home... but then I saw the flower. A Christmas rose. They grew here and there across the countryside. It was if it had risen of its own accord up through the snow-woman's lap. But, I could see, even from my distance, that its stem had been carefully poked into the snow furrow where her inner thighs met. A joke? An enigmatic prank?

Or, was it art... created by the wind with cooperation from the falling snow... and a tree, who even as I produced this thought, seemed to rearrange it's branches, flinging snow in my direction? Now shaking from the bitter cold, I decided to continue my musings in the shelter of my living room. I'll write it all down... and then, hopefully, forget it.

- I figured, this image needed a narrative, so, I wrote it. Inset right is a photo of a "Christmas Rose," that is, the hellbore plant (helleborus niger) featured in Erté's image. A very interesting winter plant!*

As for the image, is it just me, or does that stump of a tree limb hovering over the snow-woman's shoulder kind of appear like a faceless head wearing a white wig? Moreover, doesn't the shape of the sky inside the spiraling tree look like the silhouette of a man's narrow head with the tree trunk extending from the area of his nose? In any case, Erté's snow-woman sure beats the standard snowman. 

"If you lived through the '70s and '80s, you saw an incredible revival of a still-living artist whose control over his meticulously rendered images never wavered. He worked up until the last two weeks of his life at 97. He was fond of the publicity he had from his revival, and made many appearances in his celery and lavender-colored suits with scarves and hats adding extra glamour.

Of his hallucinatory and decadent imagination he said, "I'm in a different world, a dream world that invites oblivion. People take drugs to achieve such freedom from their daily cares. I've never taken drugs. I've never needed them."

- Via the 2013 Advocate article: 22 Russians Who We Won't Let Vladimir Putin Forget Were LGBT.

"This book's biographical text is fine enough and is peppered with interesting stories from Erté's career, including an amusing one from 1913 in which he showed up at a Paris dress rehearsal party as an anonymous lady in a red dress, leading the newspapers the next day to speculate as to who the mysterious lady was. In another, he threw one of the leading actresses of the silent cinema, Lillian Gish, out of his studio when she criticized his choice of fabric for one of her costumes, leading to his dismissal. In a tragic story, Erté's business partner and lover of 25 years, Prince Ouroussoff, died from a freak infection contracted from a mere prick of a rose thorn. The death coincided with a decline in Erté's career and fortunes until the 1950s' art deco revival."

- Via this Goodreads review of a 2014 publication of Erté's graphic work. The bit about Prince Ouroussoff and the rose sounds like another strange fairytale! Inset left (above) is a photo of Erté in his 20s.

"Not only do I do what I want to do, but I do my work in my own way and never have been influenced by another artist.  The sole influences on my art, through the course of my entire career, were the Persian and Indian Miniatures and Greek vases I saw in my childhood at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad).  I think that these influences have stayed with me to this day, although they were assimilated long ago."

- Excerpt from: Erté at Ninety: The Complete Graphics. Inset right is the cover graphic. Somewhere in that image... is gold!**

***

Born in the Russian Empire around the turn of the 19th/20th century, Romain Petrovich de Tirtoff was in line to follow his father into the Russian navy. But, then, in a marvelous coup, he moved to Paris in 1910, made art, fell in love with a Prince, and became Erté.

And, what an amazing body of art he produced, developing a distinctive style which combined the clean lines and geometrical elegance of Art Deco with the erotic, organic spirals of Art Nouveau.

Now, about those spirals...

Five Spirals for December - #2 "Princenza Hyacinta" by Alphonse Mucha (Updated 1/8/2024; Rodin)

Princezna Hyacinta (Princess Hyacinth), 1911, Alphonse Mucha.
Geometry: 2023, DS.

"One of Mucha's best Czech posters, printed by the firm of V. Neubert in the Smichov quarter of Prague, was for Princezna Hyacinta, a fairy-tale ballet and pantomime with music by Oskar Nedbal and libretto by Ladislav Novák. The portrait of the popular actress Andula Sedlácková as the princess dominates the poster. The plot develops as a dream of a village blacksmith who falls asleep after digging for a buried treasure. In his dreams he becomes lord of a castle, and his daughter Hanicka becomes the Princess Hyacinth. Of her three suitors, one is a sorcerer who abducts her to his underground palace, but she is rescued by a poor knight who looks like her real-life lover. Mucha used the motif of the hyacinth throughout the entire design, from embroideries to silver jewelry, and for an elaborate circle sparkling against the mossy green background. The portrait of the actress is seen against a sky full of stars and encircled with images from the dream: the blacksmith's tools, a gold crown, hearts speared by arrows of love, the sorcerer's alchemical vessels, and his strange monsters." 

- Via this poster auction page, Princess Hyacinth is a perfect example of  Czech artist, Alphonse Mucha's elegant use of a grand circle in the background of many of his designs. While not all of his designs featuring circles also feature golden spirals, his adorable princess features two, and very nice ones! They're almost mirroring each other, except for the difference in orientation. (See above and inset left.)

"Mucha arrived in Paris in 1887. He was in the fortunate position of being supported by a wealthy patron and he was to enjoy this support for a further three years. With the withdrawal of the Count's support, however, leaner times loomed. Mucha learnt to survive on a diet of lentils and beans and began to eke out a living by providing illustrations for a variety of magazines and books. Once started, he was soon able to establish himself as a successful and reliable illustrator. 

