Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. Volume 1. St. Petersburg, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2022. 352 pp., 342 illustrations
Intended for the general reader, the two-volume monograph Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art is a visual examination of the many manifestations of stairs in ne art and literature from pre-historic times to the present day. Throughout history and across cultures steps, ladders and stairs play a philosophic role in religious tradition and works of art: artists use the image to address questions of the path of life — how to ascend or descend, and where to; what obstacles are encountered on the way; individual ights and falls. The two volumes present Chemiakin’s visual analysis of the subject as well as explanatory texts treating diverse aspects of the research.
Mihail Chemiakin, an artist, sculptor and art researcher, has collected over 2000 images on the theme of stairs in art, of which 768 are presented in this book. Steps, Ladder, Stairs in Art, rst published in Russian in 2020, is the third in a series of books on themes of Chemiakin’s “Museum of the Imagination” research project. The previous volumes are Letters, Words, Text in Art (2015) and Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art (2018).
Concept, compilation, analysis — Mihail Chemiakin
Layout and design — Marina Kesler
Image pre-production — Sergey Krylov
Translations — Sarah H. de Kay
Exhibition curator — Olga Sazonova
Translations: Sarah H. de Kay
Photo: Sarah H. de Kay (facing title page), Ruslan Iskhakov (Р. 346–347)
The Museum of the Imagination is a research project created by the artist and sculptor MihailChemiakin.Atitscoreistheanalysisandacademicclassi cation of object, artistic devices, signs and symbols in the works of various genres of visual art. The analysis is conducted through the juxtaposition of images culled from books, exhibition catalogues, engravings, and photographs of works in museums. In decades of work on this project, Chemiakin, working not only as an artist but also as a philosopher, analyst, art historian and educator, has created a unique research laboratory-library of artistic expression. The research materials reveal whole previously unexplored areas of world culture, and demonstrate how an image is transformed and interpreted in the art of di erent cultures and epochs. Among approximately 400 themes examined in the context of the research are “Children in Art”, “Images of Death in Art”,“Blurred Images in Art”,“The Hand in Art”, and the subject of this book,“Letters, Words and Text in Art”. The laboratory and library are currently housed in the artist’s studios at his residence in France, where artists and art historians come from Russia to study.
TheRussiantelevisionchannel“Kultura”producedaseriesof21 lmedlecturestitled“Mihail Chemiakin’s Museum of the Imagination”in 2002–2009. In 2003 the series was nominated for theTEFI award, and was awarded four prizes at theVIII International“Velvet Season”Television Festival, for best lm in the category of “Cultural and Educational Programming”.
Beginning in 2000, Chemiakin has curated numerous thematic exhibitions in Hudson, NY; Loches, France; and in Russia, in St. Petersburg, Khanty-Mansiisk, Nalchik, Maikop, Kaluga, Voronezh, Lipetsk, Novosibirsk, Moscow, Kaliningrad, Sochi and Norilsk.
In 2013 Chemiakin released a book on the research, “Chairs in Art”, and in 2015 the rst full catalogue of a “Museum of the Imagination“ exhibition, “Letters, Words, Text in Art“ was published, and in 2018 "Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art" appeared.
This book is the third exhibition catalogue in the series and contains material from the exhibition “Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art“ at the Mihail Chemiakin Center, May 18 — November 7, 2018.
This exhibition, like all the Center's thematic exhibitions, is complemented by a series of one-man shows by contemporary artists on the given theme. These shows are the result of open international juried competitions conducted in the period leading up to the thematic exhibition, and serve to involve artists more profoundly in the research and creative process of“Mihail Chemiakin's Museum of the Imagination“.
The Mihail Chemiakin Center works through the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation in St. Petersburg, which was created in 2002 and is the primary venue for public programs of the “Museum of the Imagination“ project and programs of The Institute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art. The Center's goals are to support Russian culture, organise cultural exchange with other countries and assist young artists, writers, performers and musicians.
2012Seats of… Chairs in Art
2012Disturbed Images: Cuts in Art
2013Children in Art
2015The Automobile in Art
Letters, Words, Text in Art
2016Clothing in Art
2018 Swaddled, Bandaged and Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art
2019 Steps, Ladders , Stairs in Art
A NOTE TO THE READER
Back in the 1960s I began collecting, comparing and analyzing reproductions of works of ne and ritual art — Metaphysical Heads, Metaphysical Figures, — with the goal of synthesizing what these works by di erent masters had in common, understanding the essence of the image, and on that basis I hoped to create a system of “signs” in the art of the 20th century. With time my research and the number of themes I explored broadened, along with the development of my own artistic work and the broadening of my analytical visual experience.
It is important to stress that this research were and continue to be purely visual, independent of place and time. I have always been less interested in who created the work that interests me, or when it was created, than in the linear, rhythmic, compositional, coloristic and conceptual similarities of di erent authors, regardless of where and when they worked.
In the late 1990s it became clear that my research and the material I had collected and organized was of interest not only to me. Scholars, rst scientists, then philosophers, theologians, historians, writers and art historians, approached me with requests to work with my materials. Some of these colleagues and students needed more detailed information about the images collected in order to pursue their own work.
Unfortunately it is not always possible to obtain precise information about certain artists and their work. In recent years I have made e orts to collect and conserve information on the images in my research, and for exhibitions and publications I try to provide more historical information. But, again, I stress that exhaustive historic documentation of this or that work is not the primary goal of my research.
Mikhail Bakhtin, the author of a brilliant analysis of medieval carnival culture as seen in the work of Francois Rabelais, wrote, “The image is always broader and deeper (than the historical character upon whom it is based), it is connected to tradition and has its own aesthetic logic independent of the allusion.” This method allows the reader to avoid “foolish historicity.” Bakhtin’s phrase expresses the essence of my analytic method.
In this book the reader will nd captions and notes to each illustration, but I do ask that he not concentrate on the “entourage” of an image, but rather attempt to read the visual information in the analysis I have constructed.
Mihail Chemiakin France 2018
1
STAIRS IN CONTEMPORARY ART:
FORM, FUNCTION, CONTEXT
Mihail Chemiakin’s research on “Stairs, Ladders and Steps in Life, Consciousness, and Art” examines and interprets this archetype as it appears in the work of modern artists. Archetypes take form as symbols through the process of objecti cation. “Ladder” symbolism not only unites many religions and worldviews, but also through its system of imagery reaches across time. We nd the theme in the Babylonian ziggurat, in the Christian icon, in African ritual objects. The very shape of ladders and stairs, consisting of vertical and horizontal lines, is imbued with inter-cultural symbols: vertical lines literally suggest ascension and progress, horizontal lines evoke the ancient sign of the horizon and of passive contemplation. When connected in the form of a ladder, they become a universal metaphor for the spiritual path.
Stairs or ladders can be counted among prototypes dating back to the birth of mankind. The earliest images we know are from the Paleolithic era, 65,000 years ago. Ladders and stairs gure in fairy tales, fables and folk expressions, poetry and myths, as well as classical and modern literature. They appear in ceremonies and rituals as well as on the stage. The obvious narrative element has inspired artists, architects, directors and psychoanalysts to study stairs and ladders in depth. They impart a wide variety of meanings to stairs, building on their traditional form and initial function; the degree of depth and actualization of those meanings depend on the religious or social context of the work. The religious context applies to such themes as the ladder as a link spatially connecting the secular world to heaven; the ladder as the path of or obstacle to spiritual ascent or liberation. In the societal context, on the other hand, the functional structure of stairs determines movement within architecture and society. Stairs provide a convenient way to convey the hierarchy and position of the individual in society, or to describe his evolution, referring to personal or socio-historical memory.
At the same time, many artists focus solely on exploring the possibilities of the very form of stairs. Going beyond the given static structure, they treat stairs as malleable plastic material for their experiments, often creating absurd staircases.
The Biblical story of Jacob’s Dream has long fascinated artists both religious and secular, from icon painters to Marc Chagall. The St. Petersburg artist Vladimir Tsivin has treated the subject extensively.
From the sketches I made it emerged that Jacob, asleep under a ladder to the sky, represents an ideal universal tombstonefor Man. For all humanity. After all, someday, after many millions of years, in order to be saved, Man will have to wake up, climb the ladder to the sky and leave the horizon behind forever.1
In Tsivin’s work the ladder Jacob sleeps under is of triangular form, suggesting a stepladder or a tent (V1 : 80, 81); perhaps the shelter it provides indicates God’s protectiveness towards man. Or perhaps the tent, omnipresent in nomadic cultures like that of the Prophets, suggests the inevitability of the spiritual path that each of us must travel to reach our heights.
Anselm Kiefer often includes ladders in his works and in the German Romantic tradition seeks the perfect symbol to imbue his works with deep philosophical meaning. The titles of his paintings “Seraphim” (V2 : 334) and “First” (V2 : 335) refer to Biblical texts, one of the central motifs of his oeuvre. In Kiefer’s works, stairs and ladders are often reborn from the wreckage of the old world in accordance with established divine law. The ladder in “Seraphim” is the highest point, the culminating chord sounding in the void. This note does not oppose chaos; on the contrary, it is constructed from the elements of chaos. By mixing paints with dirt, sand, dust, straw, rusty metal and clay, the artist creates an archetypal image: a ladder, ideally capable of structuring chaos thanks to its structure, which arranges space horizontally and vertically. And just as God created man in his own image and gave him the right to create and destroy, so the artist combines these two poles in his paintings. Kiefer is acutely aware of each individual’s responsibility of for the fate of all mankind and his works often address the theme of war, destruction and subsequent rebirth. In many of those works ladders serve as harbingers of a new, mysterious life.
“For some, ruins are the end, but if there are ruins, you can always start over again.”2
In Ilya Kabakov’s installation “Red Wagon”, the ladders leading up from the city invite the viewer to make a bold leap into the future, promising liberation to everyone who dares to climb them. Its complex, constructivist form alludes to Tatlin’s “Tower of the Third International”, the Babylonian tower of Communism, embodying the utopianism of the idea itself.
“This is an image of the path along which the viewer should go, having experienced the beginning, middle and end. Having experienced the inability to climb the stairs to heaven, experiencing the painful boredom of eternal expectation and being among a pile of dirt, debris and petty nonsense. “3
Nonetheless, in another work, “How to Meet an Angel,” Kabakov gives us hope: if a person manages to climb the steps of the ladder 3600 feet toward the sky, an angel will y to him. And here the ladder represents not only the path to another world, but also a chance to see a miracle with one’s own eyes. In this context, the bronze installation of “How to Meet an Angel” on the façade of a clinic for the men-
2 Iordanov, S. ,What you need to know about the Anselm Kiefer exhibition in the Hermitage // “The Village”, 2017. URL: https://www.the-village.ru/village/weekend/weekendguide/267792-kifer-v- ermitazhe (accessed: 20.10.2019).
3 Kabakov, I.I., “Ilya Kabakov. Texts.”, : German Titov, 2010, p. 282.
Tsivin, V. A., “Vladimir Tsivin: Comments”, St Petersburg : Aurora — Design, 2008, p. 314.
tally ill in Amsterdam can be interpreted as a symbol of hope for salvation.
Many artists have created large-scale works on the “stairway to heaven” motif. The Chinese artist Yu Hong’s twenty-foot painting of the same name (V1 : 99) was inspired by the 12thcentury icon “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”(V1 : 98) in St Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt. In Hong’s interpretation, men and women of di erent ages climb up or fall from a ladder that has no end or beginning. The dynamic poses and the characteristic details of their clothing of each character reveal their respective social status. This lends the work a theatrical-satirical tone and distances it from the sacred and sublime original.
A compatriot of Hong, Cai Guo-Qiang, created a truly evanescent “stairway to heaven” a eeting (2.5 minutes) but vivid performance using modern pyrotechnics. This enchanting display literally rose up over Huiyu Harbor in Quanzhou (V2 : 343) in the artist’s homeland, early in the morning: a 1650-foot ery ladder, which Guo-Qiang dedicated to his creative path, appeared in the sky. Its ery, explosive nature, as a universal symbol of divine power, adds the theme of the duality of experience. In most cosmological texts, re and ame are associated with both the creation of the world and the apocalypse, i. e. with uncontrollable forces of nature bearing both creation and destruction.
In nity is an integral characteristic of the “stairway to heaven”. This is central to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installation (V1 : 260). Since the 1960s, a primary theme of Kusama’s work has been numerous repetitions and re ections. Here it takes the form of a luminous road with no beginning or end, of which the viewer encounters only a small segment. An optical illusion makes the construction — a steel ladder wrapped with ber-optic cable and two large round mirrors placed above and below it — appear endless, leading upwards to meta-space.
A di erent point of view on the heavenly ladder (V2 : 270) is o ered by Fabrice Samyn, depicting it from the opposite perspective with a wide base and steps narrowing as they get higher. Turning the iconographic symbol of man’s connection with God upside down, the artist transforms it into an instrument created by God for communication with man. The installation’s title, “You are the salt of the earth”, also suggests this interpretation. It is a reference to the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel (Matthew 5 : 13,14), in which Christ speaks of the great strength of spirit a person needs in order to travel the path of self-improvement and resist the forces of evil.
Stairs were used to represent the dialogue between the earthly and the divine long before the birth of Christian culture, in ancient architectural forms such as the Babylonian ziggurat and the Egyptian pyramid (markedly in the step pyramid of Djoser), symbolizing the ascent from various elements of nature to a common divine whole. The Dogon people’s stairs (V1 : 217) are both a manifestation of the hierarchic nature of the cosmic world order, and in addition to their ritual character have a utilitarian function. The long, winding sandstone stairs, with graded steps and forked peaks, allow the inhabitants of the area around the Rocks of Mali to get to and from their homes.
Some Biblical scholars have noted the connection of the heavenly stairway with the Egyptian Ladder of Hathor, along which the souls of the dead ascend to heaven. Based on texts inscribed on the walls of corridors and pyramid chambers, Egyptologists concluded that the inhabitants of Ancient Egypt believed that they could reach the world of the dead only by climbing this ladder, and that deities guarding it (Horus and Set) assisted the deceased, turning the ladder into a path to heaven. During the Ancient and Middle Kingdoms, a wooden model of the ladder would often be placed in tombs; later, priests would draw a ladder on papyrus to illustrate texts from the Book of the Dead. Stairs and ladders as ritual symbols have developed into a familiar metaphor for the passage out of the world of the living. In this context, a ladder appears in the nale of Slava Polunin’s lyrical show “Chu”. The show tells the story of a group of old clowns, who have only one thing left to do as their lives near their end: to leave on time. A ladder decorated with gold funereal tassels, lowered from “heaven”, indicates the solemnity of the moment; but it is not the ladder that predicts the clowns’ departure. At the appointed hour, an angelic guide comes for the hero, who is late, and punches his oneway ticket, thus marking the end…
In Mihail Chemiakin’s work “The Ladder” (V1 : 253) a border between two planes is clearly marked. The passage here represents not the transition between worlds, but rather the choice of a moral path. The change in color from red to white can be seen to symbolize the choice between spiritual purity (white) or bodily passions (red), if we consider red and white to be symbols of the diabolical and the divine. The dichotomy of red and white, present in European culture since the early Middle Ages, today is most often associated with the Russian Revolution.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. How to meet an angel, type of installation on the facade of the Mentrum Clinic, 2009, Amsterdam.
Photo by Emilia Kabakova
Chaim Soutine. The Red Staircase at Cagnes, 1923–1924, oil on canvas, 28.5 × 21.25 ins
“Stairs and ladders play a tremendous philosophical role in human life. Our life unfolds on the earth’s surface, on this plane, but we strive towards something higher; step by step we attain some sort of heights, like Jacob. And vice versa: if we do not behave as we should, we descend closer and closer to the underworld. The ladder is a symbol of human existence.“4
Red and white tones predominate in Chaim Soutine’s paintings, notably in his “Red Staircase at Cagnes” (Fig. ) — a profoundly tragic image that re ects the artist’s dramatic life and its constant psychological stress. This landscape from the artist’s early period is an attempt to comprehend the meaning of color. Soutine was very interested in red as the color of both life and death. His red staircase, reminiscent of the backbone of the split carcasses so often depicted by the artist, runs along a crooked street, conveying the niteness of the esh and the “ uidity” of being. Here once again we nd the heavenly staircase, uniting the carnal and the sublime, the inaccessible but possible. Leningrad nonconformist Gennady Ustyugov’s 1993 painting ”Whither leads the ladder?” (V1 : 159) can be seen as a reference to Russian Orthodox Marian iconography. Ustyugov places the ladder, in dialogue with a female gure, against the background of an unreal landscape. The bent position of her translucent body reminds the viewer of the angels in Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity” icon, and her head is tilted toward a ladder, suggesting it is a way to the mountaintop. The female gure is imbued with the mood of estrangement from the earthly and the readiness to make a journey; the presence of a ladder as a transcendental sign gives hope for salvation, hope that the soul will gain strength and recover after su ering. The painting largely becomes a mirror of the internal state of the artist himself, who has de ned his primary question in the work’s title: does the ladder represent atonement or punishment?
“My soul is created as if in the image of Russian icons”. (G. Ustyugov)5
Stairs as a symbol of Christ’s su ering appear in the Catholic tradition as early as the 9th century and is found in icons, cruci xes and retablo. And although the presence of a ladder in “Ascension to the Cross” and “Descent from the Cross” is not mentioned by any Gospel — ladders rst appeared in illustrations and images — ladders are often mentioned in theological manuscripts from the Middle Ages. One can even speak about the formation of established medieval iconography in the image of Christ climbing a ladder to the cruci x, an example of which we see in the illustration by Pacino di Buonaguida to the c. 1320 manuscript “Vita Christi” (V1:102). In Fra Angelico’s “Nailing of Christ to the Cross” (1442) (V1: 106), both executioners and Christ are depicted on ladders leading
4 Interview with the artist, 2018, France.
5 Interview with Gennady Ustyugov // “Sobaka.ru Journal”. 2014. URL: http: //www.sobaka. ru / city / art / 21028 (accessed date: 10/20/2019).
to the cross. Thenceforth the ladder is frequently an attribute of execution. For example, Jan Luyken’s 1685 etching, “Anneken Hendriks, tied to a ladder and burned in Amsterdam in 1571” (V1 : 119), depicts the execution of a woman condemned for heresy. Here the ladder itself, in an analogy to the cross, is the instrument of execution.
