About Sieves and Sieving: Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm 9783110608212, 9783110606140

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About Sieves and Sieving

Barbara Baert

About Sieves and Sieving Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm

The author acknowledges the support of KU Leuven and the Francqui Foundation.

ISBN 978-3-11-060614-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-060821-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-060615-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966905 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed ­bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Layout and typesetting: Andreas Eberlein, aromaBerlin Cover illustration: Johanne Allard, Black Iris I, 2018. With permission of the artist Printing and binding: Beltz Bad Langensalza GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

For Andreas and Marius

The student learns like a sieve, not like a sponge. AFTER A LATE ANTIQUE RABBINIC EDUCATIONAL SAYING

I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then. CLARISSA VAUGHAN IN THE HOURS BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

Contents

13 Preface

15 

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

31 

Etymology, Symbolism, Cosmology 41 

45 

The Sieve Dances

A Short Break. The Nun in Affile 51  57 

Bilderatlas

The Sieve as an Organism 63 Grid/Lozenge/Trellis 71 

77 

Moi-peau

(Un)heimlichkeit. Back to the Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve 85 Galloping! 89  95 

Bilderatlas

Digital Sieves – Epilogue by Ellen Harlizius-Klück

105 Notes 119 

Picture Credits

120 Bibliography 127 

Index nominum 131 Colophon

Preface

For I will give the command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve, and not a pebble will reach the ground. AMOS 9:9

The subject of this essay is the motif of the sieve – Sieb (German), tamis (French), zeef (Dutch), setaccio (Italian), tamiz (Spanish). The sieve exhibits a wide range of symbolism that extends across art history, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. This essay will provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the sieve from four methodological angles: motif, symbol, technique, and paradigm. The sieve as motif goes back to Roman stories of the Vestal virgins. The Vestals Aemilia and Tuccia, suspected of being unchaste, were able to prove their innocence by collecting water from the Tiber in a sieve and carrying it into the city without spilling a drop. The (impermeable) sieve thus became an important epithet for chastity, and was later also iconographically transferred to contemporary women. In a famous series of portraits, Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), for example, is shown with a sieve as a sign of her integrity. This essay also explores the longue durée of the sieve as a symbolic-technical object of use, looking at examples from Jewish folklore, Berber culture, and ancient Egypt that indicate the cosmological importance of the action of sifting, and the exclusivity of women in the related actions. The roundness of the sieve and the ‘shaking’, rocking, circular movements support this symbolic spectrum. Female responsibility for nutrition and hygiene are cultically and symbolically transferred to the sieve. About Sieves and Sieving also involves paradigmatic challenges. The first challenge concerns its tectonics. The sieve’s filtration process is made possible by a woven structure, often utilising natural materials such as horsehair and types of grass. Its capacity both to retain (saving the good) and to remove (discarding the unwanted) in a single action makes the sieve a fundamental symbol of ‘separation’ and ‘filtration’. The sieve connects the principles of matter, structure, and function in a radical manner, and forces us to look at the object as a completely consubstantial cultural object, as an organism. Anthropologist Tim Ingold calls this organic unit the paradigm of ‘textility’. We will let this paradigm expand further into the tectonic structure of the sieve as a grid, lozenge, and trellis.

14

Preface

From the twentieth century on, the principle of the sieve-like membrane starts being mentioned as a theoretical model in the fields of both psychoanalysis and gender studies. This brings me to the second paradigm: the sieve as moi-peau. The sieve is a fruitful image for the skin, with its pores, but also for the role of the unconscious that seeps through according to rules of its own. The moi-peau conducts the sieve as a metaphor for individual transport of trauma and memory (Didier Anzieu, 1923–1999) and the cultural membrane of Erinnerungsspuren (Aby Warburg, 1866–1929) as well as within gender studies regarding the female ‘uncanny space’ (Ernst Fischer, 1899–1972). The sieve and sifting are also part of the principles of the positive sciences. The sieve of Eratosthenes is a method for finding prime numbers. We have spam filters, and the famous Google algorithm. Because this essay presents the iconological method in all its interdisciplinary capacities, we asked an expert, Ellen Harlizius-Klück, to describe the digital aspects of the sieve in an epilogue.

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

I am and not; I freeze and yet am burn’d;/ Since from myself, my other self I turn’d. QUEEN ELIZABETH I

In this chapter, I discuss the so-called ‘sieve portraits’ of Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland (1533–1603).1 The ‘sieve portraits’ were created between 1570 and 1590 and include the well-known Plimpton Sieve Portrait (1579, fig. 1),2 attributed to George Gower (1540–1596), and the Siena Sieve Portrait (ca. 1583, fig. 2),3 attributed to Quentin Metsys the Younger (1543–1589). I analyze the sieve as Elizabeth’s attribute from two angles. I look at it first from the standpoint of the emblematic tradition of the sieve with regards to virtue and solid leadership. I then present the argument that the queen-virgin was positioning herself as a contemporary Vestal virgin. Indeed, both portraits were painted in a period of fraught negotiations concerning a possible marriage to Francis, Duke of Anjou (1555–1584).4 The queen remained unmarried, however, and was given the epithet of ‘Maiden Queen’ or ‘Virgin Queen’. In the Plimpton Sieve Portrait, Elizabeth holds a round sieve in her left hand. In the left corner of the portrait, a globe can be seen behind the queen. The roundness of the sieve reflects the shape and position of the globe. But while the globe is a conventional motif in the iconography of imperial portraits, the sieve remains a peculiar choice for the genre. The sieve is attached to the queen’s clothing with a cord and buckle, becoming an extension of her body. The sieve is a profane and utilitarian object from the personal, female space of the household. In the pictorial space of a dynastic portrait, however, the sieve becomes an attribute with symbolic meaning. This is apparent from the motto in the Plimpton Sieve Portrait, a quotation from the Trionfo d’amore of Petrarch (1304–1374): stancho riposo e riposato affano (“Weary I rest and, having rested, I am still weary”).5 “Here, an emblem of discernment, more than tumescence, provides the key image of political power,” writes Deanne Williams.6 The sieve that separates good from evil is, after all, also a symbol of government, as can be seen from the second motto written above the globe: tutto vedo e molto mancha (“I see everything and much is lacking”). The Siena Sieve Portrait similarly shows a sieve and a globe. The edge of the sieve bears the inscription: a terra il ben, mal dimora in sella (“down goes the good, the bad remains in the saddle”).7 This can also be seen as a political message about proper governance,

16

1

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

George Gower (ca. 1540–1596), The Plimpton Sieve Portrait of Elizabeth I of England, 1579. Oil on panel, 104.4 × 76.2 cm, Washington, D. C., Folger Shakespeare Library, inv. no. ART 246171

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

17

2 Quentin Metsys the Younger (ca. 1543–1589), Sieve Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (Siena Sieve Portrait), ca. 1583. Oil on panel, 124.5 × 91.5 cm, Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale, inv. no. 454

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The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

after all, as Leslie Hotson duly notes, Elizabeth’s sieve is empty: she contains no residual badness. In this impresa portrait, Elizabeth portrays herself not only as a queen who is able to discern good from evil, but also as a head of state that precludes evil.8 Before the (English) Renaissance emblemata literature, the sieve was also the attribute of Prudentia, or Prudence, as one of the four cardinal virtues.9 Besides the mirror – for she contains self-knowledge – Prudentia carries the sieve, because she can sort truth from lies and thus also good from evil (fig. 3). We can’t rule out the idea that Elizabeth’s sieve portraits also refer to this cardinal virtue, where the queen also claims caution as one of her most important qualities. The Siena Sieve Portrait also has a decorated column in the background with the story of Aeneas and Dido. This is considered by Deanne Williams as a possible allusion to ­Elizabeth’s ideal of chastity: The pillar to Elizabeth’s right depicts scenes from the Aeneid: Dido’s first meeting with Aeneas at Juno’s temple, their idylls in the cave, and, ultimately, Dido’s self-immolation. These are images of Dido the sensualist, Dido the seduced. They provide visual reminders of the stings of love and eros that Elizabeth has repudiated for herself, and on her country’s behalf.10

If we indeed take the historical facts surrounding Elizabeth’s celibate life and the iconographic allusions to it into account, then a second interpretation is possible: the sieve is a reference to the Vestal virgin Tuccia. In his Factorum et dictorum memorabilium, Valerius Maximus (first century AD) tells the story of the Vestal Tuccia, who was accused of being unchaste.11 To prove her innocence, she grabbed a sieve and prayed to Vesta, scooped water from the Tiber with the sieve, and carried it to the temple of the Vestals without losing a drop. Valerius Maximus writes: With the same kind of assistance, the chastity of the Vestal priestess Tuccia (charged with the crime of unchastity) burst from the cloud of infamy with which it had been darkened. And she, with the sure knowledge of her innocence, dared to look for hope of safety in a dangerous logic. She grabbed a sieve and said: ‘Oh Vesta, if I have always brought chaste hands to your rites, grant that I may with this sieve fetch water from the Tiber, and carry it back to your shrine.ʼ The rules of the natural world gave way before the priestess’ bold and reckless vows.12

The cluster of water and sieve that the sacerdos Vestalis speaks of is no coincidence. The Vestal priestesses were responsible for keeping the ritual purity of the temple, which had to be done by uncontaminated young virgins.13 If a Vestal priestess had been impure, that would call a curse upon the well-being of the city of Rome. The priestesses kept the fire of Vesta burning in the temple, which was only extinguished and reignited on 1 March

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

19

3 Jean Mansel (ca. 1400–1473/74), Four Virtues, La Fleur des ­Histoires, ca. 1450. Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Ms. 9232, fol. 448v

(the original first day of the Roman calendar). Like fire, water is a purifying element. The Vestal virgins collected water for their ritual from the Aegeria spring, named after the prophetic nymph Aegeria, who, according to Metamorphosis (Book XV, v. 479) by Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-17 AD) changed into a spring.14 Her sacred grove can still be visited close to the Porta Capena in Rome today in the archaeological park of the Caffarella and was seen as a sacred place for birthing mothers, which underlines the deep connection between water and fertility (fig. 4). She was considered one of the Camenae, prophetic nymphs and muses who were also concerned with birth.15 Indeed, Aegeria’s name seems to be akin to the Latin verb gerere, ‘to bear’ or ‘to carry’. One form of this verb leads to the English ‘gestation’, meaning pregnancy, though it would appear that the actual Latin terms for pregnancy are not related to gerere. Aegeria’s name is sometimes glossed as ‘Giver of Life’ or ‘She Who Bears Children’.16

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The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

4 Aegeria’s sacred grove close to the Porta Capena. Rome, the archaeological park of the Caffarella

Vestal virgins also made products. The mola salsa was a mixture of water and spelt or wheat flour. They also made the suffimen, where the ash of unborn calves was used for the ritual. In the preparation of these materials, the sifting process was used. In short, within the context of the Vestal rituals, both water and sieve play an important role, and the embedded patterns of fertility, hygiene, female inclusiveness, and ritualistic domesticity, are featured where pureness and virtue articulate the ethical dimensions. Tuccia is not only an exemplum of virginity, but also of the deep inner conviction of her innocence and her demonstrated faith in the Gods. According to Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Valerius Maxiumus’ passus “the cloud of infamy with which it had been darkened” reveals the impact of the miracle within the Roman religious system. After all, “violated pudicitia angers the gods, and this endangers the society.”17 The godly proportions that this intrigue takes on is therefore perfectly in proportion to the supernatural proof of her innocence.

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

21

5 Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501), The Triumph of Chastity, ca. 1463–1468. Tempera on panel, 38.7 × 170.4 cm, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, inv. no. 57.PB.2

The status of these Vestal virgins as direct mediators with the gods is also the subject of Mary Beard’s article “The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins.”18 The author nuances the virginal exclusivity in favor of gender ambiguity, which characterizes and determines the unique divine function of these priestesses. Based on descriptions from ancient literature, Beard determines that, on the one hand, the Vestal virgins share the physical characteristics of hairstyle and clothing with that of the profane bridal ceremonies, but that, on the other, they are involved with the sacrificial rights normally reserved for men. Thus the ambiguity of their sexual status, the way they share the characteristics of virgins, matrons, and even men need be regarded no longer as an awkward aspect somehow to be accommodated in any explanation of their position, but as a crucial element in designating their sacredness [...] the highly ambiguous status of the Vestal virgins must be seen as playing an important part in their symbolic position. The fact that, through various aspects of their dress, their cult obligations and their privileges, they may be perceived as falling between several categories of sexuality, marks them out as sacred.19

Beard’s research places the gender interstice as the main quality of the Vestal rites in Ancient Rome. “These interstices are the mediators, for their ambiguous status is not merely passively evocative, but is an active unifying force. Thus in short one might offer the following formulation: mediation is ambiguity in action.”20 The ambiguity as something that gives meaning, the ‘in-between space’ as agency, is also interesting when it comes to Elizabeth’s doubling as woman and queen. I will come back to these various “household ambiguities” that arise from the anthropological clusters of hygiene, nutrition, birth, and death.21 Christianity, too, adopted the Vestal virgins’ unusual ordeal as an image of chastity. Augustine (354–430) twice refers to the story of the Vestal priestesses in his De civitate Dei.22 Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity also refers to Tuccia, alongside Lucretia, Penelope,

22

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

6 Alvise Donati (1450–1534), Cassone with scene of the Vestal Virgin Tuccia, The Judgment of Solomon and the Legend of the dead King, 1508. Tempera on panel, 42 × 49 cm, Kraków, Royal Castle

Virginia, and Judith (fig. 5).23 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) uses Tuccia’s proof of chastity as an exemplum in his treatise Della Famiglia (ca. 1433–1434), stating (paraphrased) that nothing is as important for a woman, or as good in the eyes of God, as pleasant in the eyes of the man, or as precious to the child as chastity. Her chastity is a jewel for the family and greater than her beauty.24 In the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento, the story of Tuccia was therefore a popular iconographic theme on wedding chests, and on wood paneling in female private s­ paces. On the cassone by Alvise Donati (1450–1534) in the Royal Castle of Krakow, the story of Tuccia is combined with, amongst other elements, a scene from the Judgment of Solomon (fig. 6).25 The four grisaille panels by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) showing Tuccia (fig. 7) and Sophonisba (now in the National Gallery, London),26 and Judith and Juno (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal), were probably once part of a Trionfo della virtù ensemble for the private studio of Isabella d’Este (1474–1539) in Mantua. ­Isabella d’Este’s famed expression Lo insaciabile desiderio nostro de cose antique (“our insatiable desire for antiquities”) also refers to her intellectual affinity with ancient knowledge and her desire to mirror herself on the virtuous heroism of these four women. This “insatiable desire for antiquities” brings me to Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas as part of the Mnemosyne project he launched in 1924 together with Gertrude Bing (1892–1964).27 He places Tuccia of Mantegna on Tafel 49, with the inscriptions: Gebändigtes Siegerpathos (Mantegna). Grisaille als ‘Wie der Metapher’. Distanzierung. And: Pathos del vincitore imbrigliato (Mantegna). Grisaille quale ‘come della metafora’. Distanziamento (fig. 8). Tuccia is in the

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

23

7 Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), The Vestal Virgin Tuccia with a Sieve, ca. 1495– 1506. Tempera on poplar, 72.5 × 23 cm, London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG1125.1

center of the panel, and connects the iconography of Ancient virtues on the left with examples of the Ancient bacchanals on the right. The montage places Mantegna as a mediator between the three linguistic form systems of the Renaissance or the three degrees of intensity that Warburg recognizes in the Pathosformeln (that is, the visual expressive forms functioning in culture across centuries): Positiv (ornamental-physiognomik) – Comparativ (Spiel-Drama) – Superlativ (dynamisch-pathetisch).28 Mantegna provides balance for Warburg, because he doesn’t just copy the eloquent dramatic gesticulations, and because his maniera antica is never lost in the exaggeration.29 Exactly this in-between space separates Mantegna perfectly from the Ancients. It gives him, according to Warburg, the perfect position of Distanzierung, distanziamento. Tafel 49 is the last in a series (37, 44, 45, and 49) to examine the role of grisaille in the Pathos-phases of the maniera antica.30 Aby Warburg sees the grisaille as the Pathosformel of the ‘invasion’ and the ‘transport’, of the unique “occasion to include ancient pathos into the paintings; the necessity to confine the strength of these classics phantoms into the ‘shadow reign’ – the background.”31 In Warburgian terms, Andrea Mantegna’s Tuccia means “controlling the energy of Antiquity, keeping a distance from the gestural rhetoric drawn from classical models, and using the fictional possibilities of grisaille as a metaphorical expressive tool.”32 Grisaille is the eruption of the ancient pathos into the foreground of the scene. Grisaille functions as a membrane, as a sieve that only allows that what is needed through: gray coloring and the tempered form of ancient pathos. Grisaille and sieve are connected through the idea of frugality and filtering.