But it was on St Stephen's Day (December 26th) in 1894 that fate singled Mucha out once again. He was doing a favour for a friend, correcting proofs at Lemercier's printing works, when Sarah Bernhardt, the star of the Parisian stage, called de Brunhoff, the printer's agent, with an immediate demand for a new poster for her production of Gismonda. All the regular Lemercier artists were on holiday, so de Brunhoff turned to Mucha in desperation. A demand from 'la divine Sarah' could not be ignored."

- Via this biographical page on the comprehensive Mucha Foundation website, we discover a bit of the serendipity that seemed to be an important element of his career as an artist. He often seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Coming to the attention of Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated stage actress in Paris during the Fin de Siècle (and a force to be reckoned with), was just the opportunity he needed to showcase his talents. His posters for Sarah, such as the one inset right above, were so popular that his work became much in demand. As for Sarah, she had artistic skills of her own (see this post).

"We had rooms next to one another, so we lay on our beds with the doors open. Rodin must have been considerably disturbed because after a while he suggested we should walk around the rooms a bit. I got up and we took a little stroll in our nightshirts, but soon Rodin began to be rather worried because there was a gathering noise outside. Suddenly he grabbed my sleeve. From the street there came a mighty roar like an explosion: “Vive Rodin! Vive la France!” No chance of a rest now, Rodin rushed away from the window and from that moment avoided it like the plague, giving it a wide berth."

- Via this Mucha Foundation page, we have Mucha's description of an amusing moment in time spent with his friend, French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, during Rodin's visit to Prague in May of 1902. Inset left is a photo of the two comrades looking rather dandy - Rodin is on the left - sourced from the Arthive. Then again, and we know this from prior experience, one would have a hard time finding a popular artist at the turn of the century who did not know Rodin; that cat got around!*

***

While I've found Italian Golden connections, French Golden connections, Dutch Golden connections and, finally, the Greek omphalos from which it was spawned, fate left my best discovery till last: Alphonse Mucha, our first Slavic Golden connection... and a true Master of the form. Seriously, his spirals are so spot-on, they are almost diagrams of the golden ratio mechanism itself. Look and learn... and the first thing you will absorb is the usefulness of one strategically placed grand circle in your design; it's relationship to the golden triangle being the golden key to the "divine proportion."

I say no more, but if you are a collector of Mucha's work, you have more gold in your collection than you probably realized; you have some of the most excellent examples of the golden ratio utilized in artwork.

And Mucha was very prolific and his talents were many. He was a graphic artist and an illustrator producing numerous advertising posters, political posters, decorative panels, book and magazine illustrations. He was a serious Symbolist painter - inset right is said to be his portrait of his daughter, the artist Jaroslava Muchová. He was also a mural painter. But, that's not all...

(More below the jump...)

Five Spirals for December - #1 "Night Flight" by Michael Parkes

Night Flight, 2015, Michael Parkes. (Geometry: 2023, DS, 2023.)

Well, it's that festive time of the year again... that is, the year's end. December is a holiday month celebrated by cultures world-wide. So, in lieu of presenting new material in the form of the long (dense) blog post I initially had in mind, I decided to present 5 superb spirals recently found in the course of my spiral journey. Think of them as golden greeting cards. In ways they are historical pieces; for the most part (sacred) geometric artifacts discovered, like Gustav Moreau's Venus, in art from the turn of the 19th century. Speaking of historical, the first spiral I ever posted was on Christmas, 2021.

Above is the first Spiral for this year's holiday season. The image first appeared on this blog in a "swan people" post. At the time, it's sculptor was not known to me and the link to the image has since been lost, but when I recently viewed that post again, the spiral in the image leapt out at me and I just had to formally locate it. For some reason, I had always imagined it as a work of a 19th century European artist, but, no, Night Flight is the work of Michael Parkes, stylistically, a contemporary American Symbolist and Surrealist... although both artistic movements and styles are often (presently) referred to as magical realism.

(The spiral inset left is another possibility. I've begun to see these different orientations of the same basic spiral as, not so much artifacts of the main spiral, but, rather, the indication of a superior spiral - that is, one in which rotation of the triangle does not change the spiral's overall character.)

I generally refrain from analyzing the work of living artists, but, in this case... well, it's such a beautiful example of golden art, I felt compelled to share it.* In spite of the fact that Night Flight is in three dimensions and not two, I have recently found that the spiral can still be "mapped" on an object... and, as it happens, the corresponding points between the spiral mechanism and Parke's sculpture are so elegant, I'm getting the urge to put lights on them! Maybe I will; it's the holiday.

(Note: although one can't be sure, it seems that the spiral in the image is terminating around the figure's hand  which is obscured by the swan's wing in the image shown. See this Pinterest alternate view.)

The reality regarding this holiday season, however, is that I would be blind, indeed, if I overlooked the fact that millions of people might not be celebrating any holiday at all this month. My sincere condolences go out to them for their losses... up to and including the illusionary loss of their true spirits. My sincerest wish is that these spirits are found again after this particular ugly period in history has passed, the toxins have cleared, and all of us can live in peace and dignity again... if not for the first time in history. Blessed be.

December is also the birth month of (some of) those unusual people born under the astrological sign of the Sea Goat, Capricorn; those who should be proud of both of their symbolic heritage and the other movers and shakers born under that sign. Oddly enough, Night Flight has origins that resonate for those Capricorns born on the cusp the year. From the article linked to previously:

"Night Flight from Michael Parkes started life as a painting and was later also realized as a bronze sculpture. The subject is a part of a fairy tale that Michael used to tell his daughter about the world of the swan kingdom. In pursuit of the Unknowable, the swan princess is encouraged by the swans to fly. Until ultimately, like Castaneda’s leaping from the cliff, she will learn to shift from matter into spirit and back again as we all must do eventually."

(More below the jump.)