Among contemporary artists, Richard Humann developed this theme with a neo-conceptualist twist in his 2008 installation “ You Must be this Tall” (V1 : 114–116). The artist explores the collective subconscious through a projection onto everyday objects in a miniature amusement park. And apparently innocuous, at rst glance, children’s attractions turn out to be modi ed to serve for executions.
Thus, we can talk about the ambivalence of the image of stairs and ladders, now uplifting and sacred, now aggressive and destroying; they are often encumbered with elements contrary to their practical nature. Stairs or ladders, helpful tools that accompany a person on his path, can be transformed into obstacles blocking that path. The materials stairs or ladders are constructed from can evoke associations with physical pain, communicating an aggressive message and a danger sign.
The Cuban artist Kcho (Alexis Machado) expresses this ambivalence in his 1990 installation, “The worst of all traps” (V2, p. 207). His ladder’s frail wooden frame suggests that it would make easy prey for enemies, but the rungs are made from machete blades — symbols of the Cuban war of independence. The artist’s use of palm branches — the national tree of Cuba, strengthens the already obvious allegory and ensured that the work attracted broad attention in Cuba. Nevertheless, Kcho asserts that the materials do not dominate the installation, but rather help the viewer find meaning in their very physical essence.
Unlike Kcho’s rusty machetes, which recall Cuba’s history but pose only a metaphorical threat, the sharpened steel knife-steps in Marina Abramovic’s 1996 installation “Double Edge” (V1, p. 126–127) can cause real physical harm. Here, as in much of her work, Abramovic examines the limits of physicality, provoking in the viewer an emotional involvement on the level of re ex. The work consists of four ladders with rungs made of di erent materials — from ordinary smooth wood to knife blades, heated metal and icy rails. The sight of these ladders whose familiar form has been transformed into something dangerous causes psychological discomfort in the viewer. These “dangerous steps” are a metaphor for trials that have to be overcome by overcoming mental and physical fears. In the museum setting, this installation did not involve physical contact, but in 2002, Abramovic revisited the ladders in her performance piece, “The House with the Ocean View” (V1, p. 124–125). For twelve days the artist lived in specially built minimalist rooms, open for viewing by visitors to the gallery. Under these conditions, ordinary actions take on the ritual character of a trial, a test combining asceticism and total publicity. Ladders with knives for rungs physically prevent the artist from going beyond the allotted space, thus an inanimate passive object becomes an actor in the performance, demonstrating its power over the will of the artist.
Eadweard Muybridge. Woman Walking Down Stairs, Chronophotography, 1887
“For ‘The House with The Ocean View’ it was very di cult to be in the present constantly for twelve days, so I always tried to stand on the edge, over the ladder with knives, where I might fall on the knives.”6
In another project, “The Abramovic Method” (2016), at the Benaki Museum in Athens, the viewer becomes part of the performance that takes place on a gently sloping ramp that connects oors of the museum on the way to the main exhibition space. The artist has deliberately chosen a space in the museum that is usually considered secondary, to be passed through quickly. Participants in the performance are forced to move in slow motion, concentrating on a more profound consciousness of their bodies in time and space; this is particularly noticeable in contrast to the movement of other visitors to the museum. In this way, Abramovic induces the viewers to focus, through body experience, on a speci c “episode” of life.
Artists began to portray movement on stairs in painting at the end of the 19th century. Marcel Duchamp’s famous 1912 Cubist painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase” (V1, p. 183), which The New York Times christened “Explosion at the Tile Factory,” depicts a woman’s motion down ve steps along a spiral staircase through the successive overlapping of individual fragments. The painting was inspired by the new technology of cinema and particularly by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of photographs “Woman Descending Stairs”, made in 1887.
Gerhard Richter’s “Ema. Nude on a staircase” (V1, p. 185), painted in 1966 is a comment on Duchamp’s work. Like Duchamp, Richter based his painting on a photograph. The model was the artist’s wife, descending an ordinary staircase devoid of details that would indicate a particular time. Richter’s almost ghostly image, seemingly woven of dreams and memories, renders Duchamp’s experiment to the limits of traditional portrait painting, a genre much out of favor in the art world of the 1960s. Richter’s painting later served as an inspiration for Bernhard Schlink’s 2014 novel, “The Woman on the Stairs”.
The phenomenon of movement both up and down steps is the subject of Mario Ceroli’s sculpture “La Scala” (V1, p. 186). His staircase with pro le cut-outs of men and women, made of unpainted wood, captures the various phases of this movement, focusing on the contrast of static and dynamic. In her live installation “Plastic” (2015–16) by the artist and choreographer Maria Hassabi explores the same dichotomy of static and dynamic, examining pauses both plastic and temporal in a museum space. Hassabi placed performers along the ight of stairs lying perfectly still, contrasting sharply with the rapid ow of visitors around them. Thus, the artist expands our idea of the obviously utilitarian signi cance of the stairs in the museum, slowing down the rhythm of our reaction to its meaning.
“This is a transition space. For this reason, I was interested in presenting the work there (on the stairs). How can transitional space become a pause? Thus, the movement of stairs has a very forward direction to it. It’s falling forward.”7
A staircase represents not only movement but also stability — architecturally, staircases are pillars that unite di erent levels. Since ancient times, this simple formula has given rise to many plastic variations, to the point where today we can determine the architectural style and period of a structure from the staircase. To this day architects continue to experiment with stairs, often sacri cing functionality to play with forms. Perhaps this is because other means for ascending and descending have diminished the staircase’s
Maria Hassabi. Performance. Plasticity, 2016, Museum of Modern Art, New York
practical function, leaving it only a romantic role in modern architecture.
M. C. Escher was one of the rst artists to depict absurd stairs, stairs that are endless and simultaneously devoid of function. In his 1953 lithograph “Relativity” (V2, p. 42) he depicted an architectural structure with several levels united by stairs, full of geometric paradoxes. Escher eventually created a series of lithographs with impossible stairs and constructions, making him a major gure in the school of “impossible reality”. They were created under the in uence of Lionel Penrose and his mathematician son Roger, whose model of a “continuous staircase” in the form of a square with no exit causes the walker, if he walks clockwise, to descend, and if he walks counter-clockwise, to ascend, in both cases endlessly.
Escher’s use of stairs as a dynamic symbol of forward movement, spiritual ascent and transformation, transition to a di erent, higher state, gave rise to a whole direction in the visual arts. Stairs as an Escherian symbol became an integral part of modern mass culture, appearing in the theater (V2 p. 43), cinema and animation. Martina Casey designed a set for a nonexistent spectacle based on “Relativity” (V2, p 43), in which ladders as a metaphor for elevation, change and movement connect di erent points of view: artist, actors and spectators. Escher’s “Relativity” has inspired the set designs of numerous theatrical productions. Gary McCann built a multidimensional maze of walkways and staircases for the opera “Macbeth” at Vienna State Opera in 2015. The bewildering series of stairways mirrors the characters’ confusion and moral decline and embody the seductive nature of evil. In Julia Noulin-Mérat’s 2018 set for “The Barber of Seville” at Boston Lyric Opera, “impossible staircases” are placed all over the stage, emphasizing the paradox of what is happening. Shizuka Hariu’s set for Nitin Sahwney’s “Dystopian Dream” is one example of Escher’s in uence on contemporary choreography. The set embodies the space “between a dream and twisted reality”8, in which Escher’s image symbolizes the internal contradictions and re ections inherent to man.
Escher’s “Relativity” has been recreated in mass-market movies as well, for example, the room where the nal confrontation scene in Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” (1986) takes place, and the moving stairs scene in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” directed by Chris Columbus in 2001. In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 lm “Inception” two episodes evoke and attempt to explain the Penroses’ “continuous staircase”, and characters climbing the stairs recall Escher’s “Ascending and Descending.” Escher’s stairs also appear in the cartoon series “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” among others.
Staircases play key roles in the plots of many Alfred Hitchcock movies, notably in “The Lodger: a Story of the London Fog” (1927), “The 39 Steps” (1935), “Vertigo”
(1958) (V1, p. 176) and “Psycho” (1960). The director used stairs to manipulate the viewer’s reaction and create a rollercoaster e ect. As Hitchcock’s heroes go down and up stairs, their movement re ects the waxing and waning of suspense. Probably the best-known staircase scene in the history of cinema is the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”. Cameraman Eduard Tisse recounted that he used sharp light and shadow to create drama in the frame. The lm crew found more and more expressive opportunities as lming progressed on each of the 120 steps. The abstract idea of oppression is embodied in the drama of steps turned symbol of national pain. The scene is a tragic plea for revolutionary action, a metaphor for the confrontation between good and evil.
Here one specific episode became the emotional embodiment of the entire epic of 1905. [...] One part took the place of the whole. [...] 9
The stairs in Rene Magritte’s 1936 painting “Forbidden Literature”, which addresses the duality of the world and the transition to another space, play a completely di erent role. Here among multiple absurd ele -
9 “Battleship Potemkin”, 1925, “From the screen to life” // Eisenstein, S. M., Selected Works in 6 vols., 1964, V.1, pps. 120–135.
Barber of Seville. 2018, Boston Lyric Opera, set design by J. Noulin-Mérat
Macbeth. 2015, Vienna State Opera, set design by Gary McCann
Penrose Steps in the movie Beginning, 2010, directed by Christopher Nolan
ments, only the stairway, based on that of the artist’s Brussels apartment, represents “this side” of reality, symbolizing a familiar part of our surroundings. This juxtaposition of prosaic biographical detail with mythology and text is what gives Magritte’s works their strange surreal character.
In the Chapuisat Brothers’ multi-story architectural installation “Hyperspace” (V1, p. 249), created in 2005, the stairs ll their original function. They connect various levels of a large-scale (over 2150 square feet) art labyrinth, in which the viewer is invited to explore the internal structure of imaginary space.
Unlike his predecessors, the German artist Art van Triest completely rejects both the functionality and the symbolism of the staircase in order to focus exclusively on its “skeleton”. Most of his sculptural works, installations (V2, p. 198) and drawings (V2, p. 166) from the 2010s are based on a simply drawn outline of a staircase with broken and deformed steps, twisted into a Moebius band so that the ends meet. Studying the physical properties of this simple architectural form, van Triest perceives “ rst principles”, discovering what Schopenhauer called:
…those ideas, which are the lowest grades of the objectivity of will; such as gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, those universal qualities of stone, those rst, simplest, most inarticulate manifestations of will; the bass notes of nature; and after these light, which in many respects is their opposite10
Combining di erent and sometimes contradictory materials, such as metal and wood, van Triest tests the limits of the plastic possibilities of the original form right up to its destruction. The artist continues the experiment outside of his “physical laboratory”, recording the stages of an endless research process and placing installations in an unexpected public context.
The Polish artist Magdalena Sosnowska is also concerned with the plastic possibilities of stairs. She addresses the topic of the psychological impact of architecture on humans through this familiar element.
“[I am] especially interested in the moments when architectural space begins to take on the characteristics of mental space.”11
10 Schopenhauer, The world as will and idea https://www.gutenberg.org/ les/38427/38427pdf.pdf
Sosnowska’s work generally falls into two categories: lines marking a shape in space, and deformed structures with emotional connotations. Soviet modernist architecture is an important conceptual reference for the artist, and her 2007 installation “Staircase” (V2, p. 177) is based on a symbol of the Soviet utopian ideal. Sosnowska creates a sense of the instability of the metal structure, compressing and twisting it. The distorted shape of the spiral staircase suggests a certain expressive gesture with respect to the crumpled, and then expanded, object, completely stripped of its functionality. This violent deformation allows the transition of the structure from architectural element to sculpture. Sosnowska is interested in transforming a staircase into a living organism, which, for example, can encircle entire exhibition halls, like a exible vine in the 2016–2018 “Stair Rail” installation, or as in her 2010 “Spiral staircase”, recall a skeleton with steps twisting around the backbone. In her 2012 public sculpture in New York, “Fir Tree” Sosnowska creates a similar composition in which spiral stairs lead towards the ground, forming the silhouette of a tree “sprouting” amid the skyscrapers of the metropolis.
The “stair-tree” became a central motif for a number of artists who express a powerful and vital symbolism in their works. The American sculptor Lin Lisberger uses the form of an upward-rising structure as a metaphor for in nite possibilities that open up at the di erent stages of growing up and becoming a person. In Lisberger’s work, many variations of ladder structures, including the 2008 installation “High Journeys” (V1, p. 298) made of wood, have a launching platform, which correlates with the beginning of a new stage and a new journey... Boats, baskets, and more ladders become part of the “travel.”
“Ladders are one of the most fundamental architectural forms, suggesting movement through space and endless possibilities.”12
Like any organism, a tree grows, changes and fades, and this in turn becomes the subject of close attention by the South Korean sculptor Myeongbeom Kim. His installation “Staircase” (V1, p. 305) was executed directly in the natural landscape, where the trunks of two trees connected by rungs and steps symbolically continue the life cycle. The natural arrangement of the installation echoes the “Tree in the Garden” motif — in the Christian interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis about the “Tree of Life”, which grants eternity, and the “Tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, whose forbidden fruit has become a symbol of the mortality of human esh.
Rene Magritte. Forbidden literature. 1936, oil on canvas
Frame from the lm Battleship Potemkin, 1925, director Sergei Eisenstein
The identi cation of the tree with the vital energy embedded within it is transformed into a metaphor for the creative ow in the painting of “The Truth about Comets” (V1, p. 304) by the American surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1945). Against the background of the winter landscape, a staircase appears, the railing of which sprouts with woody branches directed to the celestial bodies. Their very appearance is presented as a bewitching, magical spectacle, observed by mermaids personifying the artist herself. A staircase passing into a tree, whose steps go up into the sky, creates an image of a creative process leading to the freedom of imagination. Tanning’s interpretation of immersion in the irrational depths of the subconscious, is replaced by a more sensual approach to the study of the surrounding reality of the Spanish artist and designer Nacho Carbonell.
“I like to see objects as living organisms, things that can come to life and surprise you with their behavior. My works are conceptual, not practical, they are tactile and I like them to tell a story that makes a point about an aspect of life.”13
In his street installation “The Playground Closes at Dusk” (V1, p. 318) (2011), four interactive objects are presented on high ladders climbing on which the viewer can smell, hear, touch and see, following the author’s instructions. At the same time, the fth part of the installation, “Memorabilia”, embodies human memory, which plays the role of the main repository of cause and e ect relationships, emotions and impressions. The many small boxes at the top of the ladders symbolize a cloud of memories like those found in our own minds. For the artist the climb carried out by the viewer goes beyond the scope of physical e ort and can be interpreted as a psychological journey to the deep levels of the subconscious. Aroused interest in introspection is translated as the main feature of the individual, which in this case is projected onto the ladder-object.
A similar visually constructed relationship between the installation and the viewer is emphasized by the work of the American artist Nick Cli ord Simko in “Still Life with a Ladder” (V1, p. 215) (2012). The stepladder taken as a basis is identi ed with the body, assembled from objects sequentially placed on the steps, such as a classic plaster head, owers, a phallic gure and boots, which in general is built into a portrait. The addition of shoes makes the generalized nature of the comparison of the stairs with the gure of a person more personal, introducing an everyday detail of identi cation. An even more personalized image endowed with psychological characteristics is created in the installation of the Spanish photographer Chema Madoz in “Disabled Ladder” (2003). A crutch-based design loses its stability and integrity, which creates a convincing emotionally charged focus on physical features. This emphasizes the clarity of comparing the ladder with a living organism that is capable of experiencing su ering and pain.
“Yes, the main thing in our life is stairs, because in the end any road is the same staircase, only at the beginning invisible. And curves are especially dangerous when, due to turns, you don’t feel that you are going lower and lower. This is what the old staircase leading upwards told me, which su ered greatly when they rolled down it. Do not o end the stairs!”14
Many artists of the XX–XXI centuries, realizing the irreversible process of the de-sacralization of art, appeal to their audience through the personi cation of the art form. Even Hegel at the beginning of the 19th century noted the loss of sincere reverence for the work. Today one can observe how religious consciousness gives way to social consciousness by visualizing everyday life. By putting forth new, or updating old, approaches during crises in the worldview and identifying themselves with some of them, artists bring personal experience to their work.
French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois, in the “Woman House” series, places a brightly lit staircase inside a female body enclosed in the shape of a silent, dark building, making it the only possible way of communication. The house serves as both a safe haven and a prison. Its complete con uence with the gure re ects the inner world of a woman who is enslaved but rebellious. In an earlier series by Bourgeois “He disappeared in complete silence” (1947) (V2, p. 251), the theme of alienation between people, which is portrayed through lonely architectural structures, is revealed. The composition of sheet 8, lled with a surreal spirit, allows the artist to combine multiple ladders that have lost their basic function of a “connecting element” and hang in space in de ance of gravity. From the embodiment of her personal history, through the image of the ladder, Bourgeois goes on to explore issues of gender self-identi cation, which, in turn, are the central theme of the feminist trend in art. In the graphic variations “Mother and Child” (1999/2000), the staircase forms the silhouette of a high-rise building, and the gure depicted at its foot allows us to discuss the place of women in contemporary society. Another form of stairs in the work of Bourgeois is a spiral, which is identied with the image of reversed time, return to oneself, to one’s body. This psychological component is disclosed in the installation “Cage (last climb)” (V1, p. 315) (2008) executed shortly before her death in the center of which is a spiral staircase, preserved from her old Brooklyn studio. Going beyond the allotted space of the cell, it symbolizes the release of the artist herself from the shackles of memories of the past.
