New Civilization News: Magdalena

Magdalena

26 Jun 2006 @ 14:33, by Nigella Wraye

PreRaphaelite Dreams

The paintings of this movement have always remained singularly unattractive to my appreciation until learning the following.

One of the main inspirations behind the PreRaphaelite Movement was a newly acquired awareness amongst artists and intellectuals on the periphery of the Catholic Emancipation Act (of Parliament). This itself spurred by the famous Oxford Group dissenters from Protentantism in the wake of a new freedom wave declared on Catholicism in England.

The artist considered to be the most sublime of all the Renaissance artists is Raphael, who unfortunately lived a relatively short life. It is now known that many of Raphaels paintings uses as subject matter, Mary Magdalene, often denoted by the colour orange, green and or red of the chemise, or dress on the bodice part of attire and drapery. Attending one such exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery a couple of years ago was a most heart lifting experience. The extent of beauty in each drawing, etching and painting is simply breathtaking. Raphael must have nursed a fascination with Mary Magdalene, and intellectual circles in Italy must have all hummed and buzzed with the newly found realisations of that time of her friendship with Our Lord, and subsequent escape with family to Provence, and a generation later to England at Glastonbury, where the family line continued to show itself in the Arthurian legends as Sir Galahad renowned for his prayer ability, spiritual experiences, and other worldliness. In the recent debate on the Da Vinci code, authors most knowledgeable have not been quoted, one wonders why? Personally, I do believe completely in Mary Magdalene as close friend of Jesus, and mother of children: Can see why a following sprouted in Provence with her arrival, and can see why this would have created a confusion with the Virgin Mary.

The church strongly denies this, to use the same link as used in Jazzolog, Its a Girl fame, I refer to it again here, being the chief inspiration for this log.

[link]

The second link below is about the womem members of the PreRaphaelite movement. It makies extremely interesting reading, and carries notions both of a real struggle and wish these ladies pursued to a new intellectual line. This line seems permanently to remain a secret. The strength of the movement, to judge from the depth and strength of their art, is not matched at all with the few histories made on this group, namely that it was simply another art movement, albeit the first so called Avant Garde one.

[link]

Quote:
""

As so often in the history of PreRaphaelitism, it is William Michael Rossetti who provides the ultimate verdict. 'All the artists whom I best knew and valued deplored her death as a real loss to art', he wrote in 1906; 'they had looked upon her as the leading hope for painting in the hands of a woman'.(44) Yet had William Michael consulted his sister, another ambivalent PreRaphaelite, he might have seen that his apparently handsome conclusion was still inadequate. What Joanna Mary Boyce's life and work attest to most vividly is the struggle for social mobility and intellectual independence that must come before art, if art is to shape culture in the way that PreRaphaelitism is commonly allowed to have done. This struggle dogged the female artist in the orbit of PreRaphaelitism's challenge; and, when male PreRaphaelites are praised as iconoclasts, trend-setters or free-thinkers, it should be remembered by what comparative privilege they attained such positions. . . . . . "

This article carries a palpable mystery woven between the words although accidental of course.

My first introduction to things Mary Magdalen in High Art (apart from that through the Church at Easter each year), and, most importantly after learning about the Black Maria legends in Provence, through the work of Le Corbusier and his links with the Cathars in the Pyrennes, was while visiting an important historical house from Elizabethan times, in which Queen Elizabeth I lived as a child, in the sixteenth century. In this house were two things connecting the previously collected research above. One was a family tree **chart showing the holy blood line (from Jesus) descending down through time to Queen Elizabeth and the other was a collection of medium sized portraits of Mary Magdalene perhaps 6 or 8 in all. Each one of these portraits, showed a different aspect of prayer or adoration or modesty or self containment in the full Renaissance style at a time shortly AFTER Raphael himself. ((** Family Tree charts showing descendency from the Holy family were very much the vogue for at least 1,000 years, mattered in the survival stakes, and are all related to the Magdelen myth)).

