Athena by John Banville Read Free Book Online Page B

to say cluttered, canvas which with its flattened surface textures and uncannily foreshortened perspectives gives more the impression of a still life than the scene of passionate activity it is intended to be. The progression of the seasons, the phenomenon which lies at the heart of this myth, is represented with much subtlety and inventiveness. The year begins at the left of the picture in the vernal meadow by lake Pergus – note the opalescent sheen of water glimpsed through the encircling, dark-hued trees – where Prosperpine’s companions, as yet all unaware of what has befallen her, wander without care amidst the strewn violets and lilies that were let drop from the loosened folds of the girl’s gown when the god seized her. In the foreground the great seated form of Demeter presides over the fertile summer fields, her teeth like barley pearls (or pomegranate seeds?) and withcornstalks wreathed in her hair: a grotesque, Arcimboldoesque figure, ancient yet commanding, the veritable mother of the mysteries. To her left, at the right of the picture, the trees that fringe the headlands above the narrow inlet of the sea have already turned and there is an autumnal smokiness in the air. Sunk here to her waist in the little waves the nymph Cyane, cursed by the god of death, is dissolving in her own bitter tears, while at her back the waters gape where Pluto has hurled his sceptre into the depths. On the surface of the water something floats which when we take a glass to it reveals itself to be a dark-blue sash: it is Proserpine’s girdle, the clue that will lead her grief-demented mother to the underworld in pursuit of her lost daughter. The placing of the girdle in the sea is one of van Hobelijn’s temporal jests, for when we examine the figure of Proserpine suspended above the waves we note that the girdle in fact has not yet fallen from her waist: in this painted world all time is eternally present, and redeemable. With what consummate draughtsmanship has the painter positioned in the pale, marine air the flying chariot with its god and girl. The arrangement of vehicle, horses and passengers measures no more than five centimetres from the flared nostrils of the leading steed to the tips of Proserpine’s wind-rippled hair, yet we feel with overwhelming immediacy the full weight of this hurtling mass of iron and wood and flesh that is about to plunge into the gaping sea. With its sense of suspended yet irresistible violence the moment is an apt prefigurement of the rape shortly to take place in Tartarus. The god’s swarth features are set in a grimace of mingled lust and self-loathing and his upraised arm wielding the great black whip forms a gesture that is at once brutal and heavy with weariness. Proserpine, a frail yet striking figure, intensely realised, seems strangely unconcerned by what is occurring and gazes back over her shoulder, out of the frame, with an air of languid melancholy, caught here as she is between the brightworld of the living and the land of the dead, in neither of which will she ever again be wholly at home. Beyond her, in the background at the top of the picture, Mount Etna is spewing fire and ash over a wintry landscape laid waste already by the wrath of grief-stricken Demeter. We see the broken ploughshare and the starving oxen and the farmer lamenting for his fields made barren by the goddess in her rage at an ungrateful earth that will not give up to her the secret of her daughter’s fate. And so the round of the seasons is completed. We think of other paintings with a seasonal theme, the
Primavera
, for example, but van Hobelijn is not that ‘Botticelli of the North’ some critics claim him to be, and his poor canvas with its jumbled perspectives and heavy-handed symbolism is utterly lacking in the poise, the celestial repose, the sense of unheard music sounding through its pellucid airs, that make of the Italian painter’s work a timeless and inexhaustible masterpiece. However,
The