The installation “The Night She Left” (V1, p. 290) (2011) by the Indo-British artist Bharti Kher addresses problems of gender and national tensions. The staircase in it acts as a kind of stage set on which the symbolic con ict of two principles is played out. The steps, covered with small ornamental ripples of traditional Indian bindi dots deliberately shaped like sperm, represent the masculine. A female sari twisted like a rope intensi es the confrontation giving the installation a feminist context.
14 Yengibarov, L. G., “Storybook ‘The Last Round’”. Yerevan: Sovetakan Grokh Publishing House, 1984. URL: http://engibarov.ru/books/last-round/lestnica/ (accessed: 10/20/2019).
By taking an extreme position on one of the con icts pervading society an artist can arouse the interest of a democratic public, a phenomenon which Swedish artist Larissa Stenlander treats with irony. In her series “Women with Baggage” (V1, p. 151) (2016), gures in long, tight- tting dresses that emphasize their voluptuous gures climb stairs, carrying huge suitcases. The contrast between the irtatious characters and the weight of their suitcases makes an apparently humorous picture. Nevertheless, the women’s “baggage”, in the sense of the burden of their own histories and ideas, hinders women as they strive to achieve their goals, and the images convey a sense of the absurdity of their situation.
The British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare uses the ladder to address the problem of self-identi cation in a post-colonial society.
Louise Bourgeois. Woman House, 1946–1947, oil on canvas, mascara, private collection
“Society is changing and becoming more diverse, it is increasingly important that diversity is re ected in culture, particularly in the art canon.”15
In the series of installations “Magic Ladder Kid”, (V1, p. 144) Shonibare shows the degree of identi cation of people with a foreign culture. Instead of a head, a child has a globe, which makes him a “victim” of globalization. It rises up the steps of knowledge that are dictated by textbooks on Western literature, art, war, gardening, etc. The gap in the cultural matrix is expressed in the appropriation of an imaginary identity, the acceptance of alien, largely foreign traditions and attitudes from the West. The artist reinforces this idea by using a Victorian dress on the child, made, not from handmade batik, but from a cheap British manufactured fabric made to look like a “genuine African” print which the British then sold to West Africans, and that the latter still ironically consider as a sign of their own authenticity.
At the same time, the staircase as one of the oldest symbols of humanity is able to unite, to overcome various kinds of communicative barriers — linguistic, religious and political, creating a common semantic eld. An example of this is the huge mural (76 × 70 ft) by the Iranian street art artist Mehdi Ghadyanloo, displaying the image of a staircase to heaven. Filled with hundreds of people of di erent nationalities with red balloons in their hands, the composition soars into the air, personifying the ease of being and embodying a universal metaphor that is understandable in all cultures. Conceived by the author as a sign of rapprochement between the Iranian and American peoples and prominently arising at one of the busiest intersections in Boston, he clearly demonstrates the communicative power of relevant topics through mass art in an industrial civilization.
15 Interview: Yinka Shonibare and the point of art // Artimage. 2018. URL: https: //www.artimage. org.uk/news/2018/yinka-shonibare-and-the-pointof-art/ (accessed: 10/20/2019).
In the informational onslaught of our modern high-tech urban environment, a person feels much more vulnerable than in the 19th or 18th centuries, and the in uence exerted by mass art is much more signi cant. Mass art is not only an expression of the society’s level of aesthetic development of, but also can illustrate or ironize its current social problems. For example, a sculpture by the German satirist and provocateur Peter Lank, (V1, p. 148–150) installed near an investment bank in Berlin, (and dismantled shortly afterwards), depicts moving up the career ladder as an end in itself in the human journey. The sculpture’s characters, rendered as caricature, are easily recognizable as typical o ce clerks. They all cling to ladders reminiscent of children’s Swedish walls, a metaphor for the “back-stabbing games” adults play.
In contrast, “Our Journey” (2010–12), a large-scale outdoor installation on the wall of the Orlando Sports and Entertainment Center by the American sculptor Bill Starke, excludes competition among its characters, depicting team spirit instead. Characters gradually ascend the ladders in the work, reminiscent of progression in a computer game. By hinting at an artificially created reality, the artist offers a model of an ideal society in which people are on the verge of great discoveries, and the construction of one person’s career makes it possible to create a harmonious world. Ladders in this case allows the artist to convey the image of a person “interacting, colliding, cooperating, striving and achieving.” 16 Starkes’s bronze sculpture “Solitary Climber” (V1, p. 146) emphasizes the individual’s role in his own ascent; here the ladder is both a symbol of all-powerful man’s movement towards the new, and a perfect tool to enable this movement.
A person’s position in society is inextricably linked to his professional a liation, and this is the central motif in the work of Jim Rennert. In his bronze sculpture “Entrepreneur” (V1, p. 156) (2008) the viewer is presented with an illustration of the common expression “career ladder”.
“Suits, ladders, briefcases, united in multiple variations... are iconic visual representations of business. The title works together with the visual image to illustrate the experience, sometimes physical, sometimes psychological.”17
At the same time, Rennert’s sculpture suggests that the moment of jumping from the ladder represents a dramatic act of going beyond the boundaries of possibility, limited as it is by social dogmas. The sculpture symbolically reveals the development of man outside a precarious structure, directed not upward, but deep inward, into his own experience.
16 Bill Starke, quoted in Yoo, A., “Climbing Sculptures Represent Achieving Your Dreams” // My Modern Met. 2011. URL: https://mymodernmet.com/climbing-sculptures-representachieving-your-dreams/ (accessed: 10/20/2019).
17 Artist Statement // Jim Rennert Sculptor. URL: http://www.jimrennert.com/statement.html (accessed: 10/20/2019).
We see how variations on the theme of self-identification have become a natural component of modern artistic thinking, which is largely dictated by the current paradigm infused with commercial intentions. In the works of contemporary artists, people often climb stairs, then descend and clamber up again, hoping to jump over a couple of steps and land immediately on a beautiful marble pedestal. There is a faster and more direct way to this goal — the elevator, which allows one to move quickly and easily according to trends, fashion and public opinion. It is no accident that the elevator is increasingly present in works of art. Stairs and ladders, by contrast, reflect spiritual, intellectual and moral elevation by virtue of their primal symbolism, they enable man to restore lost contact with the divine, at the same time emphasizing the value of the path itself.
Climbing the steps of ancient temples, our ancestors advanced towards to secret knowledge and spiritual perfection. The number of steps, in most traditions seven, is important. The mystical number seven personi ed the cosmic order, spiritual purity, completeness and perfection. Stairs or steps as an image of the world order have expanded from their purely religious context to encompass earthly values, exempli ed by Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs and Vladimir Lukov’s less popular seven-step “thesaurus pyramid.”
The American artist and ecologist Mark Dion explores the evolution of values and uses stairs as a structure for works that look like natural science catalogs or encyclopedia Dion raises the urgent issue of the relationship of man with nature through the prism of the classical concept of the “Great Chain of Being” that dates back to the ideas of the ancient philosophers and at di erent times in uenced theories of the world order of such thinkers as Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz among others. In his installation “Scala Naturae” (V1, p. 322) (1994), incorporating historical and natural artifacts, he illustrates theories about natural history. The artist builds a hierarchy from inanimate objects and minerals on the lower steps to plants and animals on the upper. According to a medieval religious interpretation, it is led by God, whom the author symbolically replaces in his installation with a bust of a person.
The construction of a “chain”, which is stable by de nition, may turn out to be fragile when implemented in the unnatural human uses of nature, as demonstrated by the work of Korean sculptor Seon Ghi Bahk
(V1, p. 313). Thousands of pieces of coal suspended on transparent nylon threads, as a result of careful alignment, create the image of a fragile staircase with a rather rough texture, that can be considered the artist’s testament about the need to maintain a universal balance that includes the natural world.
Scientists use the form of a spiral staircase and its function of connecting to illustrate their scienti c discoveries. It is noteworthy that long before the discovery of the DNA molecule (1953), in 1505, Donato Bramante created a spiral staircase in the form of a double-helix for the Vatican Palace. The design was intended to distribute the ow of movement both up and down the staircase.
Stepping back from the functional and practical characteristics, we turn to the aesthetic component of the image of the double-helix. It is embodied in the project “Ribbon of Life” ( V2, p. 95) by the modern American sculptor Mike Fields. The sculpture resembles the shape of a swirling staircase, which, according to the author’s idea, can rotate around its axis. The revealed dynamics emphasize the image of a complex molecular compound of DNA, which gives impetus to the development of a living organism. Fields notes the in nite potential of this orderly and at the same time variable element embodied in his work, where the creative nature of the molecule symbolizes a signi cant creative act for the artist.
The biotic memory stored in DNA is comparable to cultural memory hidden in archetypal forms, one of which is “stairs”. Through it, in a chain of cultural DNA, times and styles are connected. The staircase as the embodiment of this mental process is the subject of Mark Tansey’s “ Triumph Over Mastery II” (V1, p. 154) (1987). The staircase here is a metaphor for the connection between generations with reliance on classical art. Installed vertically, it literally allows a character to rise to a level of viewing the work and paint over the distinctive outline of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco by from the Sistine Chapel, using a roller lled with white paint. By virtue of his arrival in that plane of space this new hero is symbolically elevated to the level of virtuosity of the Renaissance artist. From this point of view, the ladder becomes a kind of embodiment of the artist’s desire for self-improvement. His emphatically athletic physique has something in common with the anatomy of the central character of the mural — the gure of Christ the Judge, to whom he is likened in a sense. The symbolic act of “rewriting” a work of the past raises the question of continuity of mastery. Using the ladder as the metaphorical link between generations becomes the foundation of the artist’s vision. The artist’s shadow is projected onto the mural and connects the silhouette with the outlines of Michelangelo’s gures. The artist on the stairs represents the dynamic development of art, which replaces and thus defeats the
Bill Starke. Our Journey, 2010–2012
Mehdi Ghadyanloo.
Mural. Spaces of Hope, 2016, Boston
work of the past, which is statically frozen in its spatial and temporal plane. But this triumph is illusory, the viewer notices how the artist working with energetic gestures, destroys the shadow of the stairs and then his own shadow. A break with traditions comes practically down to an act of vandalism, the paint-roller reduces the central image of the artist to the level of an artisan. It is noteworthy that the movement of the hero himself, despite the symbolic tendency to move up, works down, and systematically “whitens” the space.
The absurd desire to erase the legacy of the past, as well as the destruction of one’s own shadow, seems an unnatural process. The contrast of the white plane and the detailed pictorial work in Tansey ’s work can be regarded as a re ection on the development of the avant-garde movements of abstract art of the twentieth century against the background of the old established tradition of gurative direction. The strict use of monochrome oil paint gives the image the look of a photograph, which emphasizes the feeling of actually xing what is happening.
In the lm by the Italian architect Ugo La Pietra ,”Big Chance” (1973) (V1, p. 198), the artist’s rapid ascent of the stairs re ects the solemn moment of the realization of creative ambitions. The ight of stairs lmed is located on the premises of the XVth Milan Triennial and lead directly to the main exhibition space. Gradually accelerating the pace of his ascent, La Pietro emphasizes the long-awaited moment — the opportunity to declare his art. The staircase becomes a metaphor for the nal stage in the work of the artist. He presents his work to the public, experiencing a sense of liberation and discharge, which is characterized in the nal frame of the lm, depicting an empty staircase to epic music.
We see how in a modern museum a staircase increasingly provokes an immersive and performative action in a space in which both the viewer and the artist are involved. One of the most striking examples of the new museum staircase in Russia is the amphitheater staircase, designed by the Studio 44 architectural studio for the East wing of the General Sta Building of the State Hermitage (2008–2014). In the realized project of reconstruction and restoration of the ministerial building dating from the early 19th century to its subsequent transformation into a museum complex of the 21st century, the main atrium staircase becomes a dominant interactive feature in the gurative and functional structure of the “temple of art”. The shape of the space as an amphitheater allows the staircase to showcase the importance of the auditorium, symbolically embodying the global trend in the synthesis of museum and theater.
The installation of “Stairs in Art” at the artist’s center in St. Petersburg, divided into sections in the form of stairs, is also a kind of stage platform where the viewer can either focus on details or see the general plan. Each framed set of images is an independent complete formula for comparative analysis, with a clear sequence. The viewer will have to set up the optics himself and choose among the polyphony of dialogs — formal-stylistic, historical, geographical, social, etc. — the most interesting to him.
In contrast to the exhibition, the two-page spreads in this book focus the reader’s attention on speci c analytical “compositions”, emphasizing the search value of each “subject” included in it. Regardless of the presentation of the study, following the concept of the cultural continuity of images connected by a common archetype, stairs act as a mediator connecting the “ordinary” with the “museum”, thereby making the transition from the everyday perception of reality to a more complex form of intellectual experience.
“Mihail Chemiakin’s Musee Imaginaire” is itself a sort of spiritual staircase in which boxes of images serve as steps; it mirrors the path of the artist himself, his development and transformation, and our path as the audience, provided the opportunity to rise above our own ideas about art through a transition to another ontological level of knowledge. Each stage in this analytical structure can be perceived as a new episode through which occurs the development of new approaches to the study of the world order with ourselves as part of this process.
Art historians of the Mihail Chemiakin Center
Olga Sazonova, Daria Lobanova, Karina Chernyshova, Diana Abramova
Exhibition view, “Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art”, Mihail Chemiakin Center, St. Petersburg, 2019
Donato Bramante.
Spiral Staircase, 1505, Vatican Osiris, Papyrus of Hunefer, 1310–1275 BC, British Museum
ASCENT TO THE ARCHETYPE
1. The Birth of a Symbol from the World of Objects
Along with esoteric “signs” representing spiritual realities, metaphysically uniting incompatible elements, (metaphysical juxtapositions of the incompatible), in religious art everyday objects often serve as symbols. These symbols have the power to trace back/elevate to the world of archetypes hidden from man by states of consciousness closely tied to the psychosomatic organization of the corporeal “I”. An object destined to become a symbol is removed from its usual context and included in a system of religious and mystical values, but even in a purely aesthetic, non-utilitarian (ex-utilitarian) experiment, according to Schopenhauer, is experienced in the same way as in a work of art if thus the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the subject out of all relation to the will, then that which is so known is no longer the particular thing as such; but it is the Idea, the eternal form, “if thus the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the subject out of all relation to the will, then that which is so known is no longer the particular thing as such; but it is the Idea, the eternal form…”1
Anagogic experience should inspire a chain of associations in its recipient, allowing him to rise above the empiric level of comprehension. Some objects are infused with symbolic meaning only within the framework of a single culture and are utterly alien and incomprehensible to other cultures. There are however symbols of a universal character, rooted in the foundations of the human psyche and independent of the conditions of time and space, although shades of meaning may vary in di erent historical periods. Among these universal symbols tied to the world of archetypes is the ladder or stairway, close in signi cance to other fundamental discoveries that date back to the beginnings of human development and have retained their meaning to this day. Ladders have been depicted as magic symbols since at least the Paleolithic era — c. 65 000 BC —as witnessed by the unique fresco in the Cave of La Pasiega in the Spanish province of Cantabria. (p. 62)
“There are many ‘ladders’ in the mystic philosophies and schemes, all of which were, and some still are, used in the respective mysteries of various nations. The Brahmanical Ladder symbolises the Seven Worlds or Sapta Loka; the Kabbalistic Ladder, the seven lower Sephiroth; Jacob’s Ladder is spoken of in the Bible; the Mithraic Ladder is another “mysterious ladder”. Then there are the Rosicrucian, the Scandinavian, the Borsippa Ladders, etc., etc., and nally the Theological Ladder which, according to Brother Kenneth Mackenzie, consists of the four cardinal and three theological virtues.”2
The purpose of stairs was initially purely practical. In this quality they are often seen, for example, in Assyrian bas-reliefs depicting the stormings of enemy cities. However, ladders early on came to be considered a symbol of spiritual ascent. Ancient Egyptian wise men conferred symbolic status upon ladders and steps, creating initiation rites in which the initiate schooled in the mysteries traversed a strictly de ned number of steps leading to communication with the gods. A special meaning was attributed to the preparation for the posthumous wanderings of the soul, once it was freed of the fetters of its material body. In the “The Book of the Dead” there is a prayer meant to help with a harmonious entry into the spritual world after death: “I ascend on your ladder which my father Re made for me...”3
Re himself was considered in Ancient Egypt to be the sun god and leader of the world. He crosses the celestial ocean in his boat together with the god of wisdom Thoth and his daughter Maat, symbolizing the world order.4 Pictures of the boat in the papyrus manuscripts show the dead person making his posthumous journey. In one papyrus the boat is depicted with a seven-step stair at its center, symbolizing the seven steps of ascension to the spiritual world.5 By completing this journey, the soul achieves ritual uni cation with Osiris and communes with the forces of resurrection. The number seven was a widely accepted symbol of the highest spiritual perfection in Ancient Egypt, and is similarly revered in other cultures, particularly those that have conserved their ties to initiation rites; in some cultures, this reverence is passed down through tradition even after the number’s symbolic meaning has been forgotten. Osiris was sometimes depicted at the top of a seven-step stairway meant to symbolize the nal resurrection from the dead6 which guaranteed immortality to all those who had completed the initiation rite.
3 Eva Von Dassow, ed., The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day — The Complete Papyrus of Ani Featuring Integrated Text and Full-Color Images Chronicle Books, 2015. p. 137. no. 153a.
4 Manfred Lurker, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt: An Illustrated Dictionary, translated from the German by Barbara Cummings, 1984, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 100.
5 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Papyrus of Ani: A Reproduction in Facsimile, 1913, G. P. Putnam, New York, p. 325.
1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, translated from the German by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 1909, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, Vol. 1, p. 239.
2 H. P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, 1892, Theosophical Publishing Society, London, p. 185.
6 Manfred Lurker, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt: An Illustrated Dictionary, translated from the German by Barbara Cummings, 1984, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 116.