The point which struck me was the fascination that this artist obviously held for Mary M. Catholics are only ever shown pictures of Mary mother of Jesus, so it was with total wonder not only to see so many of Mary Magdalen but also that they were so very beautiful too, and almost completely unknown. (More mystery).

I also believe that Leonardo Da Vinci who was simply a more prolific genius in the art of painting than Raphael, had the capability and talent to show a 13 year old St John in the Last Supper painting without giving rise to doubts that he had actually painted a fully grown woman, if that is what he had intended. Un doubtedly the person next to Jesus in this painting looks like a women, demurely looking down, (ie away from the artists gaze, or photographer) because the most important person and people are Jesus and his disciples. If it were a young boy, he would not need to look submissively but be casting his eyes about like any of the other men disciples. As he was to be the most divine of authors for Jesus, he more rightly could have been seen looking in admiration directly at Jesus without crossing boundaries of acceptable behaviour of the times.

I believe this subject matter represents the depths of the PreRaphaelite movement and the suggestions in their haunting paintings. The sudden interest that must have been accorded Women in this time as is shown continously in the painting of this known style to my interpretation. However, a real contradiction of sorts does come out of both the works and histories written in the links supplied, especially as the Rossetti faction is described as being the Spiritual one, which would be the opposite of Mary Magdalen, who is very much the material counterpart to the truly spiritual Virgin Mary.

More than anything else in the civilisation in our Western world, this myth surrounding Magdalen actually underpins the fundamentals of Christianity, by showing what it is NOT based on, ie normal intelligent woman, but rather the regular myths of Virgin Mary and Jesus.

This does not detract in any way from the myth of Magdalen. As with the opposites of Materialism and Spirit say, the Magdalen myth is as important in the whole Christian tale as that of Virgin Mary, in that it is its very opposite in manifestation and this is the very point of BOTH. This is the continous and infinite Mystery which, I am sure, endures and enthralls, and will continue to do as long as Christianity survives.

One last entry on the artists themselves, is an extract from Wikipedia:

The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:

1.To have genuine ideas to express;
2.To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3.To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote;
4.And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

These principles are deliberately undogmatic, since the Brotherhood wished to emphasise the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and method of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Nevertheless, they were particularly fascinated by Medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to clash with the realism promoted by the stress on independent observation of nature. In its early stages the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that the two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two directions. The realist side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism.

In their attempts to revive the brilliance of colour found in Quattrocento art, Hunt and Millais developed a technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. In this way they hoped that their colours would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity. This emphasis of brilliance of colour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists such as Reynolds, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect which the Pre-Raphaelies despised.

[edit]
Public controversies
The first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite work came in 1849. Both Millais' "Isabella" (1848–1849) and Holman Hunt's "Rienzi" (1848–1849) were exhibited at the Royal Academy and Rossetti’s "Girlhood of Mary Virgin" was shown at the Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner. As agreed all members of the Brotherhood signed works with their name and "PRB". Between January and April 1850 the group published a literary magazine called The Germ. William Rossetti edited the magazine, which published poetry by the Rossettis, Woolner and Collinson, together with essays on art and literature by associates of the Brotherhood, such as Coventry Patmore. As the short runtime implies, the magazine did not manage to achieve a sustained momentum. (Daly 1989)

"Christ In the House of His Parents", by John Everett Millais, 1850. .........................========================================================

Herein begins this thread . . .

NW, June 2006

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Category: Religion

7 comments

26 Jun 2006 @ 17:38 by nraye : Confused?
So was I.

A look at the painting above, shows red chemise and even more, a hand holding the famous Phial, or jar, supposedly the Holy Grail: the painting has to be Mary Magdalene. It cannot be an allusion to anyone else. So, if as all the official historians of the Pre-Raphaelites suggest in the small extracts I have shown suggest, this painting is in complete contradiction to what the historians collectively allude. That the PreRaphaelistes sought a purer form of Christianity and painting of medieval form in relation to Virgin Mary, to judge by the first picture exhibited by Rosetti and confirmed above.

So I believe that what I read on that one occasion that the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired by Mary Magdalen and all she represented in the truth of our western christian church is correct. And what is shown in the extracts submitted here is wrong.