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8 Tafel 49 (Gebändigtes Siegerpathos (Mantegna). Grisaille als ‘Wie der Metapher’ Distanzierung) from the Bilderatlas, from: Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby Warburg, 2, II.1), eds. Horst Bredekamp, et al., Berlin, 2008, p. 90–91.

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

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9 Bartolomeo Neroni (1505–1571), The Vestal Virgin Tuccia, mid sixteenth century. Tempera on panel, 74.3 × 45 cm, London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. 425–1869

And the first row features Isabella d’Este with her insaciabile desiderio nostro de cose antique – a desire so typical for her time, and brought back to life by none other than Aby

Warburg in the Mnemosyne project. The Tuccia painted by Sienese painter Bartolomeo Neroni (1505–1571) is also viewed as a part of the donne illustre ensemble (fig. 9).33 The Vestal virgin is depicted as a Roman woman, her left breast bared. She is standing on the edge of the Tiber and carries a round, flat sieve filled to the brim with water. The Tuccia (ca. 1560) by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1578) holds the sieve in her lap (fig. 10). She is posed like an Amazon against a marble background that, like her clothing, portrays the Roman setting. Her breasts are bare and her right leg idly rests on a slab of which the cartouche reads Castitas infamiae nube obscurata emersit. The passage, “Chastity emerges from the dark clouds of infamy,” refers to the original source of Valerius Maximus. This Tuccia builds tension with her exposed chest and her proven innocence as a virginal priestess, in other words, between the nuda virtualis and the nuda veritas. Tuccia is the pure nude, because the truth has nothing to hide.34

26

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

10 Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1578), The Vestal Virgin Tuccia, ca. 1560. Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 86.9 cm, London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG3123

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

11 Moretto da Brescia (Alessandro Bonvicino) (ca. 1498–1554), The Vestal Virgin Tuccia, ca. 1540–1544. Oil on panel, 113 × 86 cm, New York, Private collection

27

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In her catalogue Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, Andrea Bayer refers to another interesting painting (ca. 1540–1544) by Moretto da Brescia (ca. 1498–1554) in a private collection in New York,35 on which the Vestal Tuccia is presented as a contemporary woman holding a sieve in one hand (fig. 11).36 Her other hand points to a tablet that reads: Pvdicitiae / testimoniv[m] alexa[n]der / brix.F. “In proof of her Chastity” is a quote from Augustine’s De civitate Dei, where he separates the miracle of the Vestal virgin from false and demonic miracles.37 This Tuccia is opulently dressed in brocade and silk, her breasts delicately visible behind an almost translucent fabric. She wears her hair in a refined updo and thus carries the Tuccia iconography into the luxury of contemporary secular portraits. Although the origin of the painting is unknown, it must have been made for a learned individual, and when one takes into account the familiarity with the comments of Augustine on the Ancient texts, possibly someone closely involved with the ecclesiastical environment.38 The integration of the theme within church walls, however, was not particularly exceptional. The San Francesco church of Volterra features a Tuccia bust as a holy water font (fig. 12).39 And on the impenetrable marble sieve, the visitor who dips their hand into the water can read the word innocenza. Thus the person of faith is connected with the innocence and purity of the church community, and the Ancient Tuccia now carries the purifying holy water. We return again to the ‘sieve portraits’ of Elizabeth. Here the Italian tradition is radicalized further. By having herself depicted as a new Tuccia, Elizabeth demonstrated, in the first place, her familiarity with humanist iconographic conventions of chastity. Georgianna Ziegler puts it as follows: While her chastity and business are praised by renaissance men in their various representations of her for the benefit of women, it is also true that as a woman she asserts power over her own body with her conscious decision to remain chaste by repulsing the advances made to her by men.40

The sieve of chastity was at that time also familiar in the emblem literature produced for elite readers, such as Geoffrey Whitney’s (1548–1601) work of 1586.41 By inscribing herself as head of state in this tradition, Elizabeth furthermore raised a tension between the ideal of feminine chastity in general, and the standard of chastity that, as queen, she in particular publicly set. In other words, this portrait doubly stages Elizabeth as Tuccia, since she had two bodies: one in private space and one in public space. Louis Montrose writes: The sieve constitutes a displacement of the queen’s sexuality. The interpretative question concerns how that sexuality is being symbolized in the sieve.42 The sieve is a paradoxical ‘heroical devise’ uniquely appropriate to a virgin queen whose realm is a virgin ruler and a prospective royal bride. The sieve portraits are not merely celebrations of royal chastity; they are compelling icons of Elizabethan eroto-politics, as these were played out both within the ambiance of the court and upon the global stage.43

The Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve

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12 Holy waterfront shaped like Tuccia with sieve, marble inscription innocenza, signed “G. Bapt. Bava,” 1552. Volterra, Church of San Francesco

To which Susan P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies add: In a society whose hierarchy offered absolute privilege to men, the ideological shift required to accept a female ruler was considerable, if not impossible. Thus the conven­ tional view of women which focused upon their containment within a private world had to somehow coexist with the reality of the public show necessary for a monarch. ­Elizabeth I was, without doubt, a female ruler accepted by her contemporaries because of her own exceptional qualities; they condoned the individual, not the concept of female majesty. But the same byplay between private and public selves does occur repeatedly in the representations and writings of other renaissance women.44

Furthermore, I’d like to make room for a short reflection about the meaning of the sieve in theatrical comedies, in caricatures, and in the vulgarising medicine of Elizabeth’s time, where the female sex was often portrayed as a leaking sieve. In her article “Leaky ­Vessels,” Gail Kern Paster proved how during the Tudor and Stuart period, the female sex is described as a wet, incontinent sieve that constantly leaks bodily fluids, such as urine, tears, menstrual blood, mucus, and seeds,45 which all struggle for balance in the body.46 “Let her cry, she’ll piss the less” is a well-known saying about women in England.47 Even the notorious cliché that women like to gossip is considered an example of ‘leaking’.

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It’s well known that women are often associated with the archetype of fluidity – the fertile element of water.48 That is basically repeated here, but in a “subverted form.”49 Elizabeth as a capable ruler, with the virtuous sieve as her attribute, takes on an added ambivalence with the popular and mocking secondary meaning of the leaking sieve. Suddenly the motif seems to swing between positive and negative meanings, between exempla of humanist environments and the nonsense that simultaneously thrives. Paster writes: “If not-leaking becomes something of a mythical miracle reserved for a long-gone Roman lady and the occasional Virgin Queen, then leaking remains the normal punitive condition for women.”50 In conclusion, “the association of Elizabeth with Tuccia’s sieve serves to separate her from womankind as a whole – and thus from the contradictions of a woman ruler.”51 In the ‘sieve portraits’ both bodies are combined and to a certain extent intermixed, resulting in an ambivalent message, making Elizabeth unique in her royal choice to remain also an ordinary maid, even in the raw ambiguity of the proverb “Let her cry, she’ll piss the less.”52 Based on these intermixtures, Elizabeth becomes a fascinating reflection of the Vestal virgins, who also had a highly ambiguous status in society, whether it came to Ancient Rome, or the Tudor and Stuart dynasties in England. In regards to the contradictions of a woman ruler, the enigmatic poetic words of Elizabeth herself bear repetition indeed: “I am and not; I freeze and yet am burn’d;/ Since from myself, my other self I turn’d.”53 These verses suggest she wrestled with the ambivalence of being both desiring woman and public figure. And perhaps the poem indicates a ‘regret’ of a poignantly painful paradox, an acute awareness of a double self.54 The sieve, too, is binary, a ‘double self’, for it retains to remove: it is always a choice with loss, and irreversible in its sifting process. This brings me to the next chapter.

Etymology, Symbolism, Cosmology

The process has never to my knowledge been described by any previous writer. The woman servant – for it is only women who sift – sets herself on the ground with her feet spread widely apart, taking in her hands a large but shallow sieve called ghurbal. JAMES NEIL

The prehistoric, proto-Indo-European word for sieve has been reconstructed as kreidhrom1 – from cribrum in Latin and κόσκινον [kóskinon] in Ancient Greek – meaning sifting or sieving substances, but also by transference ‘to distinguish’, and to reach a decision (cernere in Latin, κρίνειν [krínein] in Greek).2 It is assumed that the stem relates to sifting dry materials, such as grain, rather than liquids, such as dairy products. It is suspected that the sieves of the Neolithic were mostly used for grain products. In any case, the idea of purity is closely related to this Indo-European etymology, as is apparent from the stem peuh, meaning sieved, sifted, which gives the Latin purus: purified, fresh, spotless.3 The second Indo-European root for sieve is sehj, which can be seen in the Latin sinus and the Greek η ΄θμός (ēthmós), meaning globular, hollow. Sehj is related to sei sif-/sib and sē(i)-, sei-, meaning to drip, as in the Serbian sípiti: to drizzle. Also in Sumerian the stem sig underlies a semantic complex that touches on rain, pouring oneself out, and pouring through a sieve.4 The third Indo-European root for the sieve is reh-, which primarily in Baltic ­languages is closely related to a ‘net’ for hunting and for fishing (rete in Latin). Here the sieve connects to the primordial techniques of weaving: a grid or lace pattern.5 The same can be found in Hebrew. Here, the two words for sieve are kevarah and naphah.6 Kevarah is mentioned in Amos 9:9: “For I will give the command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve (kevarah), and not a pebble will reach the ground.” In Genesis 35:16 the term is also used during the death of Rachel: “It was at the time of year when the ground is full of holes and riddled like a sieve (kevarah).” This means when there is plenty of ploughed ground, when winter has passed but the dry season has not yet come.7

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Kevarah derives from the stem kabir: something woven, like a cloth or a net, dropping something through something braided,8 as in the Arabic ghurbal. Naphah comes from nuph: to move back and forth like in the waves of the sea or a well, as if to cradle, and to sprinkle. Naphah furthermore can also mean border, region, shoreline, as the sieve constitutes a flat thin ‘field’ with an articulated raised rim. For that matter, there is a semantic connection with brom, brum (‘young twig’), the Dutch braam (‘bramble’, ‘knife edge’), brem (‘broom’) and berm (‘edge’), and English bramble and brim all derived from the Indo-European root bherem: to stick out, edge, hem, border plant, bank, and shoreline as in naphah. I’ll make a detour about the paradigm of the net, which connects several of these etymological spectrums. In their Alles, was Netz ist, Michael Andritzky and Thomas Hauer describe how humans’ relationship with nature and culture traditionally has been structured based on the net-principle.9 Das Netz war immer auch eine Metapher für den Versuch, Strukturprinzipien in unserer Welt, ja in unserem Kosmos zu entdecken. […] Die Entwicklung von Schrift, Zahlen und Mathematik hängt unmittelbar zusammen mit dem Aufbau von ausgedehnten Bewässerungsnetzen im Zweistromland Mesopotamien und in Ägypten, die einen blühenden Garten Eden inmitten der lebensfeindlichen Wüste entstehen ließen.10

One of the earliest uses of the net was indeed for fishing.11 There are net fragments left over from the Neolithic in Hornstaad-Hörle on Lake Constance.12 A prey in the net is the result of the supernatural and magical power of the woven or knotted structure. That is why they also found amulets in the nets. The net encloses, but also allows things to pass through: it is permeable like a sieve. The ambivalence between concealing and revealing strengthens and articulates what has been caught in the net: from butterflies, to fish, to footballs.13 Because the net catches and shows, but also because it is made with knots by hand, it forms a game of both cruelty as well as refinement. Ethnologists Henry Evans Maude (1906–2006) and Honor Maude (1905–2001) have done important research into the so-called ‘string figures’,14 which live on in the modern-day commercial ‘dream catchers’. Knotted abstract figures have always been part of the great myths of the creation of the world.15 Networks play a big role in cosmology or in the Dream Time of the Aboriginals, as well as in their visual work, and are derived from the furrows on the fields. And the Mesopotamian God Marduk fought the primordial Goddess of chaos, Tiamat, with a net.16 In short, because the net catches, it also catches evil, and because it constitutes an artisanal knotted and wovenness, the net brings order to chaos. In Ancient China, people considered the expanse of the heavens as one great permeable ‘net’ (sieve).17

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13 Lace, produced in Burano

Back to the sieve. The remarkable etymological branches of the sieve relating to weaving structures, to fishing and hunting nets, yes, even to ploughed grounds, and to the movements of water on the shorelines/edges (shoreline, waves, to sprinkle) have remained visible in the genesis of the words about the production of lace. In Burano, Venice, a fisherman resists the temptation of the sirens, because his love for his fiancée is too strong. In response, one of the sirens hits her tail on the surface of the water, creating an enormous wave. From the foam of the wave a net-like veil forms, which clings to the surface of the water. On their wedding day, his love wears this veil, and still women try to replicate the finest quality of lace from the foam of the sea with their needles and threads (fig. 13).18 The iconogenesis of lace connects the foam of the ocean and its remarkable ‘openwork’ structure that froze on top of the waves for a fraction of a second, with humans’ universal fascination for networks that seem chaotic at first glance – such as the web, the nest – which they try to match in their own handicrafts… the ultimate paragone between nature and the arts.19 The notions of separation, purification, seeping through (raining), shaking, and the technicality of the ‘net’ point to the primordial capacity of the sieve both to let through and to hold back.20 Sifting is an action that aims to keep a clean residue while discarding waste. It is also a means of separating coarser from finer parts. The sieve is a basic tool through which humans interact with their environment and in particular with the substances needed for nutrition, hygiene, and wellbeing (fig. 14).21 As has been mentioned, sieves have existed since the Neolithic Age. Further, archaeological finds from biblical times indicate that grain sieves, at least, were relatively large: about 90 cm across, with a 20-cm-high wooden side.22 However, the exact type of the kevarah is not well known. Amos seems to suggest a coarse sieve, used to strain straw and stones with a fine mesh. The mesh was mostly made of woven grass or very finely interwoven twigs, such as the so-called ‘rushes’ or the recently mentioned etymological brom, brum (‘young twig’) from bherem. Moreover, little was written about the sifting process as such in ancient cultures.

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14 Household set of sieves from Ukraine, around 1930

This makes the descriptions in James Neil’s Peeps into Palestine (ca. 1915) particularly illuminating with regard to the biblical Mediterranean area (fig. 15). He writes: The process has never to my knowledge been described by any previous writer […]. The woman servant – for it is only women who sift – sets herself on the ground with her feet spread widely apart, taking in her hands a large but shallow sieve called ghurbal, some two and a half feet across. Having placed a small amount of wheat in the ghurbal, or sieve, she commences by giving it some six or seven sharp shakes, so as to bring the chaff and short pieces of crushed straw to the surface, the greater part of which she removes with her hands. After this the main part of the work begins, which is done with much skill. Holding the sieve in a slanting position, she jerks it up and down for a length of time, blowing across the top of it all the while with great force. In a word, she turns herself into a regular winnowing machine! Three results follow. In the first place the dust, earth, small seeds, and small, imperfect grains of wheat, etc., fall away through the meshes of the sieve. Secondly, by means of the vigorous blowing, any crushed straw, chaff, and such-like light refuse is either blown away to the ground, or else collected in the part of the ghurbal which is furthest from her. Thirdly, the good wheat goes together in one heap about the center of the sieve, while the tiny stones or pebbles are brought into a separate little pile on that part of it which is nearest to her chest. The pebbles, chaff, and crushed straw thus cleverly removed from the corn [grain], mainly by the angle at which the sieve is held and the way in which it is jerked up and down, are then taken out of the ghurbal with her hands. Finally, setting the sieve down upon her lap, she carefully picks out with her finger any slight impurities which may yet remain, and the elaborate and searching process of sifting is complete.23

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15 Drawing of a Palestine woman while sifting, from: James Neil, Peeps Into Palestine. Strange Scenes in the Unchanging Land Illustrative of the Ever-Living Book, London, ca. 1915, p. 55

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This sheds light on the mentioned verse in Amos 9:9. This ancient sieving technique separates the grain from the pebbles, but the pebbles remain in the sieve. The translators of the King James Version, familiar with more modern processes of filtration, could not understand this and produced: “For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain [rather than pebble] fall upon the earth.”24 Another instance of ancient sifting technique can be found in Luke 22:31–32 (English Standard Version): “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” Grain would at that time be bought with all sorts of dirt and extraneous matter. Sifting made the larger waste visible (rather than removing it as such), so that it could later be removed by hand. Because what remains in the sieve is usually the purest and thus wanted material, the sieve is indeed an apotropaion, an instrument to ward off evil.25 Into the seventeenth century there are details of ‘sieve magic’ or ‘coscinomancy’ as ways of predicting the future,26 by turning a sieve,27 playing it like a drum (infra Chapter 4),28 or holding it up to the sun for a good harvest. The sieve is also a motif in fairy tales. Between twelve o’clock and one, Frau Holle carries water in a vessel without a base, a wonder comparable to tales of Vestal Virgins. And in all sorts of North German stories, witches and stepmothers command girls to carry water in a sieve.29 Weather witches also carry a sieve as an attribute.30 In Finland, the goddess Uutar was thought to cast the rain from the clouds with a gigantic strainer. Because the sieve purifies milk and separates grain, it is also an important symbol of fertility. Even the posture when sifting grain is suggestive of giving birth, as we learned from Neil’s descriptions: “The woman servant – for it is only women who sift – sets herself on the ground with her feet spread widely apart, taking in her hands a large but shallow sieve called ghurbal, some two and a half feet across.” Among Berber women in Kabylia, for example, the sieve is linked to the grain mill.31 The upper and lower stone that grind the grain with circular movements to left and right symbolize the cosmos.32 There is however an important difference with the sieve, which in these female communities is always moved from right to left, because sifting symbolizes a movement ‘towards’ the stars, and does not copy the movement ‘of’ the stars themselves.33 Among the Berbers, the sieve may on no condition leave the house, and as a cleansing object it must itself be kept clean at all times. In Kabylia there is a story of an evil woman who deliberately turned the sieve in the opposite direction to disrupt the luck of others, and then hung the ‘widdershins’ sieve outside above her doorway, in order to infect others with the evil. The story indicates the great power of the sieve and the misuse that can attend it for a whole community.34 Raphael Patai (1910–1996) devotes a chapter of his On Jewish Folklore to the role of the sieve in old Jewish fertility rites.35 Among Bedouin tribes, as well as among Jews in the Caucasus, it is still customary to catch a baby in a sieve at birth.36 In Egypt too, newborns were laid in a grain sieve, and into the nineteenth century it was customary to ‘shake’ the child in the sieve on the seventh day, supposedly as a way of promoting good digestion.