Osiris, Papyrus of Hunefer, 1310–1275 BC, British Museum
The symbol of steps was also imbued with cosmogonic meaning. In Ancient Egyptian mythology the creation of the world was imagined as a mound rising from the sacred depths of the cosmic Primeval waters. Amulets in the form of a sevenstep staircase commemorated that event and were thought to strengthen the wearer’s hope for a new life.7 This kind of symbolism is being analysed now by scholars of Ancient Egyptian religion. Comprehension of these unexplained images demands considerable e ort, leaving room for hypothetical interpretations.
Dura-Europos synagogue, 3rd century AD, wall paintings, National Museum of Damascus
2. Ancient Egyptian Mythology and Biblical Tradition
Until the secularization of European life in the last century, Biblical images were very much a part of daily life in Christian Europe. The symbolism of steps, which in Ancient Egypt was part of sacred rituals leading to the mystical uni cation with Osiris, in European art originates not from mystic rituals but rather from an event in sacred history — Jacob’s vision of the ladder, recounted in the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Genesis. Fleeing the rage of his brother Esau, Jacob spent the night in an open eld on the way to Haran. With a stone under his head, he “dreamed, and, behold, a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and, behold, the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” (Genesis 28 : 12) At the top of the ladder Jacob saw God himself, who con rmed the promise given to Abraham and Isaac: “And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’” (Genesis 28 : 16–17).
The account in Genesis of Jacob’s vision of a heavenly ladder was written at a time when ancient Egyptian mysteries were in full force.8 The presumed author of the Book of Genesis, Moses, was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7 : 22), which wisdom was largely related to mysteries, so there is little doubt that Moses was acquainted with the role of steps in Egyptian mystical legend. All
7 Ibid.
8 There are other hypotheses. For instance, some scholars have placed the Old Testament patriarchs in the 2nd century B. C., but this would also permit us to connect Biblical traditions of God’s appearances to man with Egyptian mysteries.
this allows us to recognize better the undeniable similarities and fundamental differences between ladder symbolism in ancient Egyptian culture and in the biblical tradition of the same time. In both versions the steps symbolize the connection of the earthly world with the holy world and God appears to the observer at the top of the steps. An ancient Egyptian mystic would see Osiris; in Genesis atop the ladder is a vision of the Lord. (Translators of the ancient Hebrew text into Greek reverentially changed the generic “Lord” to the proper name of God.)
The ancient Egyptian symbol of stairs showed man the road to initiation, leading upwards from step to step all the way to the realization of the nal goal of initiation: uni cation with Osiris. Emphasis was placed on the initiate’s personal e orts to cross the border which separates the earthly world from the sacred, and thus begin his journey to a purely spiritual world. In the Book of Genesis, God reveals himself to the patriarch Jacob unexpectedly, in a dream, thus eliminating the need for Jacob to pass the stages of initation. In this sense Jacob, compared to the Ancient Egyptian initiate, is a passive observer, to whom one of the most profound secrets of knowledge of God is revealed by grace. God’s promise is also essentially di erent in the two traditions. Mystical contemplation of Osiris prepared an initiate to preserve an individual consciousness in life after death, while in the Book of Genesis the text speaks not of the soul’s passage into the spiritual world, but of the rooting of the human consciousness in earthly life. The Lord promises Jacob: “the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed,” (Genesis 28 : 13),
Marc Chagall, Jacob’s dream, 1973, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm
and that He will protect Jacob wherever he might go and return him after long wanderings “into this land” (Genesis 28 : 15). The preservation of faithfulness to the earth can be seen in the Christian perspective as a necessary condition for the embodiment of the Son of God. Thus, unlike that of the ancient Egyptian mystics, here the goal is not the ascent of man into the spiritual world for journeys in its sacred depths, but rather the descent of God to earth, making the earth holy. However, by the same token the necessity of the reverse descent — the ascent into the world of holy Archetypes — is not negated. Along with the descending Angels Jacob sees ascending ones. The nal meaning of these angels’ movements is revealed in the Gospel according to John, in which Christ speaks about the arrival of a new era, when it will be possible to achieve a balance between the two routes: the road of ascent to the spiritual world and the road of descending incarnations, carrying the fruits of supersensitive contemplations to earthly life: “Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” (John 1 : 51)
3. Revelations at the Crossroads of Cultures
The earliest known depiction of Jacob’s ladder was discovered during an archaeological dig in the Dura-Europos synagogue on the Euphrates river, built in the 3rd century AD under the Roman Empire. The dig, organized by Yale University, took place from 1928 to 1937 under the supervision of M. I. Rostovtse and James Henry Breasted. In 1935 the archaeologist Clark Hopkins discovered the remains of the synagogue, built in 244–245. In 256 the city was destroyed as a result of an invasion by the Sassanid Persians. The synagogue’s unique paintings were preserved only thanks to the fact that before the Sassanid invasion, during the construction of forti cations the building was buried in sand and thus escaped destruction during the taking of the city. Archaeologists discovered two layers of extraordinary murals. One layer from 244/245, and the second one painted shortly before the sacking of the city by the Persians. Both layers were executed according to complex theological schemas.
The second mural consists of 58 frescoes on Old Testament themes, of which nine are taken from the Pentateuch. Interestingly, all three of the themes taken from the Book of Genesis are related to episodes in the story of the patriarch Jacob: the vision of a heavenly ladder ( Genesis 28 : 10–22), Jacob’s blessing of his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh (Genesis 48 : 1–22) and Jacob’s blessing of his sons (Genesis 49 : 1–27). The fresco with the depiction of the heavenly ladder is in the upper level, on the northern wall of the synagogue. Unlike many other frescoes, it is almost completely destroyed. Nonetheless it is possible to see the fresco’s composition, which in various ways predetermined the further development of this iconography. At the same time we cannot say with certainty that this particular fresco is the rst of its kind, as there were paintings in other synagogues based on the Pentateuch and other Old Testament texts in the 3 rd century AD. This in and of itself presents not so much an art historical as a theological problem, considering the Second Commandment, forbidding the depiction “of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is
in the water under the earth,” (Exodus 20 4) and worship of those images. However, as V. N. Lazarev noted, “as early as the 1st century individual rabbis started proposing a more exible interpretation of the abovementioned part of the Book of Exodus, one which could justify the decoration of synagogues with Biblical scenes and gures of the prophets.” 9 Kurt Weitzmann suggested that this tradition dates back to biblical illustrations which appeared “among the Jewish diaspora as early as the pre-Christian era, when the Old Testament (known as the Septuagint) was translated in the 3rd century BC.”10 As a result complex iconographic works were created, often intended to convey speci c theological agendas. Thus, in the rst layer of murals in the synagogue at Dura-Europos “the decorative program symbolizes hope for the reconstruction of the temple that was lost by the Jews, by the Messiah.”11
No less complex in its conception was the program of the second layer of murals in the synagogue. It “illustrates the ful llment of prophecies about the the imminent arrival of the Messiah, about the establishment of the kingdom of David, the reconstruction of Jerusalem and its temple, and also examples of the spiritual strength and miraculous victories of the prophets.”12 We can consider that the “Jacob’s Dream” fresco in this context allegorically depicted the action of God’s Providence in the history of Israel and served as a con rmation of promises made by God to the patriarch Jacob.
4. The Symbol of the Ladder in Early Christian Art
A fresco with a depiction of Jacob’s Dream (p. 68), painted a hundred years after the frescoes in the Dura-Europos synagogue, was discovered in the Roman catacombs in the Via Latina in 1955. Despite the passage of a century between the creation of the two frescoes, they di er very little from one another. In both cases the basic element of the composition is the ladder, diagonally crossing the canvas. In the picture’s right corner, in a semi-reclining pose, a mighty gure of Jacob, almost as big as the heavenly ladder, leans on a stone with his right hand. According to the Book of Genesis the patriarch had placed this stone under his head: “And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.” (Genesis 28 11) This is followed by a description of the mystical dream with a vision of the heavenly ladder, upon waking from which Jacob “took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it.” (Genesis 28 : 18) The fresco combines two moments: on the left we see Jacob’s vision of the heavenly ladder with two angels, one of which — the larger one — is descending to earth with a gesture of blessing, as the other ascends the ladder with prayerfully raised hands, while on the right we see Jacob waking from his dream. In later development of this iconographic subject the Old
9 V. N. Lazarev, Istoria vizantiiskoi zhivopisi, 1986, Iskusstvo, Moscow, p. 29.
10 Ibid.
11 V. E. Suslenkov, Dura-Europos, 2012, on www.pravenc.ru
12 Ibid.
Testament patriarch’s act of gratitude, pouring oil on the stone that served as his pillow, is given more importance. Jacob’s eyes are wide open, possibly to indicate the patriarch’s awareness of his mystical experience, although his gaze is directed o to the side of the ladder. In this way the artist who painted the Via Latina fresco makes it clear that he has depicted a revelation (a spiritual image), which the initiated perceives not with his eyes but through his inner vision.
In the subsequent development of the iconography, the idea of the vision’s spiritual nature gradually disappears, and the relative proportion of the ladder to the gure of Jacob takes on a more “natural” character. The thin steps of the ladder emphasize its dematerialized (visionary) character. Its upper extremity disappears into a purely spiritual sphere. A “ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven” (Genesis, 28:12). Although in the Book of Genesis it is written that Jacob saw the Lord himself at the top of the ladder, the artist painted only a cloudlike sphere, indicating God’s presence without resorting to an anthropomorphic image, in keeping with the Old Testament rule forbidding the depiction of God (Exodus 20 : 4–5). Clearly the number of twelve steps carries symbolic meaning. Numerologically it matches the twelve signs of the Zodiac which de ne spiritual space, and in the earthly plane it matches the Twelve Tribes of Israel (descended from the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob) and the Twelve Apostles of Christ. In the Apocalpyse of John, also known as The Book of Revelation, there are twelve Angels at the twelve gates of New Jerusalem. (Revelation 21 : 12).
5. The Brescia Casket or Lipsanotheca13
Another work re ecting early Jacob’s Dream iconography is a relief panel on the lower part of the right face of the Brescia Casket, in the collection of the Museo dell’Età Cristiana in the Chiesa di S. Giulia, Brescia. The Casket is a wooden box (32.7 × 24 × 22 cm), covered with ivory reliefs depicting Old and New Testament scenes. Religious Byzantinism introduced signi cant changes in iconography and style at the time of the Casket’s creation, around 370 AD. The Brescia Casket is rightly considered one of the most artistically perfect works of Early Byzantine art, while it is still closely tied to the earlier catacomb period. The approaching shift from one era of church history to another can be felt in the master of the casket’s striving to achieve a strictly canonic work of early Christian iconography. While the catacomb paintings exhibit a light, impressionistic style with no attention to linear precision, the Casket’s relief panels pre gure hieratic conventions of the Byzantine sense of form. In a sense the Casket’s panels seem to bring the development of early Christian art to a close, maintaining a faithfulness — which later disappeared — to iconographic types and subjects. Thus, Christ is still depicted as a beardless youth, His image symbolizing the beginning of the spiritual renewal of man and the universe through the power of the heavenly Word (Logos). Special meaning was accorded to Old Testament themes which typologically pre gure the mystery of Christ’s death on Golgotha and Resur-
rection. Two ivory reliefs on the front panel of the Casket remind the viewer of this: one depicts the prophet Jonah, a frequent subject of Roman catacomb paintings, thrown into a raging sea by sailors in a prototype of Jesus’ death on the cross; the other portrays a monster disgorging Jonah “upon the dry land” at the Lord’s bidding, signaling the future mystery of the Resurrection, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12 : 40). From the Book of Genesis, the Casket’s panels depict the patriarch Jacob’s theophanic dream — but notably, only the ladder itself, joining earth and heaven, is represented. This indicates the su ciency of the ladder alone to convey symbolic meaning, — although lest it be perceived as a utilitarian object, the ladder is carefully placed in context, included in a series of other images, presuming their allegorical and anagogical interpretation — an important element of the creation of the Brescia Casket’s theological program. Images take on the character of codes and form a sort of mystery-painting, the meaning of which cannot be fully expressed in words.
Lipsanotheca of Brescia, c. 370 AD, wood, ivory
13 Lipsanotheca, in Latin lipsanoteca, from the Greek leipsana (“remains”) and the Greek theca (“depository”), meaning a reliquary for relics of saints.
6. Jacob’s Dream in Byzantine iconography
Winged angels rst appear in images of Jacob’s Dream, a signi cant iconographic innovation as angels had theretofore not had this attribute. According to Dionysius the Areopagite, the wings symbolize “the heavenly progression up the steep, and the exemption from everything earthly through the upward ascent. The lightness of the wings shows that they are altogether heavenly and unsullied and untrammeled in their upliftment on high.”14 The author is referring here to the ascent into the heavenly spiritual world, thus images of winged angels ascending on the ladder reinforce the sense of elevation from the earthly to the heavenly. In one of the miniatures from “The Homilies of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus”, executed
14 Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Celestial Heirarchy, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/ CelestialHierarchy.html, pp. 193–94.
Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, 880–883, illuminated manuscript
in the 9th century for the Byzantine emperor Basil I15, an Angel wakes Jacob from his sleep, so that he can observe the ladder with its winged Angels ascending to the spiritual sky. The absence in the miniature of descending Angels underscores Jacob’s attention to the purely anagogic matter of ascent to God. In this miniature there are also some notable details which were subsequently further developed in Byzantine art. To the right of the ladder we see the stone used by Jacob as a pillow, which he “poured oil upon the top of” (Genesis 28 18) on awakening, saying “this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house” ( Genesis 28 : 22), that is, the temple of the Living God. The stone is portrayed as an altar, emphasizing its sacred meaning. Even more signi cance is attached to the episode of Jacob’s struggle with the Angel, which takes place many years after the vision of the celestial ladder: “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” ( Genesis 32 : 24) There are several exegetical hypotheses about how the mysterious Someone appeared. As a result of this struggle, Jacob received the new name of Israel: “as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” ( Genesis 32 : 28). He said, “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” ( Genesis 32 : 30) In art, as a rule, Jacob is always shown wrestling with the Angel, whose Name is to this day the subject of debate. According to the apocryphal text “Jacob’s Dream” from the series “Explanatory Palaea”, which has survived only in the Slavonic version, it was God’s messenger the Archangel Sariel (Uriel) who wrestled with Jacob. He explained Jacob’s dream in Bethel and declared “his new, angel-like status, symbolically expressed in the gift of the name Israel to the prophet.”16 In the apocrypha related to the legend about Enoch, who was taken alive to heaven (Genesis 5 : 24), Uriel also “plays the role of a celestial teacher, assisting the observer of mysteries in the acquisition of his new, mountainous individuality”17 All this makes the juxtaposition of two mystical images understandable: Jacob, contemplating the heavenly ladder and Jacob, wrestling with the Archangel Uriel. Both scenes represent a sort of initiation into the sacred mystery of God-seeing. The moun-
15 Sirarpie Der Nersessian, The Illustrations of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus: Paris Gr. 510. A Study of the Connections between Text and Images, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 16 (1962): 195–228.
16 Andrei Orlov, Litso kak nebesnyi dvoinik mistika v slavyanskoi “Lestvitsa Iakova“, http:// www.biblicalstudy.ru/OT/Orlov2.pdf. p. 18.
17 Ibid., p. 20.
tain at the center of the composition symbolizes spiritual ascension into the world of sacred Archetypes.
Later on, the iconographic composition of Jacob’s Dream was expanded to include episodes of the forefather’s cult pouring of oil on the stone (or sacri cial altar) and Jacob’s struggle with the Archangel, but the old tradition was nonetheless maintained, concentrating the viewer’s attention on the symbol of the celestial ladder. The subject is thus presented in a miniature in the Kokkinobaphos manuscripts dating to the second quarter of the 12th century.18 The manuscript is thought to have been illuminated in a Constantinople scriptorium of the Komnenian dynasty. The ladder is its primary element, sharply dividing the composition diagonally from right to left. At its foot lies the gure of the sleeping Jacob. Two winged angels descend from above as two other angels, hands raised to the sky, mount towards them. The latter seem to hover, as their feet do not touch the steps, while the descending angels lean rmly on the ladder’s rungs. Their gestures are calm and directed towards earth. The gold background underscores the impression of the other-worldliness of all that is happening. At the top of the ladder there is a segment of the celestial sphere, in the center of which is Christ with a cruciform halo. By the time of this manuscript, several variations had evolved of the imagery indicating the holy presence experienced by Jacob in his dream. Given that in the Book of Genesis, the Old Testament patriarch not only heard God’s voice resounding from the top of the ladder, but also saw Him: “And, behold, the Lord stood above it” (Genesis 28 : 13), it is easy to understand why artists strove to nd appropriate imagery to symbolize this vision.
Homilies of Jacob Kokkinobaphos, second quarter of 12th century, illuminated manuscript
While the more ancient tradition, as we can see in the fresco in the Via Latina catacomb, was for artists to limit themselves to the depiction of the celestial sphere alone, in the Middle Ages artists began to add images of Jesus administering a blessing. In some images, the Virgin Mary was shown in the sphere, according to an established Byzantine theological interpretation of Jacob’s ladder as a precursor to the mystery of Christmas, in which the spiritual sky is joined with the earth.
7. Riddles of the Catalonian Miniatures
Another iconographic variation is presented by the colorful illuminations in the “Golden Hagaddah” (p. 69), dating from the rst half of the 14th century. Here at
18 The manuscript of the Homilies, gr. 1162, in the Vatican Library.
the apex of the ladder which angels are descending and ascending, at the center of the celestial sphere, is an opening, a window through which a human face appears, iconographically little different from the early Christian images of Jesus as a beardless youth with long wavy hair falling on his shoulders. Although, as the Haggadah19 is a collection of Jewish prayers and other sacred texts, for the most part related to the theme of the Exodus from Egypt as described in the Second Book of Moses (Exodus) and is read by pious Jews in the night of Passover20, of course the Face at the top of the ladder cannot be Christ’s. Stylistic illustrations in the “Golden Haggadah” are no di erent from medieval gothic miniatures painted in the rst half of the 14th century. The very fact of the creation of these gurative illustrations to the Haggadah presents a di cult question: as early as the 6th century anthropomorphic images in Judaism were strictly forbidden and reappeared only in the 14th century. One of the earliest examples of these later illuminated manuscripts is the “Birds’ Head Haggadah”, created by the scribe Menahem in the Upper Rhine region of Germany around 1300.