27 Jun 2006 @ 08:15 by jazzolog : Treasuring Our Singularities
Of course, wouldn't you know, I love the Pre-Raphaelites...even if we guys often find ourselves thus in the paintings~~~

The Accolade (1901) by Edmund Leighton

***********

Have to laugh with this! I think Edmund Leighton was made a Lord for his work, and although have visited his unsusual late Victorian house in Kensington, which has an Arabian Fountain room with pool, INside the house, complete with carved wooden trellis shutters on the windows and a profusion of dark blue glazed decorative tiles throughout, one senses this represents the fullest and complete and therefore the final point of Victorian Art Genre possibilities.

Whilst the detail is of quality, the whole is not UP lifting in any way. A characteristic of the Gothic which translates automatically into the ROMANTIC (as opposed the the Classical) in art terms is that there is a telluric, emergence from the earth, sensation to it.

Each individual will have their favourites in the Art world, and it is reassuring to be reminded of such healthy differences abounding!!!

29 Jun 2006 @ 14:07 by swanny : Offspring
Okay...
Well what are the offspring of such then.
A spiritual understanding or a physical babe.
Yet its the old nature nuture debate
or dna vs behaviourism then...

but is there no consensus....
or is it debate for the sake of debate.
What is the foundational aspect than...
The middle class?
I think that was the ulitmate result of the reformation
is the middle class. That is the baby of hmmmmm?
baby of ? a "global moral ascension"...

Middle Class Link = [link]

The onset of the middle class seems to conincide with an increase
of the social dyanmics and complexity of human society perhaps thru
the reformation and the invention of the printing press which allowed for more education and empowerment for many more through the disemination of knowledge.

) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )

Swanny Hi,

This is not Reformation. But 400 years later. Catholic Emancipation which freed catholics from having to sign a register in the House of Lords with Jews for their faith. This also allowed Catholics to own property in London. There was a whole new discourse which probably had its origins with the French Revelution and many escapees from this coming over to England, the Ancien Regime were catholic.
In the Reformation, the Virgin Mary was completely banished from Anglicanism then, all statues smashed, and its phenomena (for that is what it is, something v special) was finally brought back into discussion after just under 400 years.

The Reformation you speak of brought Protestantism, ie No Virgin Mary. If one knows about these things, this is major major. The fact Mary the Virgin was returned to the discussion in the English language is an incredibly important fact in history. There was following this, a renaissance of sorts with the Industrial Age etc in the Victorian age which many people still yearn back over.

[link]
a link for the Victoria and Albert Museum, created for the advancement of ideas and art by Prince Albert.

For me, it is extremely interesting to wonder what the discussions were that took place. The full story is not out yet. For instance could it be that Magdalene myths abounded throughout the Inquisition actually. This would mean that both Magdalen and the Virgin Mary were suppressed at the similar times.

The art of the PreRaphaelites definitely relates to Magdalen, it has a challenging aspect with eyes looking directly, the very opposite of the aspect of Virgin Mary and what she represents. This is for people to discover themselves and stay secret. But the Magdalen myth in a way, being brought out like this by this movement, PRESAGES the enlightenment say of Women. This of course is an Inner Enlightenment of intelligence, a sort of non action intelligence, a sort of realisation but which relies on whole womanhood in the truest sense in order to display its seeming beauty, and as portrayed by the Movement.

Not remotely middle class or Bourgeoise at all. It is INTELLECTUAL, quite different I assure you. American has yet to learn of the Bourgeoise factor, it is there but not recognised yet!!

I see the PreRaphaelites definitely as being of the new freedom. The Oxford Movement had many great Anglo Catholics as they are referred to, and at least one saint. Many many writers were influenced by them

[link]

This church was the result of the Oxford Group and Emancipation Act. It is a rather baroque church inside and very beautiful.

London was a dangerous place in 1830 for a woman alone going about to lectures and gatherings etc. She would have to travel with a Brother or man relation or brother's friend, and this would have been revolutionary, the draw was the intellectual content.