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The same custom can be found in Anjra in Morocco, where on the seventh day the child is laid in a sieve with henna, an egg and a bowl of water. In Tangier a sieve is shaken above the head of a newborn boy whose brother has died (but not a girl, for then she would never marry). Such customs of laying newborn children in sieves and shaking them is an extension of the idea that the child will benefit from actions that mirror certain preparatory techniques from the woman’s kitchen. They can be explained from archetypal association between the child and grain or bread, between the womb and the fertility of the earth, and also between sifting grain/kneading bread/baking bread and conceiving/making/ bearing/caring for a child. In the sieve, Patai sees parallels to the bed, the cradle, the crib, all of which have a chthonic relationship to the inner bosom or womb of the earth. Although this association is not found word for word in the Bible, the word arisa is used for a kneading trough in Numbers 15:20–21 and in Nehemiah 10:37, while in the Talmud, the same word is used to mean a cot or cradle.37 The cradle can be shaken or rocked (compare the etymology of sieve as naphah) just as bread can be kneaded. The movements that the sieve, the cradle, the kneading trough, and the crib elicit are spontaneous motions that recur in various feminine domains of care, hygiene and preparation, and consequently cover a wide spectrum of engagement with the intimate setting. In his article, “Family Relations,” David Brodsky describes the compartmentalizing rules in the domestic exchanges between Jewish and non-Jewish women based on the Mishna Gittin.38 Composed in Talmudic Israel (ca. 190–ca. 230), the Gittin (documents) belongs to the third order of Nashim (women) and discusses the concepts of divorces and other documents. In the Mishna Gittin 5:9, Brodsky found an interesting passus about loaning out a sieve. A woman may lend her fellow, who is suspected when it comes to sabbatical year produce a nafah-sieve, a kevarah-sieve, a millstone or an oven; but she may not winnow or grind with her. The wife of a fellow may lend the wife of an am ha’aretz [a Jew who is not a member of the rabbinic fellowship] a nafah-sieve, a kevarah-sieve, and she may winnow, grind, and sift with her; but, once she pours water [on it], she may not touch it with her, because one may not encourage those who commit sin.39

This instruction shows how the sieve, because it is universally charged with female intimacy, can also become overcharged with purification rules and regulations within the sensory and ethical space of purity and impurity. They are “ambiguous households” (­after Mary Douglas), indeed. The wondrous energy that emanates from the sieve in the female environment of food, procreation, protection, and care resides in the essence of the sieve itself as a permeable membrane that brings cleanness and separates the desired foodstuff from contaminants. Indeed, the sieve’s materiality and technique – be it the tying of the fabric or the twisting

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of the yarns, be it weaving, knotting – embodies those vital principles, and makes the instrument into an image of the womb.40 Childbirth and the tying off of the umbilical cord are associated closely with the symbolism of textile/knotting itself in all cultures. Psalm 139:13–15 says: “For you [...] knit me together in my mother’s womb. [...] I was woven together in the depths of the earth.” And if we then remember the etymology of naphah (rim, edgy, shore) and bherem (hem, bank, border plant, ‘what sticks out’), it becomes a broad conceptual pattern, wherein the sieve both confines and swells and receives a uterine connotation. After all, that which can overflow like a Vestal spring, like a sea of lace, should also be placed in ‘bonds’ like a frightful force.41 The well of Miriam also attests to this. The Talmud teaches: “Three great leaders led Israel: Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. In their merit they received three great gifts: the Well [Miriam], the Clouds of Glory [Aaron] and the Manna [Moses].”42 When Miriam died, the well was removed as is evidenced by the fact that immediately after the verse “And Miriam died,” the Torah states, “The People had no water.” This is thus the significance in the verses following Miriam’s death of Moses searching for and eventually striking the rock in order to restore its waters, which had vanished with Miriam’s death. Rashi explains that this well was the same rock from which Moses brought forth water after Miriam’s death, but adds that it was round as a sieve, sieve-like, a kevarah. Jan Willem van den Bosch sees a connection between this ‘portable sieve spring’ and likmos, a three-sided basket used to sift grain, a process known as winnowing.43 These recipients played a role during Dionysian processions and parties.44 The brides carried these baskets filled with phallic symbols, fruit, or images of child gods. The baskets were also used as cradles by the Greeks, and were considered connected to sexuality and birth, like we also saw in the Jewish examples in the work of Patai. If the Talmud calls Miriam’s spring a kevarah that ‘wells up’ and travels with the people, then there is an organic connection between Miriam and the fertility source of the vulva, the uterus. The spring-sieve-vulva comes with them as a portable shrine. If Miriam dies, this shrine to procreations also dies. The Hebrew word denoting the womb of a woman is māqôr.45 The basic meaning of māqôr is a ‘fountain’ or ‘spring’, a ‘source of flowing liquid’. This association of the female reproductive organs with the spring/fountain was a general conceptualisation in the ancient Near East. Two Babylonian incantations portray the source or amniotic flow as an idi or ‘spring’. Also in Mesopotamian cognition, the womb was conceptualised as a spring/fountain.46 And then there is the Greek word στόμα (stoma), denoting the ‘mouth’ of the womb as well as the source of a river or stream. [...] The unbounded and overflowing womb had to be confined in order to be able to generate, to bring forth life, and the spring served as central physical construction in this process of creation. The womb/spring of a woman with a uterine discharge was, by analogy, seen to excessively overflow its boundaries. When the excessive overflow of the womb, i. e. the uterine discharge, was confined or when it ceased, the womb/spring was again continent.47

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16 Uterine amulets, Alphons A. Barb, Diva Matrix: A Faked Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P. P. Rubens and the Iconology of the Symbol, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1953, p. 193–238, Pl. 6a

Octopus-like creatures, for instance, or balls with pins, tentacled hedgehogs, and snakes’ heads are often found as figures of the womb, corresponding to the swelling and shrinking capacity that the womb was thought to have.48 In the last phase of the growing figuration, it was even given a face: that of Medusa. On Greek amulets one often finds inscriptions that invoke the womb.49 An early Byzantine charm goes: “Womb, Black; Blackening, as a snake you coil, and as a serpent you hiss, and as a lion you roar and as a lamb, lie down.”50 The charm asks the uterus to calm itself, to shrink.51 During pregnancy, the womb or the belly is ‘seen’ as a fermentation vessel, with shapeless contents. Apotropaic amulets and spells must be situated against a background of conviction that the uterus is an animated being, a demon, an animal that must continually be soothed, appeased (fig. 16).52 Again, the sieve’s proper materiality and technique of a woven surface with an articulated rim explains these apotropaic forces against the capacity that the womb was thought to have. In the Mediterranean area, materials or objects with inextricable patterns – a field of spots, unrecognisable shapes or complicated patterns of lines – were greatly favoured for their apotropaic effectiveness. Belief in their protective powers explains in large part the remarkable preference for ‘decorative’ woven, plaited, intertwined patterns. This is true of all woven, knitted, crocheted, knotted materials, but also of plants, trees or arbours that are trained into inextricable wholes. The dizzying effect of the line on a number of Berber weaves is similarly intended to ward off the ‘evil eye’. A labyrinthine structure, a confusing network, or an indeterminate representation had the same protective effects. Since ancient times, strong apotropaic effects have been ascribed to unclear, maze-like, elusive interconnections.53

This makes the sieve a net, a membrane of life comparable to the α ΄ μνίον (amníon) or caul, the amniotic sac that surrounds a baby, in short, the physical ‘nets’ and ‘filters’ in the womb ­itself.54 In Egyptian hieroglyphs the sieve stands for the consonant kh (fig. 17). The sieve means

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17 Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the sieve stands for the consonant kh or  , limestone relief from a tomb of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Cairo, Egyptian Museum

here the placenta that filters the baby’s nutrition. In Egyptian alchemy this hieroglyph is also the pictogram for the combining of particular substances into a unity and a higher synthesis. Figuratively, the kh sieve signifies the process of the soul’s self-perfection.55 The strong relationship between the sieve and the exclusive intimate space of the woman in the household and the activity of childbirth also makes the sieve a cosmogonic symbol for the universe.56 The Egyptian deity Anubis is sometimes shown with the sieve as a symbol of the moon.57 The Persian epic myth of Amirani tells of the hero who was swallowed by a dragon and was able to make his way out of its stomach. However, he took the precaution of placing a wooden sieve in the opening, just in case the dragon ever swallowed the sun (an image of the solar eclipse).58 Should that happen, the sun could burn through the fine mesh of the sieve and free itself. Looked at more closely, this liberation of the sun is a rebirth through the membrane of the womb (sieve) and the ‘belly’ of the underworld that the dragon symbolizes.

The Sieve Dances

Cut in the forest, dried in the village, And women dance with it. What is it? The sieve. HUNGARIAN FOLK SONG

The etymological meanings closely connect the sieve with textile, weaving and braiding, but also the action of shaking, scattering, throwing into the air, and catching with a net. Combined with legends, myths, and folklore, ancient components became clear by connecting the sieve with birth and the rocking or shaking of a baby with the spring/ amniotic fluid, and even with the filtering placenta or the membrane that surrounds the baby in the uterus. Within this spectrum, what’s left is a final anthropological association: the sieve and the therapeutic dance and music. We can still describe the sieve within this cultural heritage, thanks to ethnological studies in Central Europe, where the connection between the sieve and dance has long preserved. László Kürti, for example, devoted an important and extensive study to the connection between sieve, drum, horse and dance in Hungarian shamanism.1 Fortune-telling and sorcery are connected to specific moves known as the ‘turningof-the-sieve’. [...] in Hungarian ‘turning of the sieve’ is expressed as rostaforgatás, rostavetés, or szitálás. The native concepts of forgatás and vetés relate to ‘turning’ and ‘throwing’ respectively. The former is a constant in native Hungarian dance terminology – for example, forgatás, forgós and fordulós all express ‘turning’ and ‘whirling’ motions. The latter verb, vetés – more familiar to contemporary Hungarian readers with reference to vetni i. e. ‘to sow (seeds)’ – connotes ‘throwing’ as in the side-to-side movement of the women in front of their partner in couples’ dances such as those of vetéllős and átvetős.2

Because the sieve was often stretched animal skin, such as the horsehide used by Romanians and Hungarians, the sieve could also be used as a drum or a tambourine (fig. 18).3 “The horse, which is one of the shaman’s magical animals and helping spirit entrusted with

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the flight to the heavens or the netherworld, is personified by the drum. It may be natural, then, that this instrument is endowed with the magical animal characteristics of the horse, including the sounds of its galloping gait.”4 Jeremiah 47:3 says: “For the voices of the beating of the hoofs of his strong ones, for the tumult of his chariot, the rumbling of his wheels.” The rhythm supported two basic forms of dance: the circular dance (usually feminine, incorporating the sifting action of rocking and circling) and what is known as ‘hopping’, a trampling of the ground with the feet (usually masculine, incorporating the sifting movement of shaking and scattering). This gender distinction is also mirrored in the Hebrew use of rqd for the masculine dance, and hwl for feminine.5 Rqd refers to jumping up and down and is also used 18 Shaman playing a horse hide drum in the context of a ship bobbing up and down on the waves, as well as for the jumping of the contents of the sieve when sifting. Hwl is the circle dance and the stem returns in circular motion and round household objects such as the sieve. The words with which Hungarians describe the movements of both sifting with the sieve and body slapping during dance are similar. For when using the szita (sieve), the corresponding verb is not only ‘shaking’, but also ‘hitting’, ‘beating’, and ‘slapping’. And in a proverb from Kibéd (Transylvania, Romania), it is women who literally ‘dance’ with the sieve: a connection between gender and the act of fortune telling as well as dancing. Cut in the forest, dried in the village, And women dance with it. What is it? The sieve.6

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László Kürti also describes the people of Szőreg (a village in southern Hungary): [They] believe that witches gather during night at Whitsuntide. They dance in a circle, which will cause incurable sickness to those who happen to step inside of it. This – as well as information above with regard to turning the sieve and the whirlwind – indicates that women’s round dance may be endowed with magical meanings beyond the ordinary. [...] Such kinetic shapes may be endowed with non-human characteristics. Circularness and turning (whirling) are, of course, shapes and forms of a special enclosure with specific symbolic meanings existing in many tribal as well as organized state religions.7

In the Malay Muslim ceremonies, for example, the singing voice and the dance are combined with stamping and roaring, and “rhythmic oscillation of tube beats, heartbeat, and inspiration/exhalation find their kinetic correlates in dance movements, several of which are compared with either strolling through space, or strolling in place.”8 According to these Malay Muslims, the spinning dances and the transformations that they entail can also lead to danger, to sickness and excess: to madness. The spinning and shaking of the body are related to the etymological core of wind. In the etymology of the Indo-European languages, the root of the word for wind carries the same connotations such as blowing, breath, and therefore the principle of life itself. Furthermore, the semantic meanings are always related to movement and express the dynamic interaction of humankind and nature. Thus the wind root derbh- has meanings going from dancing, turning, interweaving, connecting, and knotting to bundling grass.9 This root is still ‘visible’ in the word dervish, the trance dance of the Sufi Muslims. The wind root kelg- links wind to going around corners, twisting, bending, spiraling, turning, convolution, and by transference the idea of (literary and dramatic) plotting.10 The wind root lek-, finally, points to squirming, but also jumping up and down, the ‘hopping’ that occurs in so many rituals.11 It is indeed remarkable that the spinning, shaking, throwing sift processes can still be described and experienced within this wind-dance spectrum. Recall James Neil’s description: “Holding the sieve in a slanting position, she jerks it up and down for a length of time, blowing across the top of it all the while with great force. In a word, she turns herself into a regular winnowing machine!” Sifting is the final stage in the rural process of grain consumption. First is threshing. Essential to threshing was a ‘threshing floor’, a flat area of hard dirt or rock on which freshly harvested wheat could be piled. Quite a few verses, from Genesis to the New Testament, mention threshing floors, which makes sense because grain was so essential to life. […] Winnowing was the process that separated the mixed up pile of grain, stalk, and husk so that the edible grain could be sifted and eaten. To winnow the grain, the farmer scooped up the pieces of the crop he had just threshed and threw

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it all up into the air. The wind blew the light pieces of stalk to the side, while the grain, which was both heavier and roundish, fell almost straight back down. Thus, over time, the threshing floor was covered with three quite distinct piles of material. The kernels of grain fell almost straight down or were not blown far at all. The larger pieces of stalk, or ‘straw’, had blown a little ways off to the side, and the small pieces of stalk, called the ‘chaff’, had blown even further away.12

The sieve and the energy it gets from the άμνίον [amníon], the fertility symbols, and the constantly turning celestial bodies, this shaking, rocking, throwing, dancing weaving: it never stops. It hops and spins to the rhythm of the cosmos itself. It makes music, it roars, and it writes its idiosyncratic choreographies with the wind. It is therefore fitting to end this section with the reflections of Bettina L. Knapp: Circling and circular images also come to the fore in the opening whirlwind image. Circular movement around a centre not only focuses energy, but relates to the idea of ‘circulation’ thereby generating energy and activity and beginning of course of action. Let us recall that Yahweh directed Joshua, in his conquest of Jericho, to ‘compass the city… and go round about the city…ʼ (Josh. 6:3). Circles and circlings also suggest an absence of divisiveness and of distinction: something eternal and immutable, without beginning or end. [...] The circle, as it appears and disappears amid the swirling wind, the coiling eddies, and the particles of sand, also had a mandala effect. [...] Only when the turbulence dies down can energy be concentrated on a given area and fragmentation cease, thereby divesting the brain of extraneous matter, idle thoughts, and random feelings. Since a mandala actualizes cosmic energy, it may also be looked upon as a microcosm of divine power, thereby taking on the contours of a sacred space and interiorizing the energies within its sphere.13

The sieve, its penetrability and filtering stimulated in repetitive dance-like up-casting motions, becomes an image of flaming up, but also of coming to rest, of removing ballast, but also of isolating what is beneficial. And there the sieve’s movements and remnants are respectively magic and therapeutic.