Miniatures on Biblical themes were most widely distributed in Catalonia’s ourishing Jewish community, which maintained Kabbalist traditions. Most likely, in the miniature showing Jacob’s Dream, one can detect traces of medieval esotericism. According to the apocryphal “Jacob’s Dream” the Old Testament patriarch saw a ery human face at the top of the ladder. God himself “is located above this ‘higher’ face and addresses Jacob by name.”21 “This ery image, called in some Biblical and inter-testament texts as ‘a Face’, is tied to the appearance of glory, known in theofanic traditions as ‘Kavod’, or ‘Respect’ for God, which mystically helps one to experience the Presence of the Creator. In these traditions ‘the
19 Haggadah — from the ancient Hebrew verb agged (to tell), translated as speaking, story, narration.
20 The night of the 14–15 of the month of Nissan.
21 Andrei Orlov, Litso kak nebesnyi dvoinik mistika v slavyanskoi “Lestvitsa Iakova’, http://www. biblicalstudy.ru/OT/Orlov2.pdf. p. 4.
Face’ often serves as a light-carrying ‘facade’ of God’s glory — ‘Respect’.”22 In the miniature from the “Golden Haggadah” the anthropomorphic Face is depicted speci cally as “light-carrying”, emphasizing the quality of spiritual-light in Respect. Andrei Orlov, a specialist in Judaic apocalypticism and mysticism, found proof in the Targumim (interpretive re-tellings of the Bible in Judaism) that the Face depicted at the top of the ladder signi es the appearance of God’s Glory (Shekinah). Thus, in the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Genesis 28:13-17 is related as follows: “And behold, the Glory of the Lord stood above him, and He said to him, I am the Lord the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Izhak (…) And Jacob awoke from his sleep, and said, Verily the Glory of the Lord’s Shekinah dwelleth in this place, and I knew it not.”23
The Face depicted on the miniature in the “Golden Haggadah” becomes even more mysterious when we nd a likeness to the face of Jacob sleeping at the foot of the ladder. The esoteric basis for this mirroring is provided in several Targums, in which the “heavenly” prototype (the higher “I”) of the patriarch is mentioned. Scholars have often noted that the “ ery Face in ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ serves not only as the appearance of God’s Glory, but also represents the celestial re ection of Jacob himself.”24 If we accept this interpretation, the symbol of the ladder takes on an even more esoteric meaning, showing man the prototype of a path to his archetype (“the higher I”), concealed in the depths of the spiritual world.
On the miniature three angels are depicted, attempting to wake Jacob from his sleep so that he can receive the theophanic revelation in a waking state and thus lift his soul to a higher stage of spiritual development. We can assume that here the Angels symbolically represent three aspects of the human soul, as, according to the Kabbalah, “man has three souls”25 The rst is called the nefesh (life, as in sentience); it represents the lower step and applies to the vital. The second soul is the ruach (spirit), the third neshama (Soul), which is “another spiritual degree” the holy, higher stage of the soul26 The di erences among the “three souls” are indicated by the colors of their garments: the rst Angel, touching Jacob’s head with his hand, is dressed in a white robe, the second Angel, still standing on a lower rung of the ladder and only approaching the patriarch, is dressed in a lavender garment and nally the third Angel, who we can assume represents neshama, wears a blue robe and approaches the sleeping visionary from a distance. A fourth Angel, who resembles Jacob, is depicted ascending the ladder towards his Celestial Archetype.
This apparently strange and paradoxical interpretation is in fact fully in line with the Kabbalistic views of the Catalonian Jewish community, albeit accessible only to a narrow circle of esoterics. From this point of view two interpretations of Jacob’s Dream which seem mutually exclusive are compatible: on one hand the
22 Ibid., p. 7.
23 Ibid., p. 9.
24 Ibid., p. 10.
25 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1995, Schoken Books, New York, pp. 240–241.
26 Rav Michael Laitman (translation by David Brushin and Keren Appelbaum), The Zohar 2009, Laitman Kabbalah Publishers, Toronto, p. 232.
Marc Chagall, White Cruci xion, 1938, oil on canvas
story is connected to the theophany of Kavod (Glory); on the other hand, with the appearance to Jacob of the face of his archetype (the “higher I”). In the latter case the comparison of Angels with “three souls” also should not excite surprise. That interpretation derives from the revelation of the symbolic code concealed in the miniature’s composition. The sacred meaning itself is not forced on the viewer. It emerges in the consciousness upon attentive meditation on the image. Accordingly, the miniature of Jacob’s Dream from the “Golden Haggadah” is an example of a convincing artistic embodiment of one of the most important principles of hermetic symbolism and metaphysics: the “juxtaposition of the incompatible” leading to the union of opposites. Antinomies lie at the foundation of the structure of human reason and thus metaphysical synthesis is possible only on the level of imaginative cognition.
8. Marc Chagall’s Biblical Imaginings
Marc Chagall approached the subject of Jacob’s Dream innovatively and not without audacity. In a drawing he created in 1931, a black seven-step ladder reaches to the sky. Clearly the artist wanted to remain faithful to the Second Commandment of Moses and unlike the miniaturist of the “Golden Haggadah” did not place an anthropomorphic image of the Archetype at the top of the ladder. Three angels on the ladder are descending to earth. All this in one way or another still fits the framework of the iconographic tradition, but the drawing includes a daring and mysterious innovation — the figure of a fleeing Jew in a black cap, his back turned to the ladder with the angels. In his right hand he holds a stick, with his left hand he steadies a sack on his back. The image in itself, inspired by impressions from childhood and youth, is typical of Chagall, as is the landscape with houses reminiscent of early 20 th century Jewish settlements; but both the houses and the “Vitebsk Hasid” fleeing from the vision, would seem to bear no relation to Jacob’s Dream. On one hand, the image of the clearly drawn ladder with angels descending to the Vitebsk shtetl reflects Marc Chagall’s belief that the ladder is an archetypal reality and that at any time, in any place, ascent to the spiritual world is possible, and on the other hand, the figure of the fleeing Hasid hints at a different possibility — when a person turns his back on the heavenly vision. Or perhaps Chagall dared to depict a modernized version of Jacob himself, setting out on his path after seeing the ladder? The same mysterious figure reappears in Chagall’s 1938 painting “White Crucifixion” in which the “Vitebsk Hasid” with a sack on his back runs away from the crucifixion that compositionally replaces the ladder in the 1931 drawing. The associative tie between Jacob’s Dream and the crucifixion is underlined by the portrayal of a white ladder leaning against the cross. The figure of the Hasid appears for a third time in the 1942 painting “Yellow Crucifixion”, however here the figure is not fleeing but rather standing before the crucifixion, holding a ladder.
Chagall presents an utterly di erent interpretation of the theme of Jacob’s Dream in a 1956 colored engraving (p. 77). Here the story is viewed as an episode in Jacob’s spiritual awakening. The top of the ladder reaches into the holy sphere
(Shekinah as a revelation of the Glory of the Unseen God). Instead of an anthropomorphic Face, Chagall has drawn a sacred Tetragram27 — the Name which God revealed to Moses in Hareb, at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3 14). The sky is united with the earth by means of a vertically placed black ladder. On it stand two angels, gazing at the gure of Jacob, who lies with his back to the celestial vision. Deep in thought, he supports his head with his left hand. The most mysterious element of the whole composition is the image of a man falling from the sky to the earth. Dressed in black robes, he touches Jacob’s head with his right hand and with his left he points towards the top of the ladder, where in the Light the Name of God is revealed. If we compare this image to the vision of the Face in the Catalonian miniature, we can imagine that Chagall has portrayed the whole process of initiation, in reverse order. If in the “Golden Haggadah” the Face in the open window represents Jacob’s Celestial double, Chagall’s engraving depicts the descent of the “higher I” to its earthly projection. Chagall’s version is closer to the meaning of the dream in which the Lord gives a promise: “the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed” (Genesis 28 : 13). Jacob’s mission involves not ight from the earth to a celestial dwelling, but rather the spiritual transformation of the earth.
Chagall continued to explore the theme of Jacob’s Dream in the 1960s, creating several versions. The composition of his 1966 painting is more complex and detailed than it is in the artist’s earlier graphic works. Here the canvas is divided horizontally into two almost discrete parts. On the right, the central spot is occupied by a winged Seraphim clutching a lighted Menorah to his breast. On the left side of the painting we see Jacob’s Dream with the traditional seven-step ladder, shown with a slight incline. One angel supports the ladder while another hovers in the air next to it. A third angel, with his face turned to the skies, is shown at the top of the ladder in a complex and tortuous pose. Both the hovering angel and the angel at the top of the ladder are nude, their bodies painted a festive yellow, a color associated with the sound of the shofar ceremonial horns. In the left-hand corner, where according to iconographic tradition Jacob would sit, Chagall painted a winged angel supine on the ground. This gure presumably represents Jacob’s spiritual prototype, his celestial double. The patriarch himself is painted sitting in the contemplative pose of a meditating Hasid on the right side of the left-hand part of the canvas, thus near the center of the composition.
Chagall once again returned to the theme of Jacob’s Dream in 1973 (Fig. 1). The painting he created signals an important step in biblical iconography. The whole surface of the canvas, as in the earlier work, reminds us of the astral world in which the soul lives, emerging from its physical casing in a dream. Almost three-quarters of the painting’s surface is plunged into a dense dark blue atmosphere in which the outlines of the objective world dissolve. The upper portion of the composition represents a aming sky through which oat smoky clouds. Here Chagall in-
27 “Tetragram. The name of God, consisting of four letters, his Greek title; in the Hebrew language these four letters are ‘iod, he, vav, he’, or in English capital letters IHVH. The original ancient pronunciation is no longer known; a true Jew would consider this name too sacred to be spoken and when reading the holy texts aloud he would replace this name with ‘Adonai’, or ‘The Lord’.” E. P. Blavatskaya, Theosophical Dictionary
troduces yet more previously unseen elements into the iconography of Jacob’s Dream. It is important to note that the artist was born into a Hasidic family. He was therefore well positioned to absorb the mystical aspects of Hasidic Judaism and its emphasis on direct spiritual experience. If in the case of the Catalonian miniature we can only hypothesize about the in uence of the Kabbala on the anonymous author, the in uence of Hasidism on the work and spiritual life of Chagall is an unquestionable historical fact. He himself spoke of his striving to portray “elements of the world” that are invisible to the human eye, and thus nd a way to enter “fourth dimension” consciousness. This artistic objective impelled him to seek his own approach to questions that concerned him, based on his own inner, dreamt or imagined visions of astral images.
In a departure from traditional iconography, in Chagall’s painting the Angels are still only in the process of erecting a mystical ladder as an Angel with dark blue wings at the top struggles to hold it and keep it from falling. Three other Angels are portrayed nude, which paradoxically serves to strengthen the sense of their immateriality. Their bodies seem to be sewn from astral light and are fully devoid of eshy corporeality, and the gure of an Angel merging with the ery skies is barely indicated with a light outline. The painting includes a number of other details that cannot be clearly interpreted. For example, an anthropomorphic creature with angelic wings and animal head, ying towards the ladder, or a yellow rooster28 on which a woman sits with a baby in her arms. Clearly for the artist himself such details arose in an utterly irrational way as the result of an intuitive immersion in the depths of his own inner world, where he experienced a departure into the “fourth dimension”; apparently, not only Jacob is dreaming: the whole world is in a dream state from which only the appearance of Angels can wake it.
9. Exegetic Modi cations to the Canon
In Jewish religious art, artists mindful of the Second Commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”, nonetheless found ways to depict Jacob’s Dream. Chagall was particularly aware of this interdiction; in one case he limits himself to sketching the Lord’s Name at the top of the ladder, while in another he portrays the ladder being raised by the Angels before the Lord’s appearance on it. In contrast, medieval Christian art adopted iconographic traditions in which Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary is portrayed in the celestial sphere. Of the two, the portrayal of Jesus in the sphere most clearly re ects the intention of clearly presenting the Appearance of God as described in the Book of Genesis. Jacob saw not only the Angels, but also God himself: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it”. (Genesis 28:12-13).
28 Chagall’s paintings often depict roosters. “For the most part the rooster accompanies the image of the artist himself…To the extent that the rooster in Chagall’s work is tied to the image of the artist, or a con rmation of his creative energy”; “For the most part the rooster accompanies the image of the artist himself… To the extent that the rooster in Chagall’s work is tied to the image of the artist, or a con rmation of his creative energy” Sylvie Forestier, Marc Chagall.
For Byzantine Orthodox believers, Jacob’s vision also prototypically pre gured Christ’s gift to his disciples of the possibility to “see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” (John 1 : 51). “The vision of the open sky and of God’s angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man is the vision of Glory”29, that is, Shekinah, as the illustrators of the “Golden Haggadah” also portrayed it, albeit in a di erent light. “The vision of the Lord’s Glory is promised to the disciples. A view into the sky will be opened to the disciples. In the person of the angels ascending and descending to the Son of Man, the disciples will perceive the connection between the world of mountains and the world of valleys.”30 Thus it is not surprising that theologians interpreted the most minute details of Jacob’s Dream allegorically, aligning them with the events of the New Testament. They considered the ladder to be the prototype of the cross at Golgotha. The ladder was also endowed with ecclesiastical meaning as a symbol of the Church, uniting the earthly and the celestial. For this reason, in Byzantium a tradition evolved by which frescoes depicting the heavenly ladder along with other subjects from the Old Testament were placed in the altar area of Orthodox churches. One of the best-preserved examples of this can be seen in the Church of Saint Sophia in Ohrid, North Macedonia. In the early 11th century fresco on the north wall of the bema there is a ladder. At its foot lies Jacob with his gaze directed at the sphere of holy Light, in which he sees Christ, who blesses him. Four angels ascend and descend the ladder. The adjacent frescoes also treat themes related to the appearance of the spiritual world to Old Testament righteous men responsible for strengthening faith in the possibility of ascension to the celestial Archetypes. Two more frescoes on liturgical themes — The Liturgy of St. Basil of Caesarea (Saint Basil
Our Lady of the Burning Bush, mid-XIX century, wood, tempera, 17.6 × 15.2 cm. Note: A ladder is clearly visible in the hands of the Virgin Mary
29 Bishop Kassian (Bezobrazov), Lektsii po Novomy zavetu. Evangelie ot Ionna, 2006, SaintSerge Institut de théologie orthodoxe, Paris, p. 75.
30 Ibid.
the Great) and the Appearance of Christ to St. John Chrystotom — help reveal the anagogic meaning of these paintings to the viewer.
Byzantine theologians developed one other iconographic version of Jacob’s Dream in which an image of the Virgin Mary was placed at the top of the ladder. A ladder with twelve steps dominates the composition in a 16th century fresco in the Dionysiou Monastery at Mt. Athos (p. 71). An angel at the top of the ladder prayerfully extends his hands to the blue celestial sphere, where the Virgin Mary is portrayed. In contrast to many other works of sacred art on this theme, here Jacob is shown with his back to the ladder and fast asleep, emphasizing the purely spiritual character of his extrasensual vision.
Earlier yet in Orthodox theology and liturgical music, the symbol of the ladder was identi ed with Marian mysteries. The Holy Virgin Mary was celebrated as a “heavenly ladder by which God descended” (Akathist to the Holy Virgin. Ikos 2). On the icon of the Burning Bush the Virgin Mary is placed in the center, with a ladder in her hand as her sacred attribute. The iconography of the Burning Bush is notable for its complex symbolism, which is based on the Mariological interpretation of the Old Testament story by St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394). According to the Book of Exodus, “the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a ame of re out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with re, and the bush was not consumed.” (Exodus 3 : 2) The “radiance” that Mo -
ses sees “…did not come from a material substance, this light did not shine from some luminary among the stars but came from an earthly bush and surpassed the heavenly luminaries in brilliance. From this we learn also the mystery of the Virgin: The light of divinity which through birth shone from her into human life did not consume the burning bush, even as the ower of her virginity was not withered by giving birth.”31
St. Gregory of Nyssa supposed that the contemplation of this vision is accessible to everyone, to the degree that a person, on the road to spiritual improvement, “divests himself of the earthly covering and looks to the light shining from the bramble bush”. 32 This exegesis would seem to demand iconographic visualization, but the first attempts to depict the Burning Bush as Mariological theophany appeared only in the late 12 th century; an example of this is the miniature from one Byzantine manuscript. 33 In the illustration, the Virgin Mary is pictured emerging from the flame engulfing the bramble bush at the mountain’s summit. Probably without conscious intent on the part of the painter, the fiery column resembles a ladder uniting the sky with the earth. There is even an angel hovering by the edge of the flame and apparently holding it, and the flame reaches a curved shape that could be the bottom of the celestial sphere — presaging the later development of this iconography, which came to include symbolism of Jacob’s Dream. Early Byzantine miniaturists limited themselves to purely illustrative depictions of Moses with the Burning Bush, as we can see in the miniature in the 9 th century Paris Psalter. 34, Moses is portrayed standing before a faintly burning bush and gazing on the Lord’s hand, which emits a ray of Holy Light. With time, however, in 16 th century Russian Orthodox art we can detect interest in the creation of a more complex symbolism, and new iconographic canons appeared, the most common of which is the icon of The Virgin Mary of the Burning Bush.
