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27 October - 21 December 2007
Ruskin
and the Persephone Myth |
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I could get, and do get, some help out of Greek myths – but they are full of earth, and horror, in spite of their beauty. Persephone is the sum of them’.
[Letter from Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, January, 1866.]
Dinah Prentice: Persephone Rising |
There is no single authoritative version or interpretation of the myth of Demeter and Persephone (or Ceres and Proserpine, their Roman equivalents), but the bare outline of the story is simply told. Persephone, daughter of Demeter (fertility and Earth goddess), is picking flowers in the fields when, as she reaches for a particularly beautiful narcissus, the earth opens and Hades, god of the Underworld, carries her off. Demeter searches for her, but cannot find her. Raging and grieving at her loss, she permits no living things to grow, and the earth becomes barren. At last Zeus intervenes to achieve the release of Persephone, provided she has eaten nothing while in Hades’s realm. But Hades has tricked her into eating some pomegranate seeds, which means she is bound to return to the Underworld for part of each year. So in Spring she becomes free, and the world comes to life; in Winter she must return to the Underworld and the world dies. The pomegranate and the narcissus are symbolically linked with the myth; so is the poppy - a fertility symbol comparable with the pomegranate; and so also wheat, through Demeter’s association with agriculture. Persephone is associated with the seasons, with fertility, and with death. She is the ‘Kore’ or Cora, the archetypal young maiden; she is the bringer of spring; and she is Homer’s ‘dread Persephone’ – the Queen of the Dead. |
This exhibition is divided into two sections. Gallery 1 offers a variety of artistic responses to the Persephone myth. The intention is to provide an environment in which the visitor can become familiar with different aspects and interpretations of the myth; soak in it; taste it; have the opportunity to become aware of the enriching power that it has always possessed, and still does. Its range is intentionally wide, stretching from the high art of Rossetti’s Proserpine to the everyday culture of modern children’s books. It spans thousands of years, from the deep antiquity of Greek coins contemporary with Archimedes, to drawings made only a few months ago. It explores extremes of scale, from the daunting cliff-face of Dinah Prentice’s abstract Persephone Rising, to the tiny dimensions of a French postage stamp. All these works of art have one thing in common. They draw their inspiration from the Persephone myth, as Ruskin did.
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John Ruskin: Rose La Touche |
Frederick Sandys: The Advent of WInter |
From here, the visitor is invited to encounter Ruskin’s Persephone, in Gallery 2. Here are his books and drawings of Greek coins; his studies of flowers and plants; his mythologizing of the natural world; the tragedy of his love of Rose La Touche and his identification of her with Proserpine; and of course his book devoted to a new, humanised, mythologised botany - Proserpina itself. An important purpose of the exhibition is to show Ruskin’s mythologizing in a light that illuminates its highly personal characteristics, while also making clear its deep roots in universal human experience. As Ruskin himself observed: ‘The thoughts of all the greatest and wisest men hitherto, since the world was made, have been expressed through mythology’.
Some of the highlights of the exhibition have been achieved through generous and important loans. Dinah Prentice’s innovative and moving Persephone Rising, lent by the artist, is the largest work (twelve feet by nine) so far exhibited in the Ruskin Library; and the works by Rossetti and Burne-Jones lent by Birmingham Art Gallery provide a powerful underpinning to the whole display. In particular, the presence here in Lancaster of Rossetti’s Proserpine – one of the most famous of all Pre-Raphaelite images – is an event not to be missed.
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Alan Davis, Visiting Fellow in the Ruskin Centre, and curator of this exhibition
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