A Short Break. The Nun in Affile

In duabus partibus inveniretur divisum. GREGORY THE GREAT

In his Dialogues, Gregory the Great (died 604) recounts the story of the sieve mended by Benedict of Nursia (Norcia) (480–547).1 Benedict was traveling out of Rome to Effide (now Affile, Lazio, Italy), in the company of a nun. They found lodgings for the night near the village’s church of St. Peter. The nun borrowed a sieve from a neighbor, and placed her sieve for cleaning grain too far over the edge of the table, so that it fell and broke in two pieces (in duabus partibus inveniretur divisum). She was very distressed by this, particularly because she had borrowed the sieve.2 Benedict, moved by her tears, withdrew to pray. Through his prayers, the sieve was miraculously made whole. This was the first of twelve miracles worked through Benedict. The sieve was afterwards hung over the doorpost of the church of St. Peter, where it continued to be the locus of a series of miracles. This founding miracle story connects different aspects of the sieve as motif, symbol, and cosmology. To begin with, this passage shows the relationship between the feminine intimate space of the household and the intimate zone of the sieve that must remain ‘intact’. Through prayer, the sieve is restored, and by extension, the integrity of the nun is also restored. In this sense, there is an analogy with the sieve motif in the Tuccia story, which, as seen before, was also known in Christianity, through the glosses of Augustine. Yet, there are also differences. There is no emphatic articulation of the purity ideal (though it is of course assumed), and it’s not the nun, but Benedict himself who brings forth a miracle through prayer. This last point is connected to the cura monialium principle, where the monk is responsible for the salvation of the nun. The passage in Gregory is as it were a patriarchal variant of the ancient metaphor of threatened chastity, where often the compassion of the saint plays the most important role, instead of the sister in need herself. Gregory refers to the sieve by the terms capisterium and vas indifferently (without using cribrum). Du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis specifies that a capisterium – that is, a scaphisterium, in Greek σκαφιστήριον – is a bowl used to cleanse grains.3 They were generally wooden, and could vary a great deal in shape. In the thirteenth-century manuscript with the Dialogues preserved in the Royal Library of Belgium, the capisterium is a large bowl-shaped sieve (fig. 19). On the left, the nun is shown at the table with the sieve, on the right Benedict kneels over the sieve. In the middle is the broken

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19 St. Benedict Repairs his Nurse’s Sieve (detail) in Gregorius Magnus, Dialogi, 1156–1175. Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Ms. 9916–17i, fol. 30r

A Short Break. The Nun in Affile

47

20 Jan van Coninxloo (1489–1555), The ­Miracle of the Broken Sieve, the right panel of the diptych, 1552. Oil on panel, 167 × 81 cm, Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, inv. no. 334

sieve: the filter has come loose from the frame. The San Salvatore church in Pavia contains an early sixteenth-century fresco that depicts the miracle.4 On the left, the painter from Lombardy shows a conversation between the upset nun and Benedict. The latter is holding a large square sieve. On the right, we see how Benedict attaches the miraculously restored object with a stick to a beam above the door, in the presence of believers. Below, the text reads: il vaso tolto in prestito dalla sua nutrice il qual a/ ... trata della chiesa per miracolo (“the borrowed vessel of his nun who… [?] of the church as a miracle”). On the front right panel of a diptych by Jan van Coninxloo (1489–1555), the episode is given a more narrative connection: the mourning nun is placed in a contemporary kitchen, with Benedict kneeling in prayer in front of the broken object in the foreground (fig. 20).5

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A Short Break. The Nun in Affile

Back to the text that clearly uses capisterium and vas. Symbolically, these bowl-shaped objects are by no means neutral concepts in Christianity. Their shapes and contents refer to the female archetype.6 Mary is the honorabile vas that preserves the Godly child. And, in the same vein, the baptismal font is the venter ecclesiae. The pitcher is sometimes also seen as a symbol of the human body in which the word is contained, as in 2 Corinthians 4:7: “but we have this treasure in earthen vessels.” The pitcher is, in other words, not a neutral or ‘empty’ object in early medieval perception. It is used for containing and pouring. In the Song of Songs (7:2), we read “Thy navel is like a round goblet” and, according to Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the female is the vas viri. In other words, the pitcher represents the ability to receive and conceive. It symbolizes conception. Consequently, the pitcher obviously also refers to the broader context of fertility wells which were recurrent in the last chapter.7 And like we saw in the literature, it ‘leaks’ as well! But there is also a second possible symbolic interpretation. In his fascinating article On Broken Glass: For Semiotics of Anti-Materiality, semioticist Massimo Leone dedicated a study to the damage and destruction of objects during the Middle Ages, especially broken glass. Focusing on a better understanding of the tensions between materiality and anti-materiality (not to be confused with immateriality) he wants to prove that: The study of the destroyed [...] is ‘always’ about materiality. It always conserves a shadow of meaning, independently, from how profoundly its earlier form was disintegrated. [...] Attention to the materiality of details in miraculous stories of repairing is essential so as to fully comprehend their meaning. Indeed, the specific configuration of object, material, reparation, and after-effects somehow connotes a particular understanding of the transcendent agency on matter, the reversibility of evil, and healing.8

The author also refers to the miracle story of the broken sieve as an example of how in the founding literature of the Middle Ages, this type of miracle of corporeal/material decomposition and repair was considered a symbol of the Christian soul’s recomposition towards a higher and purified level.9 Depending on the characteristics of the material, the transformation can be expressed in more intense ways, such as glass that originally had a liquid shape, is transparent, and then falls into pieces in a more dramatic fashion. The wooden sieve that broke in two is a rather naive variant on this principle of transferable healing. Nevertheless, this break is moving in its banality, because the fragile point of the sieve is always the connection between the edges on the side and the bottom coming loose. It’s no surprise, then, that the connection between object and humans in this early medieval Gregorian conception, that is, between the repairing of an object and the ‘cleansing’ of the sin of its owner, ‘synecdochically’ refers to what the sieve actually does. In Gregory’s story, the miraculously repaired sieve is displayed on the church façade afterwards as material proof and a reminder of the miracle. In the examples from Berber culture, we saw similar uses, where the sieve that was made public had the power to either protect or curse the community. That’s where we find a trace of this apotropaic function.

A Short Break. The Nun in Affile

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21 Church of San Pietro, Affile

The San Pietro church of Affile still exists (fig. 21), with a fifteenth-century affresco inside commemorating the event (fig. 22). When I was standing in front of the small Romanesque façade, it wasn’t hard for me to picture the object hanging on the doorframe. In my mind, the sieve is still there, as the imaginary oculus of the church façade. Look! The sieve has been repaired and it is virginally empty (it does not have any residue of evil). That is why the sieve hangs there, as a sieve-window, a buon occhio against the mal occhio. As a dream-catcher that has caught the memory of a monk and a woman traveling to Subiaco for all eternity. Yes, it was a very short break indeed.

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A Short Break. The Nun in Affile

22 St. Benedict and the Miracle of the Sieve, date unknown. Fresco. Affile, Church of San Pietro

Bilderatlas By Stephanie Heremans

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. E. E. CUMMINGS

1

2

4

5

6

7

3

8

1 Neurdein Frères, A sieve maker in Tunisia, ca  1900. 2 Unknown, A sieve seller in an area bordering Poland and the Ukraine (known as Ruthenia), 1938–1939. 3 Lucien Roy, Shop with pots and sieves in Damascus (Syria), 1911. 4 Unknown, A man sifts through the sea for ormers or abalone on the Channel Islands (the British Isles), 1920. 5 Unknown, Three women sifting at a lake in Java (Indonesia), 1915–1920. 6 Giorgio Giglioli, Three men seek for gold by sifting the sands of a river, date unknown.  7 Unknown, Three men winnowing grain by hand in [India?], early 20th century. 8 Louis Vert, Worker on the quays in Paris (France), 1900–1906.   9

10 9 11

12

13a

13b

Unknown, A worker winnows the coffee beans to remove dirt at a coffee plantation in Brazil, date unknown. 10 Unknown, The process of winnowing and sifting tea in Japan, date unknown. 11 Unknown, Men and women separating the unbroken corn from the fractured rice and removing sand by sifting in Japan, date unknown. 12 Unknown, Women preparing a couscous meal in Kabylia, date unknown. 13a Unknown, Ritual of a Galičnik wedding (‘the welcoming of the bride’ on horseback by the mother in law with a sieve) in Macedonia, date unknown. 13b Unknown, Ritual of a Galičnik wedding (‘the welcoming of the bride’ on horseback by the mother in law with a sieve) in Macedonia, date unknown

The Sieve as an Organism

By necessity, they exhibit a radical kind of intimacy. PAUL KOCKELMAN

The sieve is a Kulturtechnikobjekt par excellence.1 The sieve not only filters human necessities, but in doing so it is a filter between itself and the environment in which mediation and permeability articulate cognitive and tactile contact with the world, just as the word krinein, a critical sense of discrimination, came forth from the Indo-European core vocabulary. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant put this succinctly: Image de la sélection, de la critique, du crible, le tamis est un des symboles de la séparation. [...] Décisions à prendre, décisions à subir. L’ambivalence du symbole engendre la même angoisse: celle de rejeter mille grains qu’on aime pour ne retenir que le meilleur, ou celle d’être rejeté avec les mille et non retenu comme le meilleur. Le tamis symbolise également la munificence discrétionnaire des dieux, qui répandent du haut du ciel des dons à profusion, mais non sans tenir compte des prières des sacrifices et des mérites.2

Its essential characteristic of ‘separation’ makes the sieve both a relative and a dominant instrument. Relative, because the sieve can only separate and purify what a human has designed it to deal with. Dominant, because the sieve is always effective. This relativity, but at the same time the sieve’s cruelty and inescapability – it ‘always’ throws something away – make it an agent of ‘exclusion’ and thus in a sense of discrimination. The sieve derives its nature from the binary – separating the undesirable refuse from the desired residue – thus placing it in ‘opposition’ to models of thought that seek to embrace cohesion, uncertainty, intermixture, and intuition. The following chapters will set out some anthropological and psychoanalytical frameworks that will help us to understand the sieve as a paradigm. Working from Tim Ingold’s ‘textilities’ and ‘tectonics’, through Didier Anzieu’s moi-peau, to Ernst Fischer’s ‘uncanny space’, I focus on three statements. The sieve as an organism. The sieve as moi-peau. The sieve as secrecy. Paul Kockelman describes the sieve’s functional purposefulness, but also its relative fragility in the following terms:

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Crucially, sieves have to take on (and not just take in) features of the substances they sieve, if only as ‘inverses’ of them. A hole in the ground, for example, constitutes a simple sieve: anything with a diameter less than the hole will fall through; anything with a diameter larger than the hole will stay on top. In this way, to sieve a substance, the sieve must often have an (elective) affinity with the substance to be sieved and, in particular, the qualities sieved for – in this case size. In some sense, all sieves are inverses or even shadows of the substances they sort. By necessity, they exhibit a radical kind of intimacy. [...] In other words, separating substances is not an end in itself, but a means for further ends. In particular, just as the desirable materials may now be collected, the undesirable materials may now be destroyed. Moreover, it is always useful to remember that what is chaff for someone (say, a person who cannot digest it), may be sustenance for another: for example, a cow who can eat it, the fire that requires it for fuel, or the people who need the fire for warmth, illumination, protection, or divination. That is, just as there is wiggle room as to what has or has not been put through a sieve (i. e., are we at the input end of a sieve, and so still ‘aggregated’; or are we at the output end of a sieve, and so already ‘disaggregated’), there is also wiggle room as to which of the two substances sieved is a bad or a good. In this way, both the outputs of a sieve (wheat versus chaff), and the input-output relation per se (pre-winnowing or post-winnowing), are subject to classic framings: following Mary Douglas (1966), what is dirt for me may be order (or ‘matter in place’) for you; and following Gregory Bateson (1972), what is noise for you may be signal (or ‘meaning in place’) for me.3

The energy and symbolism of the sieve attaches itself both to the materiality of the sheet-that-sifts (textile, net, animal hide or other natural substances such as types of grass), and to the action of sorting/sifting/letting through, that is to its functionality and purpose. In the sieve, agency and materiality powerfully coincide. The object of use is – as the word itself says – consubstantial with its own materiality, form and purpose: this is a ‘radical kind of intimacy’. The ‘intimacy’ between function and substance therefore challenges the ancient separation of form and matter in the Aristotelian hylomorphic model in the most ‘radical’ manner and opens up a research framework that shows the failure of this model, as opposed to an integrated vision on form-and-matter. A pioneer in this approach is the Scottish anthropologist Tim Ingold. He refers to the worn-out binary models of classic Antiquity, which we use when we look at art or rather at ‘that which is made’. Tim Ingold writes: To create anything, Aristotle reasoned, you have to bring together form (morphe) and matter (hyle). In the subsequent history of Western thought, this hylomorphic model of creation became ever more deeply embedded. But it also became increasingly unbalanced. Form came to be seen as imposed by an agent with a particular design in mind, while matter, thus rendered passive and inert, became that which was imposed

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upon. My ultimate aim, however, is [...] to overthrow the model itself and to replace it with an ontology that assigns primacy to the processes of formation as against their final products, and to the flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter.4 Namely that it is a question not of imposing preconceived forms on inert matter but of intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated. Practitioners, I contend, are wanderers, wayfarers, whose skill lies in their ability to find the grain of the world’s becoming and to follow its course while bending it to their evolving purpose.5 [...] My aim is to restore things to life and, in so doing, to celebrate the creativity of what Paul Klee (1879–1940) called ‘form-giving’.6 This means putting the hylomorphic model into reverse. More specifically, it means reversing a tendency, evident in much of the literature on art and material culture, to read creativity ‘backwards’, starting from an outcome in the form of a novel object and tracing it, through a sequence of antecedent conditions, to an unprecedented idea in the mind of an agent.7

Hence, when we see the world not as a collection of dead objects that an actor puts to some use, but as a mixed world, we no longer need the polar separation between subject and object and reconciliation between thing and maker/user becomes a given. “The world we inhabit is not made up of subjects and objects, or even of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. The problem lies not so much in the sub- or the ob-, or in the dichotomy between them, as in the -ject. For the constituents of this world are not already thrown or cast before they can act or be acted upon. They are in the throwing, in the casting.”8 From this perspective – “in the throwing, in the casting” – the sieve detaches itself as an isolated object, and itself becomes the object of a worldview that reconciles the processual relationship between hand, ‘thing’, and action (sifting). In short, it becomes the very organic prostheses of the making hand. Suzanne B. Butters adds to this: From the maker’s point of view the physical act of making new things is predicated on empirical knowledge, but the very act of fabrication forces him to respond to unforeseen material anomalies, to unpredictable mental imaginings and to a continuing feedback between the two. Acquiring new knowledge of this kind is delightfully rich, even when the objects made seem modest or banal.9

These new viewpoints make it possible to think of the sieve as a kinetic and extremely dynamic pact between these parameters. We can now emancipate the sieve from its ‘objectness’ and recognize it as a permeable membrane stretched taut upon the world, the act of making, and the human body itself, advancing and activating their cohesion in a ‘winnowing’, in a ‘throwing’ and in a ‘casting’. Recall once again James Neil’s description: “Holding the sieve in a slanting position, she jerks it up and down for a length of time, blowing across the top of it all the while with great force. In a word, she turns herself into a regular winnow-

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The Sieve as an Organism

ing machine!” This literally makes the sieve a paradigm that counteracts the hylomorphic model of separation. The sieve reconciles and binds humankind and nature. In short, the sieve is at the same time the act of sifting. The sifting is at the same time the creator of the sieve. The sieve, the sifting, and the sieve creator ‘imagine’ and ‘handle’ one another in an ultimate kinetic triangle averse to binary models such as described above, and ask for new terminology to do justice to this energetic intimacy. Tim Ingold chooses to describe the relationship in terms of life itself: its inner ‘biological’ growth, where artifacts are basically organisms. As a result, Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam distinguish two forms of ‘creating’ in their volume Making and Growing: The Action of Make (production, creation, construction, preparation; conversion into or causing to become something), versus The Action of Grow (to arise or come into existence, to manifest vigorous life, to flourish, to increase gradually in size by natural development, to increase in quantity or degree, to advance towards maturity).10 Makers know better, however. They know that the simple answer, designed perhaps to fend off your unwanted attentions as a meddling onlooker, leaves almost everything about their craft unsaid, and implies a certainty about ends and means that, in practice, is largely an illusion. Making things, for them, often feels like telling stories, and as with all stories, though you may pick up the thread and eventually cast it off, the thread itself has no discernible beginning or end.11

Following the analogy of a revaluation of the study of materiality as ‘making’, James ­Elkins has a recommendation for the Art Sciences. It takes time to experience and articulate the materiality of artworks, but academic discourse prefers its insights to come quickly. Real materiality – paying attention to the matter and the substance experienced by artists, does not yield many ideas per page or per day. Like other disciplines, Art History and Art Theory prefer continuous streams of insights and ideas, and so they consider only general aspects of ­materiality.12

Virtually as an answer to Elkins’ critical note, Tim Ingold succeeds in opening up the history of art to the history of life, where improvisation and freedom can be integrated.13 Rather, every work encapsulates the movement that brought it forth and is in turn encapsulated in the maturation of what follows. Likewise, the life of the organism is not simply expended in the translation of an initial, genetically encoded design into a material end-product. If we ask what organisms and persons create, the answer must be that they create one another and themselves, playing their part in the never-ending and non-specific project of keeping life going.