In this icon (Fig. 2), the Burning Bush is depicted as an eight-pointed star formed by two intersecting four-point stars: one green, symbolizing the bramble bush, and one red, symbolizing the holy ame. At the center of the green star is a medallion with the image of the Virgin Mary. In Her right hand She holds a ladder. This reference to Jacob’s theophanic dream is often found in Mariological iconography along with other prototypes — the “stone. cut without hands” (Daniel 2 : 34) and the closed “gate of the outward sanctuary” (Ezekiel 44 : 1). In the upper left corner of the icon the Virgin Mary is shown emerging from Moses’ vision of the Burning Bush; on the opposite side a ery seraphim puri es the prophet Isaiah (“Then ew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from o the altar; And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this
31 (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, translation by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, 1978, Paulist Press, New York, p. 59. http://www.newhumanityinstitute.org/pdf-articles/ Gregory-of-Nyssa-The-Life-of-Moses.pdf
32 Ibid.
33 Reproduced in Konrad Onasch, Annemarie Schnieper, Ikonen. Faszination und Wirklichkeit, 2001, Orbis Verlag, p. 174.
34 The Paris Psalter, Cod. Grec., 139, in the National Library, Paris.
Sophia Church, Ohrid, rst half of the 11th century, wall paintings
hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.” (Isaiah 6 6–7)). On the lower left corner of the icon the prophet Ezekiel is shown prayerfully kneeling before the closed gates of the heavenly Temple, and opposite this image, on the right, we see Jacob with a ladder on which winged Angels descend and ascend. This image relates to the upper left-hand panel and reads as a sign of the connection between Jacob’s Dream and the theophany experienced by Moses on Mount Sinai. The other diagonal composition, lower left to upper right-hand corners, connects the prophet Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicating a stage of spiritual consciousness.
There is one more iconographic canon, The Virgin Mary of the Mountain (Fig. 3), which emerged in the mid-16th century during the Tsardom of Muscovy, a time of intense interest in complex symbolic and allegoric compositions. It was created on the basis of Mariological interpretations of texts of the book of the prophet Daniel. It comes from the stone, that “was cut out without hands” (Daniel 2:34) In this image Russian Orthodox exegetes discerned a prophetic presaging of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. The Virgin Mary was shown seated on a throne. In her hands she holds two symbols: the stone cut out without hands, and a small nine-step ladder.
10. The Path to Spiritual Ascent and its Dangers
The ladder as a symbol of the path of spiritual growth leading to Knowledge of God also appears in early Christian and Byzantine art without direct reference to Jacob’s Ladder. In an inscription in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla a ladder next to the name of the deceased serves as a symbol of the ascent of the spirit to its heavenly home, and in a fresco in the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter a man is portrayed ascending a ladder, apparently symbolizing movement on the path of spritual learning.35 Such images re ect a tendency in the understanding of spiritual development from early stages to the nal goal of initiation. In «The Celestial Hierarchy» written by Dionysius the Areopagite and including the scholia of Maximus the Confessor, this path is divided into three stages: “a puri cation, an illumination and a perfection.”36
There were attempts in monastic circles to create a complex di erentiated system of spiritual exercises on the basis of these teachings on Knowledge of God, reinforced by the direct experience of prayer. According to St. Macarius of Egypt, the system is made up of twelve steps:
“There are twelve steps, we might say, which a man has to pass before he reaches perfection.”37 Experience shows that descent is also possible, for example,
35 Heinz-Mohr Gerd. Lexikon der Symbole. Bilder und Zeichen der Christlichen Kunst., 1998, Diederichs Verlag, Munchen, p. 198.
36 Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Celestial Heirarchy, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/ CelestialHierarchy.html, pp. 169.
37 Macarius of Egypt, Fifty Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian Translated by Arthur James Mason, D. D., 1921, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, Homily VIII, part 4, p. 66 https://archive.org/stream/ ftyspiritualho00pseuuoft/ ftyspiritualho00pseuuoft_djvu.txt)
when “grace gives in, and he comes down by one step,”38 or falls to the bottom. St. Macarius himself limited his written remarks to a brief reference to the twelve-step mystical path and we can assume that he gave oral instructions to his closest students, those who were su ciently prepared to embark on the path leading to spiritual perfection.
A similar characterization of each step of the monastic enlightenment was rst made by John Climacus, Father Superior of the monastery at Mount Sinai, in his “Ladder of Divine Ascent”. From the title of this book John himself came to be known as John Climacus, from the Ancient Greek word for ladder, κλῖμαξ. He entered the Sinai monastery at the age of sixteen. In his old age he became its Father Superior and he died there in the late 6th century. Thanks to long years spent in prayer, he achieved the highest stages of Knowledge of God. As stated in his Life, “When indeed (St. John) was bodily present at Mount Sinai, he truly brought his spirit to the celestial mountain; I think that from this place he could consider how exactly he might fortify and render more comfortable the road to that very celestial mountain.”39 The author of the Life, the Raithu monk Daniel, was convinced that St. John Climacus “approached the mountain of God, and entered the forbidden cloud, going towards the celestial ladders and steps, and received the statutes written by the hand of God.”40 St. John long concealed his knowledge of the steps of monastic initiation and only upon the request of the Father Superior of the Raithu monastery did he agree to write instructions for the spiritual life, presenting it as the ascent of thirty steps to the heights of Knowledge of God and Communion with God. The number thirty symbolizes the thirty years of Christ’s life up until his baptism in the River Jordan. For St. John Climacus the
38 Ibid.
× 92 cm
39 Jacques-Paul Migne, Patriologiae cursus completus… Series graaeca, 1864, Vol. 88, pp. 598–604. English translation by Robin Saikia.
40 Ibid.
Our Lady of the Mountain, 1560s, Moscow, wood, tempera, 149
rst step of the celestial ladder was “renunciation of the world”41. The ascent on this ladder is rife with di cult tests. “Those who aim at ascending with the body to heaven, need violence indeed and constant su ering.”42
St. John saw attacks by demons as the main danger during the ascent. “Though unseen themselves, they can look at the face of our soul and if they see it altered by fear, they take up arms against us all the more ercely. For the cunning creatures have observed that we are scared.” 43 If the necessary precautionary measures are not taken, it is possible to fall from the high steps of perfections gained. Once the zealot has overcome temptations and demonic attacks, he nally reaches the thirtieth step, where the secret of the unity of three virtues — faith, hope, and love — is revealed, and thus the zealot becomes an earthly angel or a celestial person. By love St. John Climacus means God Himself and His re ection in human virtue. At the end of the book he appeals to the hypostatic Divine Love, wanting to learn: “I long to know how Jacob saw thee xed above the ladder. Satisfy my desire, tell me, what are the means of such an ascent? What the manner, what the law that joins together the steps which thy lover sets as an ascent in his heart? I thirst to know the number of those steps, and the time needed for the ascent.”44 Divine Love replies to John: “May this ladder teach you the spiritual combination of the virtues. On the top of it I have established myself.”45 Thus, at the end of the path of ascent to God, the connection between the steps towards spiritual perfection and the archetype revealed in Jacob’s prophetic dream is revealed to the initiate.
St. John Climacus’ writings inspired an iconography of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, which was rmly established by the beginning of the 12th century. The rst example of this is an icon (p. 98) found in Saint Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula, o cially known as the Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai, where St. John Climacus was Father Superior at one time. Judging from the nished perfection of the composition we can presume that it was not the rst attempt to depict visually the monk’s experience. The whole surface of the icon from left to right is crossed by a thirty-step ladder upon which monks ascend towards Christ, shown at the top of the ladder. Nine black winged demons attempt in various ways to toss the zealots down into the abyss. They shoot arrows, strike with spears, or, most often, throw ropes with nooses over the monks’ heads and drag them down from the ladder. One of the demons beats a monk with a hammer as a second throws the noose on him. Some of the demons are already departing calmly with their prey, others are still preparing to attack. Ascending the ladder, that is, leading a spiritual life, is fraught with attacks by demons who often succeed in their mission. Monks are tossed downwards not only from the lower rungs of the ladder, but even from the upper
41 St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, translated by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, 1959, Harper & Brothers, New York, Step 1, p. 1.
42 Ibid.,,Step 1, paragraph 8, p. 2.
43 Ibid., Step 1, paragraph 22, p. 4.
44 Ibid., Step 30, paragraph 36, p. 129.
45 Ibid.
steps. Angels and monks observe this spiritual battle: in the lower right-hand corner stands a group of monks with St. John Climacus at their head, praying for their colleagues on the ladder, while in the upper left corner nine angels observe the events without engaging directly in the struggle with the demons. The whole multi- gured composition is painted on a gold background, symbolizing the holy Eternity, lled with spiritual Light which lends a sense of the archetypal character of the symbol of the ladder.
Over time a number of new elements were added to the iconographic canon established in the 12th century. In the refectory of the Dionysiou Monastery there is a fresco executed in the late 1540s showing Angels not only passively observing from celestial heights, but also joining in the battle with the demons. The ladder itself is broken in the middle, intensifying the drama of the ascent to the spiritual world. An Angel assists a monk who has lost his balance to stay on the broken step while to his left a winged demon has already dragged another zealot into the dark abyss — in whose depths an apocalyptic dragon is portrayed gulping down another monk who has been thrown down from the ladder. Characteristically the struggle for souls becomes more intense as the monk gets closer to Christ. Monks mount the lower rungs calmly, accompanied by Angels; it is at the top of the ladder that a cruel battle is engaged, and those who have, it would seem, achieved the highest level of perfection, are dragged from the ladder by demons. The whole development of the iconographic subject in the monastery refectory re ects knowledge based on experience of the pitfalls of spiritual development. At the same time as the refectory fresco was being created, a pupil of the monk and icon painter Theophanes Strylitzas, the Cretan master Tzortzis, decorated the monastery’s katholikon, or cathedral temple. He created the biggest series of frescoes on the theme of the Apocalypse in Russian Orthodox painting. His depiction of the Ladder ts in the context of the whole cathedral complex and takes on an apocalyptic color.
While ladder iconography’s primary theme is spiritual ascent in life, it also contains veiled references to the soul’s wanderings after death, as did the Ancient Egyptian mysteries. The side panels of Bosch’s polyptych in the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice are an example of this. On the inner side of the left panel, Angels are depicted as they raise the souls of the dead into the sphere of spiritual light (through a sort of tunnel of light), while on the inner side of the right panel, demons throw souls downward into a ery abyss. If one were to juxtapose the two panels vertically, it would be easy to see a strong similarity to Russian Orthodox Ladder iconography. In early Russian icon painting this subject was also furnished with a number of details suggesting life after death: wide-open heavenly gates through which zealots enter and are met by Christ and a large group of angels and saints. Their souls cross the threshold of the spiritual world and become part of eternal life. On one 12th century icon monks are partaking of a meal in the celestial refectory while below hell’s ame burns and a soul tossed into it struggles to escape. An event proceeding in the spiritual world and invisible to sensory perception becomes visible through sacred iconography, indicating the path to ascent to the Archetype.
11. The Ladder of St. Romuald
In medieval Catholic art an iconography of Spiritual Ascent analagous to the Byzantine established itself, but unlike the Byzantine, the Catholic iconography was not widely distributed. It is based on the vision of St. Romuald (951–1027) that preceded the establishment of the Camaldolese Order.
Unlike St. John Climacus, who lived in the Sinai monastery from an early age until his death, Romuald spent his life in constant search of an isolated place where he could achieve his ascetic feats. He was born in Ravenna and until he was 20 he lived a distracted secular life without a thought of monastic life. Only when the young man learned of a duel his father fought, in which two people were killed, did a desire arise in him to quit this world which was “lying in evil”. He entered the Benedictine Order as a monk at the Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna, but this did not bring him the peace he craved; rather his e orts to reform monastic habits led his colleagues to persecute him. Romuald began a period of lengthy wanderings and even moved to Catalonia, where he found refuge in the Abbey at Ripoll. Romuald later returned to Italy where he once again attempted to establish a monastery with strict rules. His periods of wandering were interspersed with periods of complete isolation. Around 1012 St. Romuald decided to found an eremo46, or hermitage, near the Tuscan city of Arezzo. A wealthy Arezzan, Count Maldolus, gave him the land for the hermitage. According to legend, Maldolus’ gift was inspired by a dream in which Maldolus saw monks in white robes ascending to heaven. In another version, Romuald himself had the vision of the monks climbing a ladder of virtues towards Christ.
Italian religious art of the late Gothic period takes both versions of the St. Romuald legend into consideration. Against the background of a dense forest stands a ladder on which stand several monks in white cassocks, hands clasped in prayer. Unlike the Byzantine “ladders”, in these paintings no demons attack the zealots, no monks fall into the hellish ery abyss, the whole composition has a pacifying, calm character. Next to Christ at the top of the mountain two Angels in red robes carry the sacred chalice, which suggests an association with the Holy Grail. This element is absent from Byzantine iconography.
At the base of the ladder on the left St. Romuald is depicted deep in a mystical dream. The viewer is struck by the similarity to the pose in which the Old Testament patriarch Jacob is often shown, and thus is shown the re ection of the eternal Archetype in a new historical situation. To the right of the ladder sits the donor of the land, Maldolus. Unlike Romuald he is depicted awake, but in the pose of a meditating person, deep in contemplation of an inner vision.
Italian and Spanish Baroque painters rethought Romuald’s legend once again. They rejected the sacred language of medieval art but at the same time they wanted to portray the super-sensual character of St. Romuald’s vision using the new means of artistic expression available to them. One of the best examples of these works is a painting by the High Baroque classicist Andrea Sacchi
(1599–1661), now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. The artist avoided the theatrical excesses of the Baroque style and imparted to his composition a severity that signalled the shift from Baroque to Classicism. Sacchi portrayed a group of monks in the foreground of his painting, monks from the Camaldolese Order founded by St. Romuald. He points to his vision: in the spiritual world zealots ascend towards God, their bodies apparently free of earthly weight. The ladder itself is fully dissolved in the stream of light. Andrea Sacchi was directed in this by his artistic instinct. If medieval hieratism permitted the objective depiction of a ladder in a way that didn’t disrupt the overall supersensual character of the vision, in Baroque painting such material objectivity would make the vision look like a purely earthly scene. Through his use of light, the artist managed to portray the contrast between Romuald, contemplating the heavenly vision, and his apostles, who are merely listening to the saint’s account of his experience in the spiritual world.
12. The Forgotten Dreams of a Carthaginian Martyr
46 Eremo, from the Greek eremos, or desert, by extension a deserted place; the root of the French and English word “hermitage”.
The existence of an Archetype of the celestial ladder is confirmed by the spiritual experience of mankind in different historical epochs. The ladder as symbol of spiritual ascent maintains its universal significance, supplemented only by various details depending on the particular cultural context. Some of the visions are preserved for millennia in the human memory, others remain the property of a narrow circle of the initiated, yet others are either utterly forgotten or have little influence on art despite the profundity of their spiritual content. Among the latter are the visions experienced by the martyr Perpetua in 203, when she was thrown into prison during persecutions of Christians under the rule of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. Perpetua had several visions in prison. Her own journal notes of these spiritual experiences have survived, conserved by her friends and later included in a unique work of early
Attributed to Pittora Pisano, Dream of St. Romuald, c. 1400
Christian literature “The Passion of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity and others” ( Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis cum sociis ). “The actions of these martyrs” wrote the brilliant church historian Vasily Bolotov, “are completely true: In the first part the actions are described in writings of the martyr Perpetua herself, in the second part they are described by witnesses to the martyrs’ deaths.” 47 Perpetua was descended from a noble Carthaginian family. She wanted to become a Christian, and without her father’s knowledge was accepted as a catechumen to prepare for baptism. It was at this time that Septimius Severus issued an order which, “under penalty of hard punishment, he forbade conversion to both the Jewish and the Christian religion,” that is, in other words, “he presented a principle by which each person must follow his national [in this case Roman] faith, and not change it by his own volition.” 48 This order was not universally followed to the letter, however in Carthage and other regions of North Africa it provoked serious repressions, particularly against those who were still just preparing to convert from their “national” religion to Christianity. Among the repressed was the twenty-year-old widow Perpetua with a baby in her arms. As she was still only a catchumen, she did not know all the truths of the Christian faith, for they were explained only after Baptism or immediately before it. However Perpetua had a lively and genuine faith, which revealed to her profound secrets of the spiritual world. While in prison she had a vision of a celestial ladder which she described in a journal entry. Perpetua saw “a golden ladder, extraordinarily high, which reached from the earth to the sky; it was so narrow that one person could barely ascend it; the sides of this ladder were hung and studded with sharp swords, knives, spears, daggers, nails, hooks and other sharp objects. At the lower end of the ladder lived a terrible snake, ready to attack any one who attempted to mount the ladder.”
49 On the ladder she saw her catechist Saturus, who urged Perpetua to follow him. To step on the first rung was to step on the head of the dragon, that is, the beginning of spiritual ascent is inevitably tied to an encounter with the snake. Perpetua, approaching the ladder, “first of all stepped on the snake’s head, as the first rung. And when she ascended to the top of the ladder, she saw magnificent heavenly settlements and many people living in them.”
50
In spite of the reverence for Perpetua in both Western and Byzantine Christianity, the martyr’s vision found almost no re ection in religious art. The rst mosaic image of Perpetua — without scenes from her life — is in the Archiepiscopal Chapel in Ravenna and dates to the 6th Century. Some scenes from her life are found in The Menologion of Basil II, an illuminated prayerbook created for the Byzantine emperor, but on the whole Perpetua’s vision of a celestial ladder is mysteriously neglected. Perhaps the mysteries of spiritual life, touching on the sacred aspects
47 V. V. Bolotov, Lektsii po istorii drevnei tserkvi, 1994, Spaso-Preobrazhenskii Valaamskii stavropigialnyi monastyr, Moscow, Vol. 2, p. 108).
48 Ibid., p. 107.
49 Zhitiye svyatykh, izlozhennykh po rukovodstvy Chet’ikh-Minei sv. Dmitriya Rostovskogo (reprint of 1905 edition), 1997, St. Petersburg, Vol. 6, p. 18.
50 Ibid.
of mystical experience, revealed through the pure soul of the young Perpetua, to a certain degree were an obstacle to the development and popularization of her iconography.