When the historians refer to the PreRaphaelites heeding to the Virgin Mary, they may have done so in discussions and it may have very well been the case with the new Advent of Catholicism in England, but the art work very much concentrates on Magdalen, and this is extremely interesting.

For instance, I know of nothing equivalent nowadays in the Western world that goes anywhere near where they got with the development of these ideas. Because these days, Feminism is all about denaturing Woman (doing everything), which is towards the Fuctionary working clockwork woman (where is soul is somewhat left behind), a true contradiction of terms, which is why I cannot support the new Woman Bishop in the US, who has forgone her God given womanhood, to take a functionary role which will not allow her to utilise feminine influences. How can she compete with a Man as half a woman.

The world is full of Functionaries, it is called the Protestant Work Ethic, it is killing us and the world, and the people are so far not growing in their heads in keeping with their consumption or egos which have been hijacked by media images and consumption like a zietgiest.

For me Magdalen is like a woman, just as woman, in full moving meditation, that is totally present but totally dependent on the a presence of Man to be able to acknowledge that Woman in awareness. And it must be said, that this state does depend on Man to bring it about in a sort of agreement.

This is said in a philosophical mode only, none of it is actual.

7 Jul 2006 @ 10:09 by nraye : The Oxford Movement
as described by one of its later adherents is quoted as follows:

" ""
THE Oxford Movenment, or the Tractarian Movement as it is sometimes called, is generally regarded as a revival within the Church of England of the Catholic doctrines always retained in its Prayer Book and maintained in the seventeenth century by an influential party. Such doctrines as the Apostolic succession, the priesthood, the sacramental system, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist had in the eighteenth century become less and less prominent, and were widely forgotten. From this point of view the Movement was the beginning of the important development which our own day has witnessed, of ritualism and of Anglo-Catholicism. But the Movement also had kinship and common parentage with other religious movements both in England and on the Continent. It is traceable in the last resort to the reaction on behalf of traditional Christianity which followed the French Revolution in so many countries-a reaction signalised by the publication of Chateaubriand’s Genie du Christianisme, and embodied in what is known as the Romantic Schools in France and Germany. The scepticism of the Encyclopaedists had run its course.The stress of international war following on the convulsions of 1793 brought a new seriousness and sense of reality to European civilization, which had their effect both on religion and on thought. The Oxford Movement witnessed to this result in both departments. Its immediate causes in the region of ecclesiastical politics shall be shortly described, but they were largely its occasion rather than its true source.

The new religiousness visible in the early years of the nineteenth century expressed itself in many forms- in Simeon’s Evangelical Revival, in the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Highgate from 1818 to 1830, and in the school of earnest and Liberal thought which drew its inspiration from Dr. Arnold’s sermons and from the men whose characters he formed at Rugby, as well as in the Oxford Revival itself. .......""""

This makes pleasant reading for me as one, it is as I thought, and when presented in simple terms, aides discussion on further developments down the line in time such as we have now, on ""Its a Girl""" fame, and right here on ""Magdalena"".

7 Jul 2006 @ 10:48 by nraye : Magdalena story
Wonderful link giving the Arian perspective on the early church on Mary Magdalene and the Apostles

[link]

together with the famous Da Vinci picture.

7 Jul 2006 @ 19:00 by enora : The painting is lovely
the glass - blood or wine in it? The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is available for reading - I highly recommend it, as I do the Gnostic Gospels, which give people much more insight into the true origins of Christianity and the role and abilities of Miriam of Magdala. This is the stuff the church didn't want people to know, the stuff they banned, but later had to accept. And even though the church as made official statements about Mary status, the old tales are still being taught.

********

The Glass (jar) is for Oil. Without Oil (ie energy) there can be no flame of inspiration, knowledge awareness call it what you will. Actually there are many churches dedicated to Mary Magdalen, not too cool to use such strong language as yours Enora. The church does recognise Mary Magdalen but not to the extent of the Albegensian myths etc, being simply outside church matters. This does not mean they do not recognise them it is just that they do not form part of the main belief system or the Cannon of the Church, because actually it is all already there.