The Sieve as an Organism

23 Sieve weaver in Kairouan, Tunisia, 1987. He is making the tiny leashes on the iron heddle rod

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The Sieve as an Organism

And ‘keeping life going’ – that’s exactly what this Tunisian sieve-weaver is doing (fig. 23). Venice Lamb describes in an objective but organic way how this man can make four objects a day, right there in the market of Kairouan.14 How he keeps the goat hides in thin strips and wets them when tightening the loom. His care is not part of the hylomorphic model. His care is part of the way his hands move, and his experience with the material. He’s almost done. He can feel how the skin web tightens up like a drum, as it dries out. And he’s already thinking about the next one.

Grid/Lozenge/Trellis

It is a mode of repletion, the content of which is the conventional nature of art itself. ROSALIND KRAUSS

Let’s continue to look at the Tunisian sieve-weaver, who has now gotten started on his next sieve-loom. To an extent unparalleled in any other cultural technique, the material infrastructure deployed in textile production [and hence sieve-making] is crucially linked to the straight line in the form of the taut thread, regular sequencing to form a surface, and lines crossing orthogonally. When textiles are produced, the grid is not imposed upon a pre-existing space or material surface but is instead the element that actually generates the material surface.1

What Sebastian Egenhofer describes here is the material and metaphorical spectrum of the grid, lozenge, and trellis, essentially related to the weaving technique and sieve hermeneutics. In this chapter, I want to quickly discuss this typical crisscrossed structure as a traditionally magically charged diagram.2 Because indeed: what matters here is a form, that is material, that is an enveloping technique, that is an endless net, that is a web, that is a membrane. Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) focuses on the archetypical pattern of the lozenge in his The Sense of Order.3 He includes it in his chapter on harmony as a basic pattern that can have endless variations and can achieve very complex opaque structures by being ornamentally ‘filled’ in, or ‘wrapped’ in floral motifs. Moreover, Gombrich sees the lozenge pattern (and by extension, every schematic ornament) in its basic mathematical form as a direct offshoot of the stem/stalk principle, therefore of nature itself. According to the author, element and structure share a truncus communis. Indeed, from the point of view of visual anthropology, the lozenge is one of the oldest ideograms in the world. The longue durée of the net symbol stretches from recurring patterns on objects from the Magdalenian period (Dordogne, 10,000 BC) up until the patterns of embroidery and sewing with its cross-stitching. It is also a core motif in Berber weaving (fig. 24). The lozenge pattern is in fact the endless repetition of the diamond, and shares the notion of ‘becoming’ with this vulvatic pictogram. The net and the lozenge

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Grid/lozenge/trellis

24 Knotted Berber Textile, Bouja’d (Morocco), nineteenth century. Basle, Hersberger Collection

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symbolize creation and the power of reproduction: the net motif is a ‘cloth’ that is ‘placed’ on the subject, on the body, on the textile, to articulate it as a duplicating membrane and the pattern is in se infinite; the membrane can expand and ‘grow’ endlessly… No other form can be so pregnant of continuum as the lozenge and the grid. No other formula has the unavoidable écriture of expanding in repetition giving humankind the comfort of stability and the consolation of potential future creation processes. This notion of potentiality and endless reproduction also becomes attached to the fertility cult and the countless associations of the sieve’s birth-giving amniotic agency. Like we saw earlier in Chapter 3, the net, the checkered field, is a primordial principle and diagram.4 Weaving and ceramics with a net pattern developed simultaneously in the Neolithic. Net patterns are also found on the weights of looms. The net started appearing as zigzag snake-like motifs in the Magdalenian (Dordogne, 10,000 BC) and is connected to water symbols: zigzags, parallel lines, chevrons. Many Neolithic sculptures of goddesses from the sixth and fifth millennia BC are covered with net motifs.5 As mistress of animals, the goddess Artemis was associated with nets. The net originally refers to the water of life, to the fluid that surrounds the unborn child. There seems to be a connection between the net, the (scaly) fish, the uterus, and the amniotic membrane of the uterus.6 The net, in other words, belongs to the so-called ‘genesis symbols’ (egg, vulva, uterus, fish, bladder).7 In European folk culture, the net was the symbol of the amniotic sac. “In many cultures, children ‘born with the caul’ were considered to have the ‘second sight’. In their ‘minds eye’, they could see things that other mortals could not. They could have out of body experiences. Seers and spirit healers made themselves known by wearing a net over their head.”8 The reason the lozenge pattern is charged with such energy must be explained by the fact that it is fundamentally intertwined with the ‘textile’ medium. The crossing of threads into lozenge/net patterns becomes inherent to the materiality and the symbolism of ‘cloth’ as such. A grid-like basic structure can already be detected in the first woven fabrics. Viewed in these terms, every woven fabric is a key work of digital practice. In the history of visual media, it is crucial to call into question the contrast evoked by the historical foil of a ‘digital era’ and an ‘information revolution’, with the indirect assumption that a purely analogue era existed prior to this. This is all the more relevant in that the digital principle was also used to code patterns in later chapters of the history of weaving, when punch cards were deployed, with the essential criteria for transformation into visual code already inherent in weaving’s specific interplay of technology, structure, and material.9

We can find examples of these patterns in the Old Testament. The Book of Exodus says that the Aaronic High Priest should wear fine white linen with a checkered pattern. Exodus 28:39 reads, “And thou shalt weave the coat in checker work of fine linen, and thou shalt make a mitre of fine linen, and thou shalt make a girdle, the work of the embroiderer.”

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25 Christ of the Parousia with lozenge motif on curtain behind, ninth century. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, Cod. Gr. 699, fol. 89r

Also, the different textile curtains of the Sanctuary in the tabernacle are associated with a special lozenge pattern, which was considered to be an especially refined technique, rich in the same way the lozenge pattern was later used in damask.10 The temple curtain features a lozenge membrane. By extension, the lozenge pattern is also a symbol of the Divine secret: the secret that is denoted exactly ‘because of its concealment’. The lozenge pattern is the perfect membrane of the sacral secret. Within the lozenge pattern, the ineffability is shifted to the archetype of potential, creative urge, and the universe itself. Since early Byzantine art, the iconography of the lozenge pattern has been attached to cloth, veils, clothing, and curtains (often highlighted in gold) either to depict the cosmos and firmament, or secondly as a carrier of the true form of Christ.11 Herbert Kessler collected examples from early medieval Byzantine manuscripts where goldwork textiles with a net pattern were used to show the Second Coming of Christ (fig. 25).12 In an eleventh-century codex from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the concealing temple curtain consisted of a lozenge pattern filled with lilies (fig. 26).13 Herbert Kessler defends the pattern as being a formal support of the iconography of the cosmos, the firmament, and, as a temple curtain, even an eschatological reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem and thus the return of Christ and the restoring of paradise. In some cases, the lozenge pattern is seen in connection with the brick wall, and thus with the structure of the masonry of the Heavenly Jerusalem (fig. 27).14

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26 Temple curtain with lozenge motif, miniature in Topographia Cristiana, eleventh century. Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Cod. 1186, fol. 82v

This brings me to the second important branch of the lozenge pattern as an energetically charged carrier of textile: the acheiropietos, or the face of Christ as an epiphany of God. Both the vera icon of the West as well as the prototypical Byzantine mandylion had textile as a carrier (fig. 29).15 Textile charged with a sacral veiling to show that which is invisible shifts to the bestowed face of Christ. The figure of the Son, the New Covenant, has become visible; the face now floats in front of the woven curtain that conceals the Tabernacle of the Old Covenant. There is now a ‘duality’ of cloth and face, of old and new, of invisibility and visibility, both a Janus head on the threshold of a shared ‘visible invisibility’. In Byzantine iconography, the mandylion often shows the lozenge pattern on damask, directly referencing the above-mentioned triple layer of power of the Biblical curtains on the one hand, and by extension the anthropological creation and fertility schemata (sublimated in Mary) on the other. The figurative visibility of the Son is thus literally able to attach itself in front of or on top of the cloth as an apparition as well as a definition of a new pact between the invisible God of Moses and his visualization in the Son. The face becomes a new organic manifestation of the primal secret of the Old Testament. The textile with net pattern is meant to incorporate the past, with its energy to continue the secret, but at the same time functions as the perfect ‘safety net’ for showing that-whichmust-be-shown. Indeed, the woven net pattern is the only membrane that is strong enough to show something as powerful as the face of a God in the form of His Son.16

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27 Curtains of the holy land with lozenge motif, miniature in Topographia Cristiana, eleventh century. Sinai, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Cod. 1186, fol. 79r

The ‘grid’ operates on the scopic regimes of the rhythms between the wall, window, and lattice. It is precisely these connected regimes that resonate the erotic (spiritual) gaze of the Song of Songs. Canticle 2:9–10 says: “Look, there he stands behind our wall,17 gazing in at the windows, looking through the lattice. My beloved speaks and says to me: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’.” Origen (185–254) interpreted this teichoscopic passage of the Canticum as follows: The word of God, the bridegroom, is found not in the open courtyard but covered over and hiding, as it were, behind the wall. He would enter like the lover, like an erotikos. He would first look through the window at the Bride. With a leap he reaches the window of the house, having it in mind to peep at her. This is peeping ‘in the time’ when she will unveil her face to go outside and to find him.18 The word ‘window’ originates from the Old Norse vindauga, from vindr, ‘wind’, and auga, ‘eye’; that is in fact: ‘wind eye’. The text of the Song of Songs is a bliss. One cannot speak ‘on’ such a text; one can only speak ‘in’ such a text. This we can compare with Barthes’ “paradise of words”: “we are gorged with language.”19 The verbal pleasure “chokes and reels into bliss.” This emptying of the unspoken is experienced by the Bride as an ‘ingrafting’: insero as in Rufinus’ Latin translation. It means an erotic sowing in the mind: “Thy name is as ointment emptied out.”20 The kiss by the bridegroom is a kiss of insight, a little flash that lights up in the dark, in the speech of the text. Yet, words are not stripped naked by it, words are not bare. They are visible provocations towards the invisible – the unspoken – and they do not pass away. By analogy, this going into the paradise beyond the word by using teichoscopia,

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28 John Climacus (579–606), Holy Ladder, Mandylion with lozenge motif, Constantinople, ca. 1100. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Ross. Gr. 251, fol. 12v

viewing from the walls, or this emptying one out into the pleasure of making the text, yes, these visible provocations towards the invisible and the unspoken, is indeed an energy as well as a dynamic between the world and the weaver, between the sieve and the siever. It is a world seen through the grid of organic making, as we saw in the work by Tim Ingold: “We should understand making as a modality of weaving.”21 Let us, to end this chapter, confront this medieval theology of the lozenge with a post-modern view on the lozenge. Rosalind Krauss writes the following in her iconic article “Grids”:22 Now it is in this ambivalence about the import of the grid, an indecision about its connection to matter on the one hand or spirit on the other, that its earliest employers can be seen to be participating in a drama that extended well beyond the domain of art. That drama, which took many forms, was staged in many places. […] Therefore, although the grid is certainly not a story, it ‘is’ a structure, and one, moreover, that allows a contradiction between the values of science and those of spiritualism to maintain themselves within the consciousness of modernism, or rather its unconscious as something repressed. In order to continue its analysis – to assess the very success of the grid’s capacities to repress.23 […] In this matrix ambi- or multivalence, the grid helps us to see, to focus on. Regarding the lozenge in particular she uses the following words.24 […] Diamond shaped as if we were looking at a landscape through a window, the frame of the window arbitrarily truncating our view but never shaking our certainty that the landscape continues beyond the limits of what we can, at that moment, see.25

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In short, where we learned that Tim Ingold emphasized form-making and agency with no binary structure, Rosalind Krauss also emphasizes the drama of dualism between spirit and matter. Applying the paradigm of grid/lozenge to the sieve unlocks it as a hermeneutic tool for a scopic regime that needs the structural ‘support’ to see beyond: “the frame of the window arbitrarily truncating our view.” The sieve is the unifying oculus between bride and bridegroom. We can look through its nets. The sieve retains the power to un-limit form, to un-compromise structure, and is therefore a Kulturtechnikobjekt that essentially unlocks. This unlocking lies in the capacity to unlimit form, to challenge the scopic regime as a ‘beyond’ (as “looking through the lattice”), to continually and powerfully contest the deeply entrenched dualisms of Western thought, and finally to reflect on the relationship between humanity and environment through the permeable membrane as a fundamental mediator of the sensorium – the moi-peau – and framing spaces as (Un)heimlichkeit. The trellis forms the inner structure that prevents the world from collapsing (the wall) and keeps the viewer’s eyes in place (the window). It gives the eye the possibility to ‘hook’ into the love space (lattice). In short, it prevents him from what William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) predicted in The Second Coming: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”26

Moi-peau

The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body-sieve. GILLES DELEUZE

In this chapter, I discuss the sieve as a metaphor for the permeated separation between our body and the world: most importantly the skin membrane or the moi-peau. The moipeau or skin-ego was conceived by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and has been developed further by Didier Anzieu (1923–1999), Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), and Paul Vanden­ broeck. Freud compared the skin-ego to a “mystic writing pad.”1 He asserts in The Ego and the Id that: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”2 The child conceives and describes its impressions of the world through its hide barrier.3 But the skin is a sieve, it can open and contains pores that let through fluid. This makes the skin terrifying: its protection and enclosing is not complete. The skin constantly threatens to ‘leak’.4 This sifting function of the skin returns in Freud’s superego concept. Here the sieving through the skin is described as a filter for acceptable versus forbidden wishes. Didier Anzieu’s concept of the skin-ego is “the answer to questions he regards as crucial to contemporary psychoanalysis: questions of topography which were left incomplete by Freud; the analysis of fantasies of the container as of the contained; issues of touch between mothers and babies; extending the concept of prohibitions within an Oedipal framework to those derived from a prohibition on touching; and questions pertaining to the representation of the body and to its psychoanalytic setting.”5 “He points out that a triple derivation is at play between the ego and the skin: metaphoric (the ego is a metaphor for the skin), metonymic (the ego and the skin contain each other mutually, both as a whole and as a part), and elliptic (the link between the ego and the skin represents an ellipsis, in other words, a bifocal figure incorporating mother and child).”6 Anzieu writes: “The skin ego is the original parchment which preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over, first outlines of an ‘original’ pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin.”7 In his earliest work he sets out four functions of the skin ego:8 as a containing, unifying envelope for the self (1), as a protective barrier for the psyche (2), as a filter of exchanges and surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible (3), and as a mirror of reality (4).