Only a few attempts have been made to depict the images revealed to the Carthaginan martyr, insufficient to form an iconographic tradition. One of the most finished images of this type is an etching by Jacques Callot (1592–1635) (p. 120). In an oval medallion, fine light penstrokes depict Perpetua by a prison wall, her hands raised prayerfully, contemplating the mystical ladder. Its rungs are sharp swords. At the base of the ladder lies a threatening dragon. The top of the ladder leans against a dark cloud beyond which glows a sea of Divine Light.
Another engraving by the Dutch artist Jan Luyken (1649–1712) (p. 121), is no less interesting. The master was profoundly religious and belonged to a narrow circle of followers of the German theologian Jakob Boehme. His illustrations to the book “Martyrs Mirror” were well known. In 1701 Luyken created an engraving entitled “Vision of the martyr Perpetua” (p. 121), in which one can perceive the re ection of his own mystical experience. Perpetua is depicted sitting in a meditative pose, serenely contemplating the celestial revelation. The ladder is studded with sharp swords as described in the Life of Perpetua. Nonetheless, disregarding the danger, Saturus ascends the ladder. Below is the dragon, awaiting a victim. The ladder itself seems to have no summit, disappearing into the depths of the spiritual world.
If Callot’s engraving by its artistic manner prefigures the romantic work of Hoffmann, Luyken’s engraving in some sense already contains elements that received their full treatment only in the art of Symbolists and Surrealists. Both works demonstrate that the image of the ladder uniting earth and heaven has not lost its meaning even in an era in which secular values gradually crowd out spiritual values. All the more then is there a need for reference to eternal Archetypes as sources of genuine creation, creation that opposes the forces of death.
Vladimir Ivanov Professor, art historian, author of “Russian Icons” (Rizzoli publishers)
RITUAL LADDER CAKES *
Many rituals in Russian Orthodox and peasant traditions involve the preparation and consumption of Ladder-cakes. These are breads, pastries and pies decorated with a ladder pattern. Horizontal lines representing “rungs” are cut, sculpted, outlined on the bread or pie, or added in between two “twists”, connecting them to one another. Ladder-cakes range from simple atbreads and blinis, to leavened bread, to potato or grain pies, to cookies and gingerbread.
The number of rungs on a Ladder-cake varies from place to place, in some cases carrying its own symbolism — seven rungs represent the Seven Heavens in the Apocalypse, twenty or twenty-four might represent the “toll-houses” where the soul must atone for various sins on its way to heaven.
Rituals using Ladder-cakes fall into two categories: funereal and agricultural. Ladder-cakes would be served either at wakes on the 40th day after a person died, when the soul leaves the body and begins its ascent to Heaven, or in the elds at sowing or harvest time.
In Kaluga a pie or long wheat flatbread marked with rungs and smeared with jam or poppy-seed would be carried into the church on that 40 th day to symbolize the journey that the soul is about to undertake. Wealthier families would order a mass for the dead on the 40 th day, serv ed in the courtyard of the house of the deceased. In anticipation of the mass the mistress of the house
would place a Ladder-cake smeared with honey on the windowsill, and the hosts would greet the clergy at the gate to the house with a rye or wheat Ladder-cake. The cake would be divided between the priest and the guests after the service. The tradition of consuming a Ladder-cake with 24 rungs — representing the toll-houses through which the soul would have to pass — eliminated all suffering and obstacles that the soul might otherwise meet on the way to Heaven.
In Kursk province the custom was to bring Ladder-cakes with three or four rungs, placed atop the ritual Kutya grain dish. As in Kaluga, the Ladder-cake would be divided between the priest and the guests after the service, and the peasants believed that the deceased would ascend to Heaven on this “ladder”.
Ladder-cakes were eaten on other church holidays as well — on the Feast of the Ascension, Lazarus Saturday (preceding Palm Sunday), and Sunday of St. John Climacus. All three holidays are associated with ladders: for Christ’s Ascension to Heaven, Lazarus’ Resurrection, St. John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent.
On the Sunday of St. John Climacus peasants would bring Ladder-cakes to church, where they would be blessed during the church service. At the close of the service some of the Ladder-cakes went to the priests and the remainder was distributed to the poor. In this way the Ladder-cakes’ ritual redemptive function was strengthened by the good deed of giving alms, further smoothing the peasants’ path to Heaven.
Ladder-cakes were baked on Ascension Day to help Christ ascend to Heaven. In Saratov peasants would leave blini and other Ladder-cakes on the table, illuminated by a candle, all night. The blini were meant to wrap Christ’s feet to make his ascent on the Ladder-cake more comfortable.
Christ’s ascension to Heaven, occurring as it does in late Spring (40 days after Easter), was associated in folk tradition with good weather and healthy crop growth, and Ascension Day rituals were one way to improve the harvest. The agrarian theme of the rituals was closely intertwined with the idea of helping the soul of a deceased person ascend to Heaven.
Ascension Day rituals are an important part of the traditions aimed at ensuring a good harvest. In much of central and Southern Russia, Ladder-cakes were an obligatory element of these celebrations. Peasants would introduce the cakes into the fields in various ways: by eating the cakes in the fields while reciting special incantations; by throwing them into the seedrows; by burying them in the earth, and so on. In some places Ladder-cakes would be taken into the church to be blessed before they were brought to the fields. In the Moscow province, Ladder-cakes were placed upright in the field so that the rye would grow taller. Peasants would toss a Ladder-cake skyward with an improvised prayer, such as “Rise, Christ, here’s my ladder for you,” or, “Christ, rise to the heavens, take the rye by the ear!” Or recite, as the Ladder-cake flies upward, “May my rye grow so high,” and then eat the cake.
Whole families of peasants in Ryazan province would go to the fields after lunch, carrying Ladder-cakes which they would eat upon arriving at their plots.
Children would eat Ladder-cakes and eggs in the fields, then roll in the rye and chant: “Little rye, little rye, hitch on to Christ’s legs.”
In some villages, it would be the women who took Ladder-cakes and eggs into the fields. Upon arriving in the field, they threw their gifts into the rye for the field-spirits who, being female themselves, represented fertility and the world of the dead. According to legend they would become particularly active in the season of the rye blooming. The women would break the Ladder-cake and crumble an egg, reciting: “Spirit, Spirit *, have an egg.” In the wintertime the women would throw Ladder-cakes onto the crops, protecting themselves from the spirits’ mischief by chanting, “Spirit, Spirit, don’t bite me.”
Another Ascension day tradition was for young men and women to take the Ladder-cakes into the fields, where each participant would hide his cakes. The group would then hunt for them, and whoever found another person’s Ladder-cake would become that person’s master or mistress for the coming year.
Ladder-cakes were prepared for Lazarus Saturday in Kostroma and Moscow provinces. They were related to the song sung on that day: “Lazarus, Lazarus, he climbed up the palm tree, he broke off branches and gave them to pretty girls.”
Fortunes would also be told with the help of Ladder-cakes. In the early 19 th century in Yaroslavl province, a seven-step Ladder-cake, blessed in the church, would be tossed from a bell-tower. If the Ladder-cake survived the fall intact, it was considered proof of the person’s innocence of all the Deadly Sins, and his entrance into Seventh Heaven, where God resides. If the Ladder-cake broke, the number of broken rungs would indicate the degree of sinfulness of the person and consequently the level of Heaven he could hope to reach. And if the Ladder-cake broke into tiny pieces, that was taken to mean that the person’s soul would never enter heaven. Later, in the early 20 th century, this tradition was carried on by throwing freshly baked Ladder-cakes on the floor by the stove.
Translated and adapted by Sarah H. de Kay from Russian Holiday. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Agricultural Calendar’s Holidays and Rituals. SPb Art-SPb 2001
* The Russian term русалка (rusalka), typically translated as “mermaid”, does not necessarily live in the water or have a sh tail. This female creature was also responsible for the elds and for nurturing the crops.
Stairs rituals Death of Theodor
STEPS AT THE NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF CONCENTRATION CAMP
Steps and stairs occupy for the most part a benign presence in our lives. They help us up, they help us down. For writers and artists they serve as useful symbols for aspiration, the labour required to attain new heights, see fresh visions, ascend to a better world. And when they appear in a more sinister light — the steps leading up to the guillotine or gallows, or down into a terrible dungeon — the symbolism is immediately legible, obvious and totally uncompromising. Yet sometimes stairs and steps appear in an altogether more disturbing light, in what at rst appears to be an innocuous and easily overlooked context or setting. This is the case at the Natzweiler-Struthof death camp in northeastern France, the only camp established by the Third Reich within French territory.
Such is the topographical hillside layout of the camp that stairs and steps gured large in the lives of its prisoners. As one survivor, Kristian Ottosen, put it: “Being a prisoner at Natzweiler-Struthof meant constantly having to climb up steps, which were especially high. The prisoners knew that after a while they wouldn’t have enough strength to lift up their legs normally, so they ended up walking in an odd way. In front of each step they gathered momentum, put their hands behind one knee and lifted it up to put the foot on the next step. (...) And so they continued in the same way until reaching the block.” Camp Commandant Josef Kramer ordered his guards to hack at the edges of the steps to create sharp edges, which cut and wounded the feed of prisoners walking on them as German shepherd dogs snapped at their feet and calves.
The SS regularly used the stepped path alongside the perimeter fence as the scene of a sadistic ‘game’ with the prisoners. An SS guard would select a prisoner and march him to the topmost level of the path, the ‘starting line’. At a given signal, the guard would run his prisoner down the slope and at a certain point ing him away toward the perimeter fence. As soon as the prisoner hit the barbed wire, this technically quali ed as an escape attempt, allowing the guard assigned to the perimeter watchtower to open re. When the game was over, the corpses would be torn from the barbed wire fence and taken to the crematorium, and the ashes would be spread on iced-over stairs and steps elsewhere in the camp so as to make them safe for SS guards during the winter.
Robin Saikia Historian,
writer, author of “The Red Book” (Foxley Books)
Prisoners carry stones up the Staircase of Death, Mauthausen concentration camp, Austria, 1942 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Henri Breuil, Illustration to monograph La Pasiega a Puente-Viesgo, 1913
Cave of La Pasiega, c. 64 000 years, rock painting1
Seal impression with image of agricultural worker, Susa, Iran, 3700–3100 BC, clay
Buddha comes down from heaven, Butkara, Swat Valley, Pakistan, 100s BC
Battle of Kadesh Relief on the wall of the memorial temple in Ramesseum (detail), XIII century BC, sandstone2
Pillar Bharhut Ajatasattu (detail), Bharhut, Central India, c. 125–75 BC, red sandstone
Wall panel relief Ashurnasirpal II besieging a city by a river (detail), 865–860 BC, gypsum, 91.44 × 215.9 cm3
Miniature Jacob's dream from The Golden Haggadah manuscript, с. 1320–1330
JACOB'S
Jacob's dream Catacombs on Via Latina, Rome, Italy, III–IV centuries, fresco
Jacob's ladder, XVI century, fresco
Jacob's ladder (refectory of the Dionysiou Monastery, Athos, Greece), XVI century, fresco
Gerard de Jode after Maarten de Vos, Jacob's dream, The Story of Jacob and Esau series, c. 1580, engraving, 21.5 × 26.5 cm
Vaclav Hollar, Jacob's ladder XVII century, engraving, 7 × 10 cm
Jan Luyken, Jacob's ladder XVIII century, etching, 11.4 × 16.1 cm
Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacob's ladder, 1655, etching, engraving and dry point, 11.8 × 7.8 cm
Marc Chagall, Jacob's ladder, 1956, etching with hand-coloring on paper, 29.5 × 24.4 cm
Albert Houthuesen, Jacob's ladder 1966, 42.5 × 33.6 cm
Patricia Donahue, Jacob's ladder II, 2014, wax, pigment, 24.5 × 24.5 × 2.5 cm
Richard McBee, Jacob's ladder (after Chagall), 1996, mixed-media, 35.5 × 28 cm
Vladimir Tsivin, Jacob's dream II, 2007, chamotte, engobe, glaze, oxides, h — 35 cm
Vladimir Tsivin, Jacob's dream I, 2007, chamotte, engobe, glaze, oxides, h — 38.5 cm
Gerry Judah, Jacob's ladder, 2017, steel, h — 34 m; w — 8 m
Gerry Judah, Jacob's ladder 2017, steel, h — 34 m; w — 8 m
Mihail Chemiakin, architectural design of the monument "To the righteous of the world", 2000, ink and watercolor on paper, 50 × 70 cm
Mihail Chemiakin, architectural design of the monument "To the righteous of the world", 1999, mixed-media, 70 × 70 × 70 cm
Angels Climbing Stairs to Heaven, Bath Abbey, Western Facade, XVI century, stone
Angels Climbing Stairs to Heaven, Bath Abbey, Western Facade, XVI century, stone
Angels Climbing Stairs to Heaven, Bath Abbey, Western Facade, XVI century, stone
Angels Climbing Stairs to Heaven, Bath Abbey, Western Facade, XVI century, stone
St. John Climacus, с. 1650, icon, 33 × 20.3 cm
The vision of St. John Climacus, rst half of the XVI century, icon, 63.3 × 44 cm
Attributed to Amvrosios Emboros, Ladder of St. John Climacus Pantokrator Monastery, Athos, Greece, с. 1600, icon
Miniature The vision of ladder to St. John Climacus from Ladders and Parenesis of St. Efrem Sirin, early XVI century
School of Bernard van Orley, Struggle between the heavenly and infernal armies, с. 1530, woodcut, 38.7 × 56.6 cm
Miniature Ladder of Virtue from the didactic tractate about monastic life Speculum virginum, XII century
Richard McBee, Jacob's ladder, 2010, 172.7 × 137.1 cm
Ladder of Divine Ascent, XII century, icon
Yu Hong, Ladder to the Sky, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 600 × 600 cm
The Ladder of Divine Ascent, late XII century, icon
Mehmet Yasa, Eye of a tower, 2010s, photograph
Anastasia Rurikov-Simes, Ladder, 2014, acrylic on paper, 28 × 20.3 cm
Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Maesta altarpiece, Descent from the Cross (detail), 1308–1311, tempera and gilding on board
Pacino di Bonaguida, Ascent of the Cross (illustration to Vita Christi manuscript), с. 1320, tempera and gold on parchment, 24.5 × 17.6 cm
Anonymous; based on the sketch of Dirck Pietersz Crabeth, Allegory of Christ as the Savior of the World, c. 1560–1570, stained glass, 25.4 × 21.2 cm
Augustin Hirschvogel, Christ Ascending the Cross with Sin, Death, and the Devil (Old and New Testaments Concordance series), 1547, etching
Piotr Klemensiewicz, Big city stairs, 1997, acrilyc on canvas, 210 × 195 cm
Fra Angelico, Nailing of Christ to the Cross 1441–1442, fresco, 169 × 134 cm
Art van Triest, Ladder drawings series, 2010s, drawing
Gabriel Huquier after Claude Gillot, The Descent from the Cross, second half of the XVII century, etching, 19.6 × 12.3 cm
Mihail Chemiakin, Russia, 2019
The instruments of the Passion, Saint-Pierre de Collonges-la-rouge, XI century4
Hieronymus Wierix, Christ's Robe Surrounded by the Instruments of the Passion, late XVI – early XVII century, engraving, 13.7 × 10.1 cm
Silja Rantanen, Deposition, 1992
Richard Humann, Teacup, 2008, basswood, 25 × 51 × 58 cm
Richard Humann, Dunk the Clown, 2008, basswood, 27 × 29 × 11 cm
Jacques Callot, The hanging, The Miseries and Misfortunes of War series, 1633, etching, 12.5 × 22.2 cm
Jan Luyken, Anneken Hendriks, tied to a ladder, burned in Amsterdam, 1571, 1685, etching, 11.5 × 14 cm
Illustration to Froissart of Louis of Gruuthuse (Execution of Hugh the Younger Despenser), XV century5
LADDERS MADE WITH
Jan Luyken, The vision of martyr Perpetua, 1701, etching, 13.6 × 15.9 cm
Jacques Callot, Saints Perpetua and Felicity, XVII century, etching, 7.6 × 4.9 cm
Rangoon and Singbala, 1889, advertising poster
Sword Ladder, 1933, photograph
Marina Abramovic, The House with the Ocean View, 2002, performance
Marina Abramovic, Double Edge 1995, oak and stainless steel butcher knives, 295 × 51.3 × 5.7 cm
Marina Abramovic, Double Edge 1996, mixed media
Marina Abramovic, Double Edge, 1996, mixed media
Mark Bennett, Unusual Woodworks, wood, stainless steel knives
Illustration to manuscript about biography of John Climacus, 1059
Beuys — Klein — Rothko. Transformation and Prophecy exhibition catalog cover, 1987 (in base: Robert Fludd, Jacob's Ladder, 1617)
Joe Tilson, Untitled 1976–1977, screenprint on paper, 50.2 × 69.8 сm
Jan Luyken, The man points to a ladder that reaches the heavens, 1710, etching, 8.1 × 8.5 cm
Mark Dion, Deep Time Closet, 2001
Allen Ruppersberg, Low to high, 2002
Horst Gläsker, art-project Scala, Holsteiner Staircase in the Elberfeld district, Wuppertal, 2006
Entrance to "Peep Show", 2000, photograph
Karel van Mallery after Egidius Sadeler, Angel with ladder, с.1645, engraving, 10.7 × 7.9 cm
The Theotokos as Lady of the Angels and Prophets (detail): Prophet Jacob, early XVIII century, icon, 67 × 49 cm
Marc Chagall, Ladder, 1957, lithograph printed in colours, 23 × 19.7 cm
Dora Fiser, Woman with Ladders(?), 2000s(?), oil on canvas, 50.8 × 40.6 cm
His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the Great on top of the recently opened observatory at the Battle of La Belle Alliance, June 18, 1815, 1815, etching
Bruce Chatwin, Maria Reiche, the Nazca Lines Archeologist, 1974, photograph
Workshop of Cornelis Dusart, Harlequin, 1680–1704, engraving, 25.2 × 17.7 cm
Xiao Gua Hui, Ladder Man, 2008, egg tempera on linen, 185 × 140 cm
Isabel Miramontes, Ecstasy, late XX — early XXI century, h. — 40 cm
Rob Good, Three Steps, 2010–2015, mahogany and pine, 35 × 35 cm
Rob Good, Step III, 2010–2015, mahogany, 20 × 20 cm
Keith Bowler, Ladder Figure, 1987, wood, plastic, leather boots
Rob Good, Step IV, 2010–2015, mahogany, 20 × 35 cm
Joan Miró, The Ladder of Escape, 1971, bronze, 81 × 29 cm
Geradro Feldstein, Imbalance, late XX — early XXI century
Keith Bowler, Ladder Figures with Axes, 1987, steel, cloth, axes, gloves
Keith Bowler, Ladder, Figure with Beer Cans 1987, wood, rope, beer cans
Keith Bowler, Eye Ladder Figure 1987, wood, cloth, globe, lava rock
Keith Bowler, Ladder Figure with Flag, 1987, steel, wood, gloves, plastic, ag
Jeremiah Barber, Departure, 2017, cement, parabolic mirror, ladder, cinema rigging and custom armature, 193 × 55.8 × 101.6 cm
Zoé Rumeau, Untitled, 2018, bronze
Eva Koťátková, Hanging Upside Down Until the World Gets the Right Shape and the Body Breaks Into Pieces, 2016, wooden ladder, metal, textile, paper, and glass, 299.7 × 99.1 × 38.1 cm
LADDERS WITH HUMAN
Edward Kienholz, People's Recipient, 1975–1977
Carlee Fernandez, Hugo Parlier, Friends series, 2001, altered taxidermic rhinoceros, 190.5 × 71.1 × 61 cm
Hans Hemmert, Untitled (yellow sculpture suitable for stepladder), 1998, latex balloon, air, artist, chrome stepladder, 100 × 75 cm
Cesar Martinez Silva, Human Pendulum, c. 2002, latex, air blower, ladder (kinetic sculpture)¹5
David Černý, Adulation, 2003, mixed media, h. — 520 cm
David Černý, Adulation, 2003, mixed media, h. — 520 cm
David Černý, Adulation, 2003, mixed media, h. — 520 cm
Claudio Parmiggiani, Memorial Staircase, 1976, wooden frame, photographic canvas, bread, white canvas
Yayoi Kusama, Tender are the stairs to heaven, 2004, synthetic polymer resin mirror, plywood, painted plywood, bre optic cable, transformer, metal chain, aluminium, 420.4 × 119.8 cm
Yayoi Kusama, Ladder to Heaven, 2006, steel, ber optic cable and mirror, 380.5 × 150 × 150 cm
Robert Rauschenberg, Patrician Barnacle (Scale), 1981, solvent, fabric collage, acrylic, mirrored panel, re ector on wood support with stepladder, 238.8 × 94 × 139.7 cm
Marco Tirelli, Untitled, 2013, brass and wood, 58 × 13 × 15 cm
Dora García, Arti cial respiration (Ladder I), 2017, beech wood and two books, 181 × 110 × 75 cm
So a Hultén, One Step One Time, 2010, installation
Ramon de Soto, Death ritual I 1988, iron sheet
Agustí Roqué,
Alessandro Petti, A Common Assembly, 2013, installation
Gary Kuehn, 1964, installation
Richard Rezac, Untitled (99–07), 1999, paint, wood, steel, wire, 23 × 23 × 35.6 cm
Juan Munoz, Astrolabe for the North of the Storm, 1985, iron, 90 × 40 × 40 cm
Leandro Ehrlich, Window and Ladder — Leaning into History, 2017, steel, berglass resin, wood
Leandro Ehrlich, Window and Ladder – Leaning into History 2017, steel, berglass resin, wood, 590 × 200 × 120 cm
John Bock, Untitled, 2002, fabric, wood and coal, 54.6 × 120 × 80 cm
Claes Oldenburg, Coosje Van Bruggen, Frank Gehry, Frankie P. Toronto Costume, Large Version, Pants, 1986, latex on canvas, polyurethane foam, 190 × 193 × 34 cm
Courtney McClellan, Here, Say (detail Judge's Robe), 2016, installation (ladder, blue velvet)
Kei Kagami, 2011
Isidro Ferrer, 2009, poster
Ana Juan, Art and Architecture, 2013, The New Yorker cover
Samuele Mazza, Red Carpet Shoes 1992, wood and brass
Kobi Levi, Slide, XXI century
Ruslan Vashkevich, Five step shoes, 2012, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm
Ruslan Vashkevich, Five step shoes 2003
Maarten Baas, The Empty Chair, 2011, steel, industrial clay, h. — 500 cm
Maarten Baas, The Empty Chair, 2011, steel, industrial clay, h. — 500 cm
Ralph Johnson, Ladderback Chair, 1980, wood, 56 × 41 × 66 cm
Nacho Carbonell, Tree Chair, 2008, metal structure, metal mesh, sawdust, leaves, textile hardener, 350 × 138 × 220 cm
Maarten Baas, The Empty Chair, 2011, steel, industrial clay, h. — 500 cm
Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Trade Union (from Quite Arternoon series), 1984, photograph
Bharti Kher, The night she left (detail), 2011, wooden staircase, fabric, bindis, 226 × 91 × 80 cm
Bharti Kher, The night she left, 2011, wooden staircase, fabric, bindis, 226 × 91 × 80 cm
Meschain P. Herve, George III metamorphic table/ library steps, c. 1785, mahogany, 163 × 147.5 × 43 cm
> Andre Nagel, Ladder, 1988, mixed media, oil on canvas, 264 × 52 × 14 cm
George Brecht, Lola, 1975, ladder, mop, metal
Geo rey Hendricks, My Ladder, 1993
Robert Rauschenberg, The Frightened Gods of Fortune, 1981, wood, iron, collage, 396 × 41.5 × 187 cm
Robert Rauschenberg, Mango Ice Cave (Scale), 1977, solvent transfer, acrylic, paper, and fabric on wood with tarpaulin, ladder, unicycle, mirrored Plexiglas, and metal, 284.5 × 238.8 × 101.6 cm
Christian Marclay, Tape Fall, 1989, reel-to-reel tape recorder, ladder, speaker, and magnetic tape (playing a recording of a waterfall)
Lauren Carrera, The Revelation: Everything That Rises Must Converge, 2010s, found objects, plastic, steel, cardboard shoes, collage, gold-leaf
Mark Dion, Scala Naturae, 1994
Saâdane A f, fragment of the installation at the exhibition «...and anything», 2002, installation
Katinka Bock, A, 2012, bronze, metal ladder, metal bar, refractory bricks, 192 × 135 × 22 cm
Michael Joo, Skin’t, 2005, installation
Ab Rogers, The Ladder that Likes the Wall, 2014, leather, stained oak
So a Hulten, Indecisive Angles (IV) 2015
Mark Di Suvero, Ladder piece, 1961–1962, wood, steel, 189 × 465 × 300 cm
György Kepes, Photogram, second half of XX century¹9
1 (с. 62). Rock painting, La Pasiega cave (Spain), c. 64,000 BC In three caves scattered across Spain, researchers found more than a dozen examples of wall paintings that are more than 65,000 years old. At Cueva de los Aviones, a cave in southeastern Spain, researchers also found perforated seashell beads and pigments that are at least 115,000 years old.
2 (с. 64). Battle of Kadesh. Relief on the wall of the memorial temple in the Ramesseum (fragment), XIII century BC, sandstone Ancient Egyptian Soldiers using shields and a ladder to ght against the Hittites in the Battle of Kadesh. Stone carved frieze on the second pylon of the Ramesseum Temple, Luxor, Egypt.
3 (с. 66). Relief Ashurnatsirapal II besieging the city by the river, 865–860 BC. e., gypsum
Alabaster bas-relief depicting an attack on a city by the Assyrian army. Neo-Assyrian Period, 865–860 BCE Detail of Panel 5 (bottom), Room B, the North-Palace Palace, Nimrud, modern-day Iraq. (The British Museum, London).
4 (с. 110). Instruments of the Passion, Saint-Pierre-de-Collonge-laRouge, 11th century
Left to right: the cross of the penitent thief Dismas, ladder, sponge on reed, hammer, angels, Cross of Christ, cock, star, pincers, ladder, spear, cross of the wicked thief Gestas, and two hyssop plants growing from the ground (église Saint-Pierre de Collonges-la-rouge).
5 (с. 118). Illustration to Froissart of Louis of Gruuthuse, Execution of Hugh the Younger Despenser, XV century Ilustration of the execution of Hugh the Younger Despenser, from a manuscript of Froissart (Bibliotheque Nationale MS Fr. 2643, folio 11r) To be hanged, drawn and quartered was from 1351 a statutory penalty in England for men convicted of high treason, although the ritual was rst recorded during the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272). Convicts were fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where they were hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered (chopped into four pieces). Their remains were often displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge. For reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burned at the stake.
6 (с. 148). Peter Lenk, Career ladder 2007 The concrete-plastic career ladder is a work of art by sculptor Peter Lenk. The 14m original version was in 1994 on the premises of the (former) CGK (Computer Gesellschaft Konstanz) in Konstanz. In November 2007, Lenk placed a second, 16-meter version of the artwork in front of the Investment Bank at the Bundesallee in Berlin. An investment bank in Berlin allowed the artwork to be dismantled overnight in the fall of 2012 without the knowledge of the artist.
7 (с. 164). Walter L. Main shows, 1930s, advertising poster This Walter L. Main poster depicts performers in white tie and tails, a fashion that had been popular in American circuses for a short time at the end of 19th century and resurfaced from time to time. In reality the impractical costumes had to be adapted.
8 (с. 184).Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1, 1911, oil on cardboard on panel
“Very much attracted by the problem of motion in painting, I made several sketches on that theme. This one is the rst study for the Nude Descending a Staircase. You can see a number of anatomical parts of the nude which are repeated in several static positions of the moving bode, compared with the nal version... this is only a rough sketch in my search for a technique to treat
the subject of motion. It was done in the last months of 1911 at the same time when I was painting the Cubist chess players...; and using the method of demultiplication of the movement which was to be my main preoccupation during the rst part of 1912.” M. Duchamp
9 (с. 187). Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932, oil on canvas Visiting Stuttgart in the spring of 1933, Alfred Barr Jr., founder and rst director of the Museum of Modern Art, found that the Schlemmer exhibition had closed after a scathing article in a Nazi newspaper. Barr immediately sent a telegram to Philip Johnson, who had already donated a considerable number of exhibits to the Museum of Modern Art, asking him to purchase the Bauhaus Stairs as a possible gift to the Museum. As Barr later noted, he acted “partly out of a desire to annoy the Nazis, who had just closed the exhibition.” Schlemmer painted the Bauhaus Staircase three years after he stepped down as a teacher at the famous school of modern art, architecture and design. The lattice structure seen in the painting is reminiscent of Bauhaus design principles, while the upward movement, which includes the man on pointe shoes (Schlemmer used to paint ballet scenery) in the upper left corner, symbolizes the optimism that once reigned in the school. The gures, partially cut o by the frame of the picture, help to involve the viewer in this mood, as if they are in the space of the viewer. Simple outlines, as if assembled from modules, make them a kind of generalization, an image of a “man in general”, entering the picture and moving further up the stairs.
10(с. 191). Stefanie Zoche, Sleeper 1998, digital prints Sleepers is a series of 28 sleeping men and women depicted on an escalator. The theme of sleep can be interpreted as a condemnation of the voluntary care and self-isolation of residents of megacities. The portraits are in constant motion, and each of the people depicted has their own facial expression, slightly different from the others.
11 (с. 192). Kilpatrick's Famous Ride, с. 1900, advertising poster Dashing down a giant ladder or staircase on a bicycle was a relatively common stunt. But it was more engrossing to watch when performed by the one-legged cyclist Kilpatrick, who became famous for refusing to be restricted by his handicap.
12 (с. 193). Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, The Ugo Ancillotti Troupe, 1904, advertising poster
The Italian acrobat Ugo Ancillotti designed several challenging bicycle stunts. Descending a staircase on a unicycle with a partner on his shoulders was not only riveting, it was a remarkable acrobatic feat. The Ancillottis commanded a weekly salary of $1,600 at a time when a clown or a showgirl earned $40.
13 (с. 194). Frederick Whitman Glasier, Alexander Patty hopped on his head, 1900s, photograph Alexander Patty hopped on his head down a ight of stairs on the Ringling Bros. back lot to the amazement of a crowd who'd gathered to witness this unusual, and rather painful, acrobatic stunt free of charge.
14 (c. 216). Interior House Ladder. (Kontu Dayak. West Kalimantan, Borneo Island, Indonesia), wood
Unlike the more common and taller longhouse entry ladders, this rare example was kept in the interior of a noble family's residence and was used to gain access to the storage areas above the living quarters. Those using the ladder would step over the image of a “decapitated slave” or “ritual sacri ce” (meant to appease the spirits), shown carved in relief at the base, then climb up to the awaiting arms of a powerful ancestral gure, who is “holding” the ladder steady.
15 (с. 234). Cesar Martinez Silva, Human Pendulum, c. 2002, latex, air blower, ladder (kinetic sculpture)
The works of the Mexican sculptor Cesar Martinez seem to be lled with primordial breath: they tell about our lives, which are felt in their entirety due to the near end, the last weary breath. And one day the deceased (equalized) is freed in order to recapture the ow of life and again develop activity.
16 (с. 249). Gregory and Cyril Chapuisat, Hyperspace (detail), 2005, cardboard and wood
To tackle the work of Gregory and Cyril Chapuisat, we could weave together a few correspondences with Georges Perec's thoughts on the sense of space, i.e., an examination of how the daily world is perceived, a re ection on passages and interstices, on space as a locus for the creation of a memory. Indeed, (...) for several years now the Chapuisat brothers have been building imposing yet temporary installations. These displays, created on site, play with speci c features of the environment harbouring them and look to the eye like simple structures despite their scale, tted with an occasionally imperceptible entrance (trap door, opening in the wall), structures containing vast constructions that are often labyrinthine and dark. There is one line that remains to be crossed, that of taking part in the work of art and physically experiencing it: crawling, wriggling around and eventually extricating oneself from narrow, nearly impassable galleries to emerge into little nooks or carefully arranged rooms. These networks serve as a framework in which visitors' psychological behaviour is called into question and their aesthetic perception tested before total immersion, when perceptual distance suddenly vanishes and is fully experienced. These constructions similarly represent the space of the critique, that is, apart from the fact that they are almost entirely of “poor” or recycled materials (cardboard, wooden planks...) whose provenance is openly proclaimed, they are no less a new “object” in a panorama of artistic overproduction and overconsumption that only belongs to those who try it. This obliteration of the demarcation between representation and experience is also experienced by these nomadic artists, who use the gallery and the institution as a residence in which the site where one makes art commingles, in time and its duration, with the place where one lives. That makes it possible to explain in particular why the gures of the cocoon and nest are so often mentioned in descriptions of the brothers' work. The world of childhood, bricolage used as a natural language, and play are not far o and when the Chapuisats turn their installation upside down, attaching it now to the ceiling like a oating island, all of this is nothing more than a subterfuge, one more stratagem for an environment that is wedged in between reality and ction. Stephane Cecconi.
17 (с. 292). Meschain P. Herve, George III metamorphic table/ library steps, c. 1785, mahogany
A George III mahogany metamorphic table/ library steps Circa 1785, by Meschain and Herve
The hinged top, releasing on a catch with two treads to the underside and opening to reveal a mechanism of raising steps and hand-rails, enclosed within a uted frieze on foliate carved turned and stop- uted slender legs and guilloche collars, bearing a brass plaque engraved Invented & sold Meschain&Herve, № 32 in Jons Street, Tottenham Court Road.
Closed: 72 cm high, 88 cm wide, 52 cm deep. Open: 167.5 cm high, 138 cm wide.
This ingenious table, opening to reveal a set of library steps, is one of only a few examples of furniture know to have been made by pairing of immigrant French cabinet-makers Francois Herve and John Meschain. Both had been working from 32 John Street although Herve’s name does not appear in the London Directories until as late as 1790 and again in 1793 despite the
fact that they appear to have been working from this address for some years previously, certainly as a partnership in the 1770s. In 1781 Herve took control of the premises and was to supply furniture for the wealthy patrons of the times, often under the direction of fashionable architects such as John Carr, James Wyatt, Henry Holland and the marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre. Herve’s clients included the Prince of Wales, The Duke of Devonshire, The Duke of Bedford and Earl Spencer along with the wealthy Dutch Vanneck family to whom Herve and Meschain supplied a similar metamorphic table for Heveningham Hall, Su olk.
18 (с. 294). William IV Library Step Table, 1830s, mahogany Of breakfront outline, the beaded moulded frieze centered by tablet with lotus scroll ornament between the blind fret ornament, tted with sliding compartment with fallfront carved with lotus scroll and Greek key ornament concealing a sliding mechanism with extending steps, with turned column handrestand treads, steel stretchers on column and scroll end supports with acanthus leaf carving and gadrooned square feet joined be a shaped stretcher centered by a owerhead with foliate scroll ornament.
19 (с. 344). György Kepes, Photogram, second half of XX century PAINT TEXTURE. Black paint pressed between two glass plates produced this interesting variety of shapes and textures. The phenomenon of light is capable of an apparent spontaneity which is di cult, if not impossible, for the manual artist to achieve. This print was made by direct projection.
1.
2. Mihail Chemiakin.
3. Olga Sazonova, Daria Lobanova, Karina Chernyshova, Diana Abramova. STAIRS IN CONTEMPORARY ART:
4. Vladimir Ivanov.
5.
Scientific publication
Mihail Chemiakin STEPS, LADDERS, STAIRS in Art volume 1
Signed to printing ______________. Format 60×90 1/8. Offset printing. Chalk paper. Typeface Myriad Pro. Scope 44,00 printing sheets. Circulation items. Order N _____.