As I said Mary M represents something quite different to Mother Mary, this is portrayed significantly by the PreRaphaelites

Ie. St thomas went to India to preach the gospel but there is no long tradition of honouring his continuance.

I am familiar with all the stories related to Madgaden, and believe there is deeper significance at stake, for the modern world with its widened range of understanding other than simply the partnership with Jesus, which is not denied but not stressed either. To my mind it makes no difference to either Jesus' or her or the Church's teachings. Some will take offence if she is given prominence and others will take it the wrong way. Best to go the middle road, and let the likes of ourselves slog it out

It is an inalienable right to rewrite the doctrines of others beliefs for oneself!

The continuation of my own research covered the Oxford Movement and Arian Christian church movement, being entrenched in the normal church, these make very interesting reading as their own beliefs were at least clarifyed. From my perspective however, it is possible to identify the stumbling blocks of their thinking.

Christianity with afterlife belief and belief in the seven sacraments is a mystery religion like some others who are dressed in completely different garb but essentially to my experience say the identical things. India has traditions venerating Jesus, there is sort of a common source of basis knowledge.

We are not here defending a myth for its own sake, but for a message bringer of its own type to each individual. It is more than a matter of just believing a bit history here or there, it is about what it actually translates to via the definition. Mary is in the last supper picture, and the church commissioned it. If the Church did not want this they would just paint over it, no trouble at all. All the bad art of those times has not survived for this reason. We are left with what is treasured.

14 Jul 2006 @ 12:14 by nraye : Thoughts in 1800
The experiences of Percy Shelley are part of the intellectual environment that brought a redefinition of things Christian. A reaction to the lucid pronouncement of Aetheism as evidenced here. He can be seen as someone in a helpless, totally protected aristocratic situation, at the farthest point from, while still allowing subject coherence and a view of, the Cogs of the 1800's wheels of power, but which also by definition made him powerless to intervene in any other way the power syndrome of the time.

[link],,25341-2266779.html

In antithesis, the pronouncements of the Oxford Movement, the counter revolution if you will, of this Aethistic stance, lay far closer to the Power Cogs dwelling in its very corridors, in the personnage of Provost of Balliol College, no less. Who took up the reins of the pronouncements after Cardinal John Newman ceased to preach to packed houses in St Mary's church Oxford, about the importance of the Sacramental (catholic) component of Christianity which had been totally sidelined from Anglicanism for over 200 years. This itself surely could have been the reason why those like Shelley felt so Aetheistic, because the really Holy aspect of religion of the time had quite evaporated leaving cloaks of no meaning. Shelley was right to complain, bitterly indeed.

There was the hugest hulabaloo in Oxford with court cases, resignations, secret shuffles, very aptly described by the son of the Provost of Balliol when writing up about the Movement and his father's role. Which I must add is not mentioned in other writeups found about the Oxford Movement, the Hullabaloo has been completely written out. This ostensibly strands the Movement, as a Freak, not gaining any serious attention at all, something struggling on its own, apparently not causing huge ruffles. Apparently Oxford dons destroyed many papers relating the case, in an effort to retain the former 1800 Cogs of Power.

[link]

(This is about 30 pages, the Second half contains the Hullabaloo) I consider it to be extremely well written.

This writing out of surrounding facts to a popular cause by the powers that be, while its adherents struggle bravely on, rings a rather too familiar bell, in my own poem, since removed from above, by me, (as being too uncomfortable)and now partially placed below AGAIN, as its pertinancy persists. . . .

Pre-Raphaelite dreams of histories past
Mistaken identities of cultures cast
Indelible mythology which holds too fast
On the psyches of women to keep them aghast

To be overtaken at every turn
With efforts of family and beauty to burn
In ashes to nothing not even the firm
Delights in the Pre-Raphaelite impeachable dream .....

...... Eerie feelings indeed, history repeating itself.

However, not being a Defeatist, there has to be a way out. Either something which explains all the aforementioned in another way, or a further newer view yet to be perceived. The Indians have religion which is accepted without dogma, and gulfs of disagreemnt why can this not happen in Chrisianity too?

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