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Anzieu’s third moi-peau is the sieve skin as a filter that is also a medium. The permeability of the psyche is a precondition of the sieve skin’s capacity to be ‘inscribed’ with memories. The sieve skin leaks out to the world and becomes an inscribed membrane and a screen upon that world. Anzieu goes on to define subcategories of the sieve skin. The third moi-peau is also a fertile field: it produces hair, fur, and down, and it waters the field with sweat, pheromones, fluids. In just the same way the sieve is made in function of dry and wet, from sifting grains to sieving dairy products, and so the sieve skin is, as it were, also an image of fertile land.9 We also recognized this connotation in Genesis 15:35: “It was at the time of year when the ground is full of holes and riddled like a sieve (kevarah).” In short, the skin-ego or moi-peau filters the person towards the world: from their thoughts to their body in the world and their physicality towards other bodies. Gilles Deleuze sees the moi-peau as something quite radical: from the schizophrenic body. “The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. […] Bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body-sieve. […] Other bodies always penetrate our body and coexist with its parts.”10 The moi-peau is also the percolating canvas of artistic expression: from fears to the buffer of the world, from a cultural subconscious to new Pathosformeln. The creative moipeau faces the world with a selective permeability: from dripping softly to violently pouring, from a subtle secretion to a brutal drop downwards, in short, like in the etymological traces we saw earlier in sehj, sei sif-/sib and sē(i)-, sei-, meaning to drip, and the Sumeric sig meaning rain, pouring oneself out. Paul Vandenbroeck developed a theory around the skin-ego as an artistic dripping or a creative pouring. He calls this the ‘psycho-energetics’ of artistic expression.11 The skinego first constitutes corporeal art and textiles, the second performative expression and ritual intervention, and finally the aesthetics whereby the body constitutes the pulsating underlayer (as a formal unconsciousness).12 Corporeal art and textiles relate to duplication: body and textile are parallels; the so-called skin-ego acts as a buffer, a membrane that functions in two directions. We recognize it in lacework, meshwork, weaving (fig. 29). The second skin-ego concerns the ‘transposed’ body: the energy of the body shifts to elsewhere, to a place where it can flourish unrestrictedly, as in dance, but also in a plastic sanctuary, such as the garden. The transposed body expresses itself not so much allegorically as allodeictically: indicating in a different way, unconventional insofar as its signifiers and symbols are concerned. In the third case, the expression ‘shifts’ from the energetic body to fields where the ties with the body are no longer articulated literally.13 These fields relate to para-sacral, abstract devotional, and non-figurative forms of expression. Part of this pulsating substrate are the textile wrappings, but also the whirling and hopping dance, as we could consider it strongly connected with the sieve. The latter skin-ego zone is psychosomatic, intuitive, perhaps even therapeutic, and, according to Vandenbroeck, capable of restoring a pre-aesthetic and pre-conscious manifestation of the body-in-the-world.14 It occurs in a dripping humus: “The deeper one plunges into the seething cauldron of processing the psycho-corporeal experience of

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29 Old lace, produced in Mechelen

existence and its paradoxes, the further one departs from its aesthetic elaboration and the closer one gets to its source.”15 This source is located between anxiety and exuberance, between desperation and comfort, and between oppression and expansive energy.16 This Zwischenraum between fear and joy brings us back to Aby Warburg’s Bildraum. Although he would never use the term, his work resonates with a cultural moi-peau: the membrane between the plastic subconscious of humans that filters and transports this to the now and where it materializes within the polar space between Dionysus and Apollo, between the exalting Pathosformel and the restrained artistic emotion. It’s a space that Warburg calls the Zwischenraum, and which we can see vibrating through the diaphanous membrane, the net of Erinnerungsspuren. What surrounds us and is artistically thrust up from the humus is that which the ego or culture has granted permeability. Depending on the individual and historic contemporary filters, what passes through is always relative and cyclical. And that is exactly what the Mnemosyne project is all about. Wolfgang Kemp associates Warburg’s paradigmatic sovereignty with his splitting of the concept of memory: mnemosyne versus sophrosyne.17 In an analogous way, A ­ ristotle put mneme/memoria opposite to anamnesis/reminiscentia: the ability to remember by chance something previously experienced, allowing it to resurface in the soul, versus the power to concentrate fully on something, recapturing from memory that which was forgotten. In fact, it is also about Gedächtnis versus Erinnerung. Or Marcel Proust’s (1871– 1922) mémoire involontaire versus mémoire volontaire. Or Roland Barthes’s (1915–1980) punctum versus studium. Punctum is the detail that resonates out of historical material by surprise. Studium is the historical material that, in accordance with knowledge, leads to our own purposes.

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According to Aby Warburg, memory must undergo a test in order to become mnemosyne, and thus earn the role of punctum or mémoire involontaire.18 “Each recollection must

be stored in the collective memory, where it is rooted in the primal experiences of sorrow, ecstasy, and passion that have left their indestructible ‘engrammes’ on the psyche of humankind.”19 When a memory arises from these depths, it must work in a ‘polarizing’ way, as ‘explosive’ as a formula of liberation and activation. Only then is the memory granted passage and can it drip through the cultural membrane of the skin-ego. In short, these culturally sifted ‘recollections’ are always profound: terrifying or emancipating. The dripping of the memory from the depths – called the humus of the psycho-energetics earlier – possesses the wondrous beauty of the Augenblick. It is the oculus to the chthonic gate that connects past and present, that connects humankind with that which was ‘forgotten’. These moments of (psychic) access can be frightening, because their powers of anamnesis are overwhelming. The chthonic paradigm allows us to imagine the god of the right moment or Occasion who comes by – Kairos – through memory and regression. Finding opportunity, in other words, is a short-lived flash of an opening to the suppressed self.20 These ‘chthonic’ hermeneutics of artistic expression (Trauerarbeit) between oppression and expansive energy come close to what Sofie van Loo wrote in her book Gorge(l): The term ‘insight’ is actually misleading: an insight is rather a sort of seeing-in-between, a seeing by feeling. The in-sight occurs in the margin of the visual field. An insight does not come naked. It presupposes a skin, multi-layeredness, a covering. One cannot point to it directly in the work of art, nor can one focus on it. Something shows itself, becomes visible, withdraws, but between these two or more realms a link has been made possible. This borderlinking of the insight requiring (escape) potential of the artwork lends it a peculiar intensity. Precisely the encounter with the intensity created may be experienced as a hovering between oppression and relief.21

I see this intermediate space as highly kinetic, equipped with an energy comparable to the ever-expanding circles on the surface of the water when a stone has been thrown in.22 The sieve spans in its generosity of limitation, in the healing comfort of selective memory, a masterful and cherishing membrane over the plastic history of mankind. This sieve resonates what the beating heart of humans are capable of, when they first used red pigment to create contours of their hands on the rock wall and said: here I am and here you are, the first image (fig. 30).

Moi-peau

30 Handprints, Magdalenian period (12000–9500 BCE). Dordogne, Chauvet Cave

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There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. T. S. ELIOT

As we have seen, the sieve belongs to the intimate sphere of the woman. The sieve should not go outside; the sieve is the crib; the sieve is the bosom of the earth; the sieve is the amniotic membrane – seeping net – and even the placenta within the womb. In this connection Ernst Fischer introduces another paradigm for the sieve, the ‘uncanny space’.1 He uses the moi-peau in terms of the woman’s position in domestic space. “Architecture introduces a necessary third term, namely ‘house’ in addition to ‘space’ and ‘home’. […] The house is a fiction made concrete, a perspectival grid that shapes and marks the bodies in houses according to the very ideology of visibility in the name of which it is itself constructed.”2 Sebastian Egenhofer formulates the domestic space in terms of the grid: When the grid explicitly bursts out of the bounds of the surface that underpins it or negates the materiality of this support through its strict geometry, it provides motivation for a reading that transcends the immanence of the material world – that domestic universe divided by walls and wall hangings and shot through with social borderlines.3 The agency of the grid is dividing a space or a surface into regular repeating units that serve as modules to measure an area and is indubitably such an elementary form of human orientation in the world that it does not have a clearly defined origin in any particular cultural technique.4

“Unfolded into three dimensions and repeated in vertical and horizontal directions, the grid does more than define the space of architecture – it turns into architecture.”5 The trellis indeed permits a visual contact of external and internal elements. It allows one to observe both the inside and the outside of a construction. The semi-transparency of the plans permits a simultaneous reading of imbricated volumes.6

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The lozenge, or ‘trellis’ defines the space and holds it together, as Bernhard Siegert describes in his important book Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. It refers fundamentally to the principle of τάξις (táksis: Greek for order, position, rank) that uses the grid pattern as denotation of (empty) space to be ‘filled’ or ‘fixated’.7 Indeed, the grid is a technique or visual format for the paradoxical notion of ‘presence-absence-space’.8 “Between the sixteenth and eighteenth century, grid-shaped control becomes the universal practice that constitutes the basis of modern disciplinary societies.”9 “In other words, it presupposes the ability to write absence, that is, to deal equally efficiently with both occupied and empty spaces. This concept of place is thus inextricably tied to the notion of order. In return, it is impossible to conceive of this modern concept of order without a new understanding of place.”10 This brings us to the sieve as a ‘spatial-marking’ grid and moi-peau in the work of Ernst Fischer, Writing Home. After all, the meaning of the sieve, thickened with grid and moipeau, possesses the capacity to be linked to the intimacy and spatial demarcation in the house/household or the notions of Heimlichkeit and secrecy. It is interesting to see that precisely the notion of Heimlichkeit/secrecy derives from secretum, which in turn is derived from segregation, separation. It seems pertinent in this connection to recall the Latin definition of Heimlichkeit/ secrecy as an act of separation, and to note that according to Arnaud Levy, the word originates with the sifting of grain with the purpose to separate the edible from the non-edible, the good from the bad.11 The separation is effected by a hole, an orifice, whose function is to allow something to pass or not pass, depending on the relation of the objects shape and size to the shape and size of the hole. Hence, the sifting process allegedly constitutes a metaphorical representation of the anal function. [...] The production of Heimlichkeit in the sieve of the house is achieved through a process of excretion: the separation of the homely from the abject.12

The voiding function of architecture as ‘home’ arises with Leon Battista Alberti, quoted earlier with reference to the metaphor of chastity.13 “Entering the house as spouse is immobilized and secreted through confinement in a hierarchically arranged sequence of private spheres. Within this spatial order, the woman is further sub-divided and ultimately effaced as sexual, desiring subject by being put in her proper place among her husband’s possessions. She is declared pleasing for knowing her limits defined by: ‘... surveillance over a particular space, whether it be the dinner table, the threshold, the church, the fingertips, the bath, the face, the street’.”14 This reminds me of Origen’s comments on the earlier discussed passage in the Song of Songs: “Behold, he stood behind our wall, leaning against the windows, looking through the nets.” In his commentary, Origen struggles with the spatial settings of the song. It’s true that inside and outside are confusingly muddled, such as noted here, ‘behind the wall’ and ‘through the nets’.15 The exegete explains this with the classical gender con-

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trast. Because the groom, as a man, is not always home, whereas the bride is always at home waiting for him, the groom sometimes speaks as though he is inside the house, and sometimes as if he is outside of the house. The verse “looking through the lattice” is in this sense a ‘scopic mediator’: a grid between male and female framing, a border that is only crossed visually, through a loving gaze, in this case.16 The grid structure of the lattice adds to the ambiguity of the privacy and permeability, of keeping out and opening up. Fischer radicalizes these positions. According to Fischer’s view, womanhood means vanishing. The female dissolves into intimate space. Her clothing, her moi-peau, can no longer be distinguished from the interior wall coverings onto which the man projects himself.17 “The woman is thus paradoxically not only locked up in the architectural grid, and abjected through the holes of the sieve, she becomes those very holes. In the domestication of space as place, its unbroken expanse is punctuated by row upon row of orifices. The art of husbandry in this sense lies in the cultivation of, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term, ‘a field of anuses’.”18 Besides the permeable screen, the woman also becomes the dissolving screen. She evaporates into the walls of the house and becomes a writeable, definable canvas for male desires and anxieties. In his Della famiglia, Leon Battista Alberti writes that it strikes him as “somewhat demeaning to me to remain shut up in the house among women when I have manly things to do among men,” in contrast to “those idle creatures who stay all day among the little females.”19 Staying indoors apparently has an ‘unmanning’ effect. “The confinement of the interior space is transferred in an optical shrinking process onto the occupant, turning him into a tiny inside-out projection of himself: ‘a little female’ occupied with ‘trifles’. The immobilized phallus shrinks and shrivels and wastes away through the sieve’s hole, to become a hole itself.”20 In connection to that, I’d like to refer to Mona Hatoum’s (Beirut, 1952) sculpture Grater Divide from 2002 (fig. 31).21 The installation consists of a giant kitchen grater.22 Hatoum often uses the grid or geometric forms to reference systems of control within society. Also, in this case, she uses a household object that is scaled to make it familiar but uncanny.23 At the same time, this grater/grid is shaped like a room divider, a foldable paravent, used to create private spaces within a room. The above-mentioned Heimlichkeit, or the space of the secrecy, is literally enlarged. Because of the absurd scale of the grater, Grater Divide posits the paradigm of limitation as a threat (amplified by the wordplay between grater and greater). This architectural grid, with its obscenely large openings, derived from commonplace kitchenware, confronts us with pain and destruction in an audacious manner. The normally so refined and distinguished room divider, part of the intimate world of the woman and her body, is now a weapon from the depths of the kitchen cabinets. The erotic ‘performative’ paravent that used to invite people to sneak a peek becomes a perversely ‘perforated’ paravent. The world of food preparation – also classically seen as women’s domain – is now part of the intimate space of the bedroom, and that clash, this ‘blowing up’ does away with the “separation of the homely from the abject:” Heimlichkeit becomes Unheimlichkeit. The holes are threatening; they’re not soft eyes, but the

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31 Mona Hatoum (°1952), Grater Divide, 2002. Patinated mild steel, 203.2 × 193 × 83.8 cm, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 2002.320

mal occhi that stare at us from the lands of Sodom and Gomorrah. “A riddle, a riddle, as I

suppose/ A hundred eyes and never a nose!” Mother Goose rhymes. In Fischer’s approach we learned to see the sieve as a spatial buffer, a membrane into which female intimacy can empty itself (emission), but into which it can also disappear, as into the hollows of tectonics itself. In Hatoum’s interpretation, these hollows of tectonics became abject, aggressive, wounds even, as well as an absurd blurring between kitchen and the privacy of the private room, two feminine spaces par excellence. I will further expand on this ‘blurring’ and Fischer’s idea of blending and emission based on Echo’s fate, or the final convulsion of complete camouflage as the only possible antidote to the masculine Narcissistic mirror (fig. 32). This detour also discusses her relevance from the point of view of Anzieu’s third and fourth moi-peau: as a filter of exchanges and surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible on the one side, and as a mirror of reality on the other side. The third and fourth skin-egos bring me to the paradigmatic tension between the opaque image, and the mirrored image. In other studies, I have discussed Echo as a visual model that rehabilitates fusion, camouflage, and female secretion, in short, as a rehabilitation of the third moi-peau against the fourth moi-peau of Narcissus’ mirror.24 Echo’s drama asks us to consider the failure of imagery as a mirror. Echo’s speech copies, while her body slowly disappears. Nevertheless – and possibly because of that – she retains the power of her voice. Echo calls. She calls for an alternative to the mirror paradigm. Echo’s love and sacrifice, that seemingly

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32 Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Echo and Narcissus, 1628. Oil on canvas, 74 × 100 cm, Paris, Musée de Louvre

take place beyond the spectrum of visibility, carefully detach imagery from ocularcentrism. Echo emancipates Narcissus with her own paradoxical power: dissolution, camouflage, (con)fusion. Echo’s selfless disappearing act, as opposed to a dominant and ego-driven scopic regime, works as a sieve too: as ‘textilization’, dissolution and the voiding act as the ultimate psycho-energetic reaction of the skin-ego mentioned above: allodeictically, indicating in a different way, unconventional insofar as its signifiers and symbols are concerned. Echo’s place in the void tips into the ambivalence of the permeability of the membrane that she ultimately became. The nymph becomes one with the moi-peau of the sieve sheet: the paper-thin membrane that is placed over the visibility of the world – her bones become rocks – and behind which she disappears in the opaqueness of the dissolution. We can only see Echo paradoxically, which is to say that which was not left of her after Narcissus’ mirror disaster: she became one with the good that fell on the Earth. Mal ­dimora in sella. What ‘remains’ of her is pulverization, residue. And what also remains is the last sense that tragically was granted to her: her voice rests in the rustling of the sieve. Having made this detour, I would like to return to the portraits of Elizabeth. In it, the sieve was defined as a filter between the I-as-woman and the I-as-queen. The ‘sieve’s penetrability’ (although reference is made to the impermeability of Tuccia’s sieve) enables her to flow back and forth between both bodies.25 Elizabeth is, after all, queen and not simply woman, besides the space of ‘secrecy’ she also inhabits masculine public

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space. As a consequence she is impenetrable at home, and penetrating outside. She is both camouflage and performance, both Echo and Narcissus. She is Anzieu’s third skin (surface) and Anzieu’s fourth skin (mirror). It is precisely this bipolarity that can be read synecdochally in the portraits’ combination of the globe and the sieve. The globe is iconographically masculine and conventional; the sieve is iconographically femininely intimate and controversial. The globe is a fixed and static object, so rather passive and unambiguous, while the sieve is a dynamic, active (ob)-ject (after Ingold), and so elusive and paradoxical. Where the globe is stable, the sieve remains controversial or “cheerfully schizophrenic”26 in the way in which it constantly questions fixed values and paradigms. The sieve is in fact ungraspable: slipping through the gaps in the mesh. The globe is a three-dimensional and reflective object, while the sieve is flat and allows the gaze to pass through. The globe triggers our sense of sight as it is mirroring and reflective, while the sieve appeals to touch as it has the ergonomic rims: the former a ‘higher’ masculine sense, the latter a ‘lower’ feminine sense.27 And finally. The globe is detached from the body as the separated, uncoupled narcissistic body. The sieve, however, is attached to the moi-peau as an intimate accessory, as prosthesis, as Stella North suggests in her ‘clothing-ego’:28 The relation of the clothing-ego to the skin ego is, in this instance, one of prosthesis; the clothing-ego can stand in for, reinforce; or even replace the skin ego. [...] Clothing goes on facing and interfacing skin, and vice versa. They are perpetually implying (sic): folding, unfolding and refolding into each other.29

For Anzieu, the prohibition on touching both represents and affects the supersession of the sensory world by the cerebral. It serves an important developmental, and thus social, function: “the prohibition on touch contributes to the differentiation of the orders of reality which remain confused in primary tactile experience. And thus inaugurates the self as separate from its environment. What is prohibited then is the touch between the mental and the corporeal realities confused in primary tactile experience.”30 In the portraits, Elizabeth is suspended between globe and sieve: between mirror-projection as queen and canvas-injection as woman. I repeat the sentence: she evaporates into the walls of the house and becomes a writeable, definable canvas for male desires and anxieties. In that respect, I recognize an analogy between the sieve portraits and the portraits of Lizica Codreano (1901–1993) wearing the Pierrot-Eclair costume designed by Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) on the set of René Le Somptier’s (1884–1950) film Le P’tit Parigot (1926) (fig. 33).31 The Ukrainian-French artist Sonia Delaunay enjoyed working with the fashion industry, designing her own jewelry and textile patterns. Together with her husband, Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), she developed simultanism to suggest movements and vibrations through colors, but also the illusion of disappearing, of a ‘grisaille-ing’ and even of dissolution. In Delaunay’s theatrical scenes, simultanism tel quel has to do with the simultaneous perception of clothing, body, and textile backgrounds.

