Ekphrastic Series by Rohan Buettel
Musée des Beaux Arts, The Train in the Snow, Circe Invidiosa, & Spirit of the Plains
Musée des Beaux Arts
High above the low town stand symbols of imperial power: the palace, courts of justice, and museum of fine arts. St Anthony is twice pictured here. On entering the gallery you rush, eager to find the famous Bosch, where he kneels tempted in a triptych. St Anthony in the centre panel: hunched, passive, looking out while imaginings run riot; weird demons — part man, part animal or plant; the woman beside him, outstretched cup in hand, wide-eyed zombie with pallid face, giant rat tail emerging from under her blue dress.
Yes, the old masters knew a thing or two, but so did the surrealists too. After circling each floor you descend another level, until nine layers down you stumble across St Anthony once more. Hanging with the Belgians, a Spanish interloper tempts again.
For Dali, the temptations are the fleshy kind: a rampant stallion leads a parade of elephants through the desert, floating on spindly legs. On their backs: a nude standing in a loving cup proudly displays her body; a Bernini phallic obelisk; a naked torso in the palladium; another phallic column; a city in the clouds. St Anthony, naked, leaning on a rock, holds a cross high warding off temptation, white skull beside his foot.
You climb nine levels to return to ponder Bosch again then leave, walking to the terrace, stand atop the scarp, observe how anyone looking from the town below would see the solemn bulk of the courts of justice on the skyline, and contemplate how the temptations of St Anthony really were those old familiar ones — money and power; how the wealth of empires is pumped from the peripheries to the heart, transmuted into cultural capital.
You’ve seen this story before in Rome, Vienna, Paris, London; even here in Brussels; and you wonder how much the people of the Congo suffered to fund this collection. St Anthony still holds his cross, he alone fights on.
The Train in the Snow (after the painting by Claude Monet) Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided … but by iron and blood. — Otto von Bismarck Eighteen-seventy was a good year to be in London, not Paris; immersed in Turner, absorbing the abstractions of light in spray and mist and seascapes; painting bridges and buildings in pea soup smog. When safe to return you settled in Argenteuil and portrayed in seventy-five this blood-stained maw beneath fiery eyes, grey smoke from burning coal dissipating in ashen sky. The train halted at the station in grimy gunmetal snow; beside a rough timber fence, a line of blackened trees; on a windless day cold enough to split rocks asunder; now iron dominates the landscape.
Circe Invidiosa (After the painting by John Waterhouse) All men are slaves to my desire. After a night of pleasure spent between my thighs they lie exhausted, stripped of all they seemed; their superficial grace revealed as nothing more than mask; their true guise swine or simple beast apparent now to all. For they will serve me, this day born in their final, unfeigned form. I brook no rivals. Any man who resists my charms for the sake of wife or lover, I will punish and transfigure into a fitting shape. The latin king who divined a pecking bird, yet scorned me, I turned into a woodpecker. I watch him doomed forever more to knocking at my wooden door. When a god resists my spell, remains beyond my power’s reach, I punish his beloved. Absorbed, intent, from potion lime in wide glass bowl a liquid rope of poison pours into the pool where Scylla bathes, my bare feet holding down her head as she transforms, her body now writhing coils with wings of bat, her face becoming furred and flat.
Spirit of the Plains (after the painting by Sydney Long in the Queensland Art Gallery) She strolls across the naked field, her skin the cast of ghostly gums that stand beyond in pink revealed her face eclipses, the moon succumbs. The brolgas trail, with flute she leads the birds with upturned open beaks matching the forks of nouveau trees, through a ballet prance with upward leaps. Harbinger of Federation drought, the grasses dry and brown and frayed, the cranes ecstatic in their mount their motion unbroken, a cresting wave. This land will suffer an endless bake the brolgas dance, all else is fate.
From the poet:
I was inspired on a visit to the Musee des Beaux Arts by the Hieronymous Bosch work and then the surprise of seeing a very different treatment of the same subject by Salvador Dali. The Train in the Snow was shown at a retrospective of Monet's work in Canberra. When I discovered the date of the painting, it took on so many associations - German reunification, the Franco-Prussian War and as a harbinger of the first world war, particularly given AJP Taylor's accounts of the role of mobilisation using train networks in bringing on the outbreak of war. Circe Invidiosa was inspired by a painting seen at a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in Canberra. The painting was vivid and striking. I felt compelled to research the scene depicted and write in response. Spirit of the Plains and 'The Cypriot are two iconict works of Australian art I viewed at the Queensland Art Gallery and felt compelled to write about in response.
About the Poet:
Rohan Buettel lives in Canberra, Australia. His haiku appear in various Australian and international journals (including Presence, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest). His longer poetry appears in numerous journals, including Rattle, The Goodlife Review, Meanjin, Meniscus and Quadrant.