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33 Lizica Codreano (1901–1993) wearing the Pierrot-Eclair costume designed by Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), on the set of René Le Somptier’s (1884–1950) film Le P’tit Parigot, 1926

This brings me to the last facet of the Elizabeth Sieve portraits. They stand out because of their excessive use of ornaments and parerga.32 The parergon33 is a stylistic ‘accessory’ in the form of page-covering excess, the a-figurative and in general everything that sometimes unfairly was put down as simply ‘decorative’ but which is presently gaining theoretical interest.34 The “amplification by means of ornament,”35 this horror vacui of pictorial opaqueness, this bulwark of detail and refinement that at the same time is lacking in depth and makes the portrait flat, also functions as a form of camouflage or ‘membrane-covering’ of the space. In this context, Tim Ingold uses the term ‘dissolution of surface’.36 Horror vacui allows the surface to disappear: we see not so much the ornament as whatever it is that the ornament seals, conceals, covers, opens and shuts. The mesh, the labyrinth and the knot all arise at the threshold where the maelstrom and the magical abyss beckon, where horror vacui arises to take unawares and to shelter: at the same time both absorbent (implosive) and restrictive (sticky, captive). We saw this ambivalence earlier in the analyses of Fischer’s uncanny space and (Un)heimlichkeit, but also before that, in the textile-based ‘webbing’ of apotropaic objects. Elizabeth’s portraits also show this ‘simultaneous movement’ behind the surface. The queen is being personalized and abstracted at the same time.37 In his The Sense of Order, more exactly in the chapter “Modifying the body,” Ernst Gombrich also dedicates a passage to this paradox.

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There is no field in which such excesses of ‘brinkmanship’ are more conspicuous than in that of fashion. […] Perhaps no one went further in this use of costume than Queen Elizabeth I of England, particularly later in life when she may have felt that her ageing features stood in need of such enhancement through a surrounding ‘field of force’. We must isolate her face to discover the human being behind the make-up mask encircled by an awe-inspiring halo composed of spreading circles moving outwards till they reach the final fringe of the lacework. But much as she may have needed the support of artifice as a woman in a world of men, even her power would not have sufficed to create it out of nothing. She drew on the trend of fashion, which her dressmakers could modify but not ignore.38

Elizabeth I is being both made present (skin-ego) and filtered away behind the decorative patterns of her clothing (clothing-ego). She is both Narcissus and Echo. In this paradox of appearing and disappearing, there is a necessary threshold, the liminal space to be able to actually ‘simultaneously’ experience the ‘double self’. The visual fusion that occurs causes a ‘surfacing of the self’, a ‘dissolution of surface’, a ‘textilization’ of the self. “The decorative becomes the corporeal and the incorporeal doubly applied.”39 Since from myself, my other self I turn’d.

Perhaps this is the fifth moi-peau: the quintessence indeed.

Galloping!

The sieve is an iconogenetic principle. It is charged with an energy that allows it to bring forth the image. As amnion, the sieve is not just a straightforward symbol of what the uterus can do: give birth. It’s also the membrane that the image carries – the mandylion – in its organic structure of wovenness, of grid and lozenge. In the moment that the invisible God has felt the tipping point to descend into the world of visibility – the moment of incarnation – this God generates the membrane. This enigma of visibility that frees itself from the black seclusion of the invisible needs the amniotic woven structure. It is the vital membrane between visible and invisible that immediately expands into the moi-peau of the skin and mirror: of representation tout court. From the sixth century onwards, the Syrian Legend of Abgar was spread, recounting how the king of Edessa was, in a similar fashion, cured of leprosy thanks to a cloth bearing the imprint of Christ’s features: the mandylion (fig. 34).1 These tributaries feed into the Roman Legend of Saint Veronica, and in the twelfth century the first Western testimonies of a sudarium occur, later also the first true images.2 In the legend, the artist, blinded by the light, could not paint a portrait of Christ for King Abgar. Miraculously, shadows and, later, colors appeared on/in the canvas: the first image is born. It floats between materiality and texture. It floats because it is located neither in front of nor behind the grid, constantly resonating, pulsing, in process, intangible. The membrane of the true image is loosely woven. It’s see-through. It filters the light that comes from God’s streaming countenance when he decided to effuse himself into tangible material.3 It means the light can be carried in the grid, where it is partially gulped up. And later, when Veronica came and the mandylion became the sudarium, and she in turn received this image on a surface of white textile, the light wasn’t enough any more, so the image flowed further in blood, tears, and sweat (fig. 35).4 And the image became a leaking sieve left behind on a woman who knows what it is like to give birth, and thus knew to embrace this first image in the permeation of her own sex. And when the flesh burst open and the blood spurted out and flowed over the world like a sig, like the rain of Sumer, like un sang d’images,5 the sieve spread over the universe and said: Un jour le Ciel Bleu est tombé sur la terre / et de sa Blessure le sang a jailli / c’était du Rouge éclatant brillant et pétillant (fig. 36).6 Fear not, said the angel. However, it was not the fear of his coming that overwhelmed Mary, but the stupefactio of the moment: the cosmic shift, the shadow of the firmament

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34 Mandylion, fourteenth century. Genoa, Armenian Church of Saint Bartholomew

that descended upon her and that also reached her through her ear and nestled inside her, smaller than ever, like a piece of wool that would thread the world. Yes, a world, as one would like, that turned digital the moment an invisible God decided to show themselves as a stain on the membrane.7   *** The sieve is galloping. The membrane vibrates to the rhythm of a horse skin. The sieve roars. Someone pushed and pulled. Here, the first image was born; it fell onto the skin and did not want to part from us. This child is not to blame for anything.8 “What counts, faced with an image, is not ‘what we are talking about’. What counts is the dance itself – of my gaze and my sentences – with the image. It is a question of rhythm. Like a galloping horse uses stretches of ground; it is not the ground, it is the gallop that counts.”9 Budapest September 2017

Galloping!

35 Saint Veronica from Cloister Marienbaum, 1501. Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Theol. Lat. Quart. 19, fol. 178v

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36 Sam Francis (1923–1994), Red Over Blue, 1952. Watercolor, 31 × 24 cm, Bern, Sammlung E. W.K.

Bilderatlas By Edita Dermontaité

Der Wunsch, Unsichtbares sichtbar zu machen, ist der Kunst von Anbeginn an zu eigen. Bildende Künstler verleihen ihren Ideen und Vorstellungen eine materiale Gestalt, indem sie unsichtbare Prozesse oder Empfindungen in die Antlitze ihrer bildlichen Stellvertreter einschreiben. ULRIKE GEHRING

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Digital Sieves Epilogue by Ellen Harlizius-Klück

Die Primzahl selbst ist völlig nutzlos. Primzahlen sucht man aus demselben Grund, aus dem man auf Achttausender steigt: Sie sind nun mal da, und es macht Spaß. GÜNTER ZIEGLER

The sieve is an instrument of order. In a single act of sifting it separates wanted from unwanted material.1 Accordingly it is a binary instrument and lends its name to an increasing number of algorithms that split digital data into desired and undesired.2 Spam filters and other digital sieves sort out information according to patterns and rules in order to predict a desired outcome.3 In the digital humanities such instruments are important for information processing. For example, on archaeological sites the new algorithmic sieves meet the old material ones. Digital sifting of fresco fragments increases the efficiency of matching them and can be done by people unskilled in archaeology thus lowering costs for research projects.4 Still, the material sifting for finding the fresco pieces in the first place is done by skilled human hands. Digital sieves are able to sort out the skilled from the unskilled because they rely on mathematical algorithms implemented in the options and choices of a database and the calculating routines of a computer. While fresco fragments are matched by humans through visual recognition and comparison, digital matching is a question of measures and numbers. Kockelman compares such algorithms with gatekeepers that accept certain features and reject others.5 But on the very basic level, algorithms do not decide by looking at the features of an object; they are not concerned with meaning. Sieve theory is a mathematical discipline that became important in recent years.6 The Wikipedia article on sieve theory presents a collection of such algorithms named after their inventors: the sieve of Sundaram, the sieve of Atkin, the Legendre sieve, the Brun sieve, the Turán sieve, the Selberg sieve.7 Ancestor of all these is the sieve of Eratosthenes, a simple method to determine prime numbers up to a given integer.8

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The Sieve of Eratosthenes How does the sieve of Eratosthenes work? Today we arrange numbers on a line from negative to positive infinity. But the sieve only works for positive integers. If such a number has only two divisors, 1 and itself, it is called ‘prime’. Thus the number 1 is not prime by definition as it has only one divisor. For applying the sieve of Eratosthenes, we write the positive integers down up to a certain number (let us say 24). According to the usual description, the method of Eratosthenes now crosses out all multiples of 2, that are bigger than 2. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24…

In the next round we cross out all multiples of 3 that are bigger than 3. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24…

Then cross out all multiples of the next number that is not crossed out… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24…

… and repeat this operation until no number is left. You might have realized that there is already nothing left to cross out after we deleted the multiples of 3, because our line of numbers is quite short and most multiples are already deleted. The remaining numbers are the prime numbers up to 24 namely: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, and 23. In this way the sieve of Eratosthenes is described in most lexica.9 It is a description and number representation that fits to modern mathematics and can demonstrate that the series of prime numbers is arbitrary and bears no order. The number line progresses one by one and makes no other distinction between numbers than their position.

What do you need primes for? Prime numbers cannot be generated from other numbers by multiplication. They were not of much practical interest until recently when they, just because of their non-generativity, became a core subject of cryptography. It is therefore still a mystery, why the Greeks were so interested in factorization of numbers and the theory of primes. There is one very ancient craft of patterning where primes are of importance, or better: preventing them. In weaving, prime amounts of warp threads would allow no full pattern repeat of any pattern in the fabric to be woven. The whole system of number classification described by Nicomachus and especially the fundamental distinction of

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odd and even numbers is what weavers constantly work with when structuring and designing their fabric. This distinction of odd and even numbers is the foundation of the number classification in dyadic arithmetic, a number theory that looks out for cognates more than for calculations. The class of even numbers is divided into even-times-even, odd-times-even, and even-times-odd ones. The existence of the last two classes that, from a point of view of modern mathematics, are identical, can demonstrate that there has been a sense for symmetry and meaning that is not conveyed by numbers today. To the Greeks, numbers demonstrate generative principles of the cosmos. This is the reason why the prime numbers are called prime in the first place: from Latin: primus or Greek protos, both denoting the first. Primes are not a result of combinations of other numbers. Therefore they are often called the atoms of numbers, an idea that we already find in the work of ­Nicomachus: To be sure, when they are combined with themselves, other numbers might be produced, originating from them as from a fountain or root, wherefore they are called ‘prime’, because they exist beforehand as the beginnings of the others. For every origin is elementary and incomposite, into which everything is resolved and out of which everything is made, but the origin itself cannot be resolved into anything or constituted out of anything.10

It has been stated that the sieve of Eratosthenes is not a very elegant method. Waldal remarks the limited interest if applied to a progressing line of natural numbers. When the primes are collected as the smallest of the remaining numbers of each round of sifting, all composite numbers (all multiples) are sifted out and lumped together extirpating any information on the original relationship (which are multiples of three, which of five etc.).11 Also, the only source for the algorithm, the Introduction to Arithmetic written by Nicomachus of Gerasa probably in the first century AD, has been accused of being “unbearable in length and shallowness.”12 Likewise the denomination as ‘sieve’, Greek kóskinon, has been challenged and it is not clear if this name indeed denotes the regular grid that we associate with this device today. Kóskinon is not a very common word in ancient Greek, so there are hardly any sources to compare and get more information on the way a kóskinon sifts.13 As a mathematical method or algorithm on numbers, the sieve of Eratosthenes has no iconological value. Asking for the factors of numbers has no meaning beyond calculation. This is the reason for the critique that we meet when modern mathematicians refer to ancient mathematicians like Nicomachus. That numbers have been of cosmological importance for the Greeks and especially for the Pythagoreans appears as a mystical approach to numbers that is now obsolete. This faith in having reached a level of objectivity today that mathematics deserves is the reason why the demonstration of the method of Eratosthenes as documented

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in Nicomachus is hardly ever presented as it appears in the source. In fact, the method is only applied to odd numbers beginning with 3 and it does not cross out multiples of 3, but every number that has a distance of three steps from 3. The idea is more to apply a rhythmical pattern, than to execute calculations. And this repeated application of patterns generated by a different length of steps is what resembles a sieve mechanism.

Primes and Patterns Actually the method of Eratosthenes applies a series of sieves and works in the following way. Let us say we are looking for the primes up to 60. We write down all numbers from 2 to 60 and put the 1 away (which is not prime per definition). Now we need to sift out all multiples of 2 as not prime and put the 2 as first prime number on a separate heap (in order so make the order of the sieve visible, the actual sifting structure in the tables below is marked grey and the numbers that are sifted out remain stroked through).  1 

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Waldal takes advantage of the fact that the numbers ‘pattern’ according to the system of arrangement and presents the sieve of Eratosthenes as tables with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, and 30 columns. Let us look at his example for 7: 1

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We might notice that the series of pairs of primes around an even number appear on virtual diagonal lines like 11–13, 17–19, 29–31, (41–43), 59–61. Such pairs are called prime twins and suggest that primes indeed show a sort of pattern. Waldal presents one arrangement with 6 columns that makes this even more visible (beginning with 2): 1

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A lot of similar approaches to such ‘speaking’ visual representations have been made to detect the pattern of primes. Stanislaw Ulam arranged numbers in a meander-like spiral. 37 — | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 —

36 — 35 — 34 — 33 — 32 — 31 | 17 — 16 — 15 — 14 — 13 30 | | | 18 5 — 4 — 3 12 29 | | | | | 19 6 1 — 2 11 28 | | | | 20 7 — 8 — 9 — 10 27 | | 21 — 22 — 23 — 24 — 25 — 26 44 — 45 — 46 — 47 — 48 — 49 …

The advantage here is that, if you mark each prime as a dot, you can compute huge images showing strange diagonal lines that seem to indicate a pattern (fig. 37).

37 Ulam-spiral showing black dots where prime numbers are

Another famous representation is the prime cross of Peter Plichta (1991–2004) who claims to reveal the secrets of the atoms.15 He states that the primes have meaning for the structure of the four-dimensional space and of logarithmic primes as background for the three-dimensional space.

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38 The prime number cross evoking the Maltese cross

Such approaches give new opportunities for number magic by looking for similarities and analogies. The prime number cross is sometimes seen as a Maltese cross (fig. 38) and as such finally replaces the former sieve of chastity of Queen Elizabeth I as a modern version of a sieve that is applied to the mantle of Elizabeth II on the same side as the former sieve was depicted (fig. 39).16 Here iconology comes back into its own as an investigation of symbols in transformation.

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39 Leonard Boden, Queen Elizabeth II, b. 1926. Oil on canvas, 74 × 49 cm, the artist’s estate, courtesy of Powys County Council

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Introductory literature on the portraits includes Christopher Hart (ed.), Heroines and Heroes. Symbolism, ­Embodiment, Narratives & Identities, Kingswinford, 2008; Annaliese Connolly & Lisa Hopkins (eds.), Goddesses and Queens. The Iconography of Elizabeth, Manchester, 2007; Elisabeth P. Erickson & Clark Hulse (eds.), Early Modern Visual Culture. Representation, Race and Empire in Renaissance England, Philadelphia, 2000. Now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C. Now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. See Deanne Williams, Dido, Queen of England, in English Literature History, 73, 1, 2006, p. 31–59, p. 49–51. Although these negotiations came close to success, the queen’s Anglican-Protestant supporters were deeply critical of the rapprochement with the Catholic king of France. There were, furthermore, rumors of a relationship with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Williams, o. c., p. 49–51). Williams, o. c., p. 49–51. Williams, o. c., p. 49. Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare by Hilliard, California, 1977, p. 30. Ecquis discernit utrunque? (“Who will separate the two?”) is a motto in Claude Paradin, Dévises héroiques, Lyon, 1551, 1557, which was also used in Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes, Leiden, 1586; Hotson, o. c., p. 30. Rosemond Tuve, Notes on the Virtues and Vices, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 26, 3–4, 1963, p. 264–303, p. 264. Williams, o. c., p. 41. See also: Mary E. Hazard, An Essay to Amplify “Ornament.” Some Renaissance Theory and Practice, in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 16, 1, 1976, p. 15–32, p. 32: “Events from the Dido-Aeneas suggesting the parallel between Aeneas’ heroic resistance to Dido’s attractions and Elizabeth’s dedication to virginity”; Susan Doran, Juno versus Diana. The Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561–1581, in The Historical Journal, 38, 2, 1995, p. 257–274, passim; Eddy de Jongh, Pearls of Virtue and Pearls of Vice, in Simiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 8, 2, 1975–1976, p. 69–97, p. 89: “Leaving the question of the medallions to one side, the pillar itself is not without significance, since it occurs frequently in the iconography as the symbol of Fortitude, Constancy and Chastity.” See also: John N. King, The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography, in The Renaissance Quarterly, 38, 1, 1985, p. 41–84, p. 64; Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans l’art profane, 1450–1600, 1, Geneva, 1958, p. 106–108. Libri IX, 8.1.5., in Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, Volume II: Books 6–9, (Loeb Classical ­Library, 492), ed. and trans. David R. Shackleton Bailey, Cambridge, MA, 2000, p. 193; Dionysius of H ­ alicarnassus, The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius Halicarnassus, Volume I: Book 1–2, (Loeb Classical Library, 319), trans. Earnest Cary, Cambridge, MA, 1937, p. 513–515 (2.69). Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Roman Religion in Valerius Maximus, London-New York, 2004, p. 5, also for the Latin translation of Valerius Maximus 8.1.abs.5. For these paragraphs: Alexander Bätz, Sacrae virgines. Studien zum religiösen und gesellschaftlichen Status der Vestalinnen, Paderborn, 2012. Ovid, Metamorfosen, ed. and trans. Marietje D’Hane-Scheltema, Amsterdam, 2013. See also my ‘Locus Amoenus’ and the Sleeping Nymph. ‘Ekphrasis’, Silence and ‘Genius Loci’, (Studies in Iconology, 3), Leuven-Walpole, 2016. According to Richard Broxton Onians in his The Origins of European Thought the oldest semantic root for nymph is lympha, lymphatos referring to the element of water, but also to panic, fear, stupefaction, and even insanity. “The current explanation of lymphatos, lymphaticus is that persons who ‘saw’ a nymph or water spirit went mad.” The nymph is related to ‘hydrophobia’ and lymphatos refers primarily to a ‘crazy fear’. This stupefaction is caused by something liquid. Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of ­European Thought. About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate, Cambridge, 1988, p. 34–35, p. 67, p. 219–220 and p. 35; See also: Szilvia Gellai, Wasser und Glas. “Vollkommen wörtliche Bilder” des Wahns bei Angelika Meier, in Literatur und Wahnsinn, eds. Helene von Bogen, et al., Berlin, 2014, p. 35–47, p. 35: Wasser und Wahnsinn standen in der europäischen Kultur über lange Zeit in einem komplexen symbolischen Verhältnis. [...] Dabei war das aquatische Element stets bipolar, denn es repräsentierte sowohl das wesenhafte Flüssigsein des Wahnsinns, als auch eine Wirkkraft gegen bzw. einen Bannraum für ihn.

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The main Roman legend of Aegeria concerns her affair with the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius. After the death of his first wife Tatia, he met Aegeria. Taken with her intelligence and divine beauty, they became lovers. For many years Numa visited her at night by her spring in the grove, and she taught him proper religious rituals and customs; http://www.thaliatook.com/OGOD/aegeria.php. Mueller, o. c., p. 51. Mary Beard, The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins, in The Journal of Roman Studies, 70, 1980, p. 12–27. Beard, o. c., p. 21. Beard, o. c., p. 23–24. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, 1966, passim. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. Robrecht W. Dyson, Cambridge, 1998, p. 416 (10.16.2). Cristelle Baskins, Il trionfo della pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Renaissance Domestic Painting, in Menacing Virgins. Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, eds. Kathleen C. Kelly & Marina Leslie, Newark, 1999, p. 15–25 and passim. Leon Battista Alberti, Family in Renaissance Florence, ed. and trans. Renée N. Watkins, Columbia, SC, 1969, p. 113. Jerzy Miziolek, Exempla di Giustizia. Tre tavole di cassone di Alvise Donati, in Arte Lombarda, 2, 2001, p. 72–88. Lorenzo Bonoldi, Sofonisba o Artemisia? Osservazioni su un monocromo di Andrea Mantegna, in La Rivista di Engramma, 52, 2006 (online). The author identifies Sophonisba as Artemisia, given the botanical detail of the tree that is argued to link her to the poison artemisia absinthium. Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke, Aby Warburg. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, (Gesammelte Schriften. Aby ­Warburg, 2, II.1), eds. Horst Bredekamp, et al., Berlin, 2008; Aby M. Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, in Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes. Zur Körpersprache in der Kunst, eds. Ilsebill Barta-Fliedl & Christoph Geismar, Salzburg-­ Vienna, 1992, p. 156–173, p. 156–170; Marianne Koos, et al. (eds.), Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne. Begleitmaterial zur Aus­stellung im Hamburger Kunsthaus. 63 Bild- und Texttafeln, Hamburg, 1994. Giulia Bordignon, Andrea Mantegna: Spiel-drama del pathos e ritmo eroico dell’antico. Una proposta di lettura della tavola 49 dell’Atlante Mnemosyne di Aby Warburg, in La Rivista di Engramma, 24, 2003 (online). Bordignon, o. c. See an extensive analysis on the visual ‘agencies’ of grisaille in Mantegna in Barbara Baert, Kairos or O ­ ccasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium. Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics, (Studies in Iconology, 5), ­Leuven-Walpole, 2016, p. 72–76. Alessandra P. Riemersione, Infezione/affezione, invasione/protagonismo, ritorno. Figure, grisaille nel Bilderatlas Mnemosyne di Aby Warburg (tavole 37, 44, 45 e 49), in La Rivista di Engramma, 100, 2012 (online). Mnemosyne Atlas, tafel 49, in La Rivista di Engramma, last update in 2014 (online): http://www.engramma.it/ eOS2/atlante/index.php?id_tavola=1049. Leslie Hotson refers to an appropriate emblem and device of the Sienese School or so-called Travagliati: the sieve with the words donec impurum. This means that the Travagliati will ‘sift out’ any form of impurity ­within themselves (Hotson, o. c., p. 30). See also: George McCluren, Heresy at Play. Academies and the Literary ­Underground in Counter-Reformation Siena, in Renaissance Quarterly, 63, 4, 2010, p. 1151–1207. Andrea Bayer (ed.), Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, (exh. cat.), New York, 2008, p. 313–314, cat. no. 144. There is an inscription, right: Alexander Broix, indicating Alessandro Bonvicino of Brescia or Moretto da Brescia. Bayer, o. c., p. 313–314. Augustine, o. c., p. 416 (10.16.2). Bayer, o. c., p. 313–314. Miziolek, o. c., p. 80. Georgianna Ziegler, Penelope and the Politics of Woman’s Place in the Renaissance, in Gloriana’s Face. Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds. Susan P. Cerasano & Marion Wynne-Davies, Detroit, 1992, p. 25–47, p. 40. The emblem reads “to purge the seedes / From chaffe”; Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth. Authority, Gender, and Representation, Chicago, 2006, p. 121–127, fig. 24; from Whitney, o. c., p. 68. Montrose, o. c., p. 124. See also: Roy Strong, Gloriana. The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, London, 1987, p. 96. Montrose, o. c., p. 127. See also: Doris Adler, The Riddle of the Sieve. The Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, in Renaissance Papers, 1978, p. 1–10. Susan P. Cerasano & Marion Wynne-Davies, From Myself My Other Self I Turned, in Gloriana’s Face, o. c., p. 1–23, p. 2.

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Gail K. Paster, Leaky Vessels. The Incontinent Women of City Comedy, in Renaissance Drama, 1, 1987, p. 43–65, p. 54. – With thanks to Sarah Eycken, Masters student KU Leuven, who alerted me to this. Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England, Kent, 1982, p. 53. Morris P. Tilley, A Dictionary of Proverbs in Seventeenth Century England, Michigan, 1950: G443. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, 1954, p. 369, passim. Paster, o. c., p. 54. Paster, o. c., p. 50. Gail K. Paster, The Body Embarrassed. Drama and the Disciples of Shame in Early Modern England, Ithaca, 1993, p. 50. Mary E. Hazard, The Case for “Case” in Reading Elizabethan Portraits, in Mosaic, 23, 1990, p. 61–88, p. 79: “Those portraits which might be described as representing the genitive of quality or description, are the most problematic to interpret – partly, as we have seen, because of the contextual ambiguity of the inflection: the ambiguity of relationship between picture and text, often a recherché source; the ambiguity intended by a political subject, patron, artist, or some combination of these. Such pictures were probably as difficult to interpret for Elizabethans as for us.” Cerasano & Wynne-Davies, o. c., p. 8. The poem On Monsieur’s Departure might refer to the leaving of Francis, Duke of Anjou (1555–1584), in 1582, or to her concealed love for the Earl of Leicester; Frances Teague, Elizabeth I: Queen of England, in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson, Athens, GA, 1987, p. 522–547, p. 536. Cerasano & Wynne-Davies, o. c., p. 8.

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http://indo-european.info/dictionary-translator/word/ine/kreidhrom. Douglas Q. Adams, art. Sieve, in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, eds. Douglas Q. Adams & James P. Mallory, London-Chicago, 1997, p. 518. Douglas Q. Adams, art. Clean, in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, o. c., p. 108–109. http://new-indology.blogspot.be/2015/05/sumerian-and-indo-european-surprising.html. See also: Chapter 8, Grid/lozenge/trellis. http://biblehub.com/hebrew/5130.htm. Benjamin Gelles, Peshat and Derash in the Exegesis of Rashi, Leiden, 1981, p. 66. In the Dutch language, the connection between the sieve and so-called rush – the weaving and braiding with stems – has been preserved; Jan de Vries, Nederlands etymologisch woordenboek, Leiden, 1971, p. 857. “Where the rush was mostly used with braiding work, one can assume that the primitive sieve was braided with stems. This means one can go back to the Indo-Germanic root *sei ‘braiding’, see: zeel; which can also stem from the ancient Norse sāld (< *sēþla) ‘sieve’ cf. Welsh hidl, old Slavic sito ‘sieve’ (also sit˘u ‘reeds’!), Lithuanian sietas, Greek ēthmós ‘sieve’. In itself, it’s not impossible to think of the Indo-Germanic root *sei ‘to drip, stream’, to which the words above could be accounted (see also: sijpelen, zijgen, and zeiken). IEW 889 wants to ascribe the meaning ‘to sift’ from ‘letting something fall through a braid work’, which is quite abstract. Should one need to use the term ‘braid work’ they are better off starting from sef.” Michael Andritzky & Thomas Hauer, Alles, was Netz is, in Das Netz. Sinn und Sinnlichkeit vernetzter Systeme, (Kataloge de Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, 12), eds. Michael Andritzky & Klaus Beyrer, Heidel­berg, 2012, p. 11–18. Andritzky & Hauer, o. c., p. 11, p. 13. Franziska Roller, Fangen-Halten-Zeigen-Spielen. Zur Geschichte des Netzes als Alltagsgegenstand, in Das Netz, o. c., p. 19–43, p. 23: Die Art und Weise einiger Stick- und Knüpftechniken ähnelt grundsätzlich der des Fischernetzes; der Netzgrund für die Filetstickerei verwendet zum Teil identische Knoten sowie einige Formen des Makramée. Und es gibt noch eine weitere Überschneidung: die Seefahrer im Mittelalter brachten nicht nur die Makramée-Tradition aus dem arabischen Raum nach Europa mit, sondern sie entwickelten die Knüpfkunst auch selber weiter. Roller, o. c., p. 19–20. Roller, o. c., p. 24.

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The Maude Papers are being steadily digitized and are available through the H. E. Maude Digital Archive: https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/79833. Roller, o. c., p. 28. Roller, o. c., p. 29. Roller, o. c., p. 29. Barbara G. Harrison, Italian Days, New York, 1989, passim, and see the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales, in The Multilingual Folk Tale Database: http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu. It would stray too far from the subject at hand, but I expand further on the idea of the web and the nest in Barbara Baert, Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries. Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression, (Studies in Iconology, 2), Leuven-Walpole, 2016. In Chapter 7, Manuductus. A (very) brief epistemology of the web, I write: “Spider and web form a fascinating prototype for handicraft, the arts and capturing the moment. Through their association with the notion of a ‘thread’, the cultic umbilical cord of the earth and the seal inscribed in the skin, as well as the skin’s outgrowth that is hair, are related to the symbolism of the knot”; Ulrike Zischka, Zur sakralen und profanen Anwendung des Knotenmotivs als magisches Mittel, Symbol oder Dekor. Eine vergleichende volkskundliche Untersuchung, (Tuduv-Studien, 7. Reihe Kulturwissenschaften), ­Munich, 1977, passim. See also: Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Weberei als episteme und die Genese der deduktiven Mathematik, Berlin, 2004, a challenging study that starts from Greek semantic roots in analyzing the linguistic idiom surrounding weaving. Michael Andritzky & Klaus Beyrer (eds.), Das Netz. Sinn und Sinnlichkeit vernetzter Systeme, (Kataloge de Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, 12), Heidelberg, 2012, passim. The idea of net, web, weaving, grid, lozenge is fundamental in this essay. In the following chapters, they will be increasingly articulated. See also: Paul Vandenbroeck, Verbeeck’s Peasant Weddings: A Study of Iconography and Social Function, in Simiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 14, 2, 1984, p. 79–124, p. 98 with a sieve in Verbeeck’s Peasant Wedding. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes. On folk customs see: Arthur Marmorstein, Das Sieb im Volksglauben, in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 21, 1922, p. 235. On swinging in folk beliefs, see also: Eugen Fehrle, Das Sieb im Volksglauben, in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 19, 1916–1917, p. 547–551. An ancient traditional form of woven basket-sieves are still made by the Yuchi tribe; Frank G. Speck, Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians, Nebraska, 2004, p. 34, fig. 15. James Neil, Peeps Into Palestine. Strange Scenes in the Unchanging Land Illustrative of the Ever-Living Book, London, ca. 1915, p. 58–59. Thomas E. McComiskeyn, The Minor Prophets: An Exegetical and Expository Commentary, Washington, 2009, p. 487: “Otherwise the word (= pebble Arabic Kirbal) signifies in the Old Testament a bundle, parcel or pouch (Gen. 42:35; Prov. 7:20). To the ground is an adverbial accusative and is translated into ‘ground’ rather than ‘earth’. If the metaphor involves grain, worthless rubbish remains in the sieve, but the good grain falls through the ground. Thus the good will make through, the wicked will not.” For everything that follows about folk customs, see: Franz Eckstein, art. Sieb, in Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 7, Berlin-Leipzig, 1936, cols. 1662–1701. Ebenezer C. Brewer, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Hertfordshire, 2001, p. 999: “sieve and shears” on divination with shear points along the sieve’s frame and then calling upon Peter and Paul. Emilijan Lilek, Volksglaube und volksthümlicher cultus in Bosnien und der Hercegovina, Vienna, 1896, p. 61. Géza Róheim, Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, 3, New York, 1951, p. 136, p. 137, p. 164. Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales, in The Multilingual Folk Tale Database: http://www.mftd. org/index.php?action=search&act=show&query=sieve. Eckstein, o. c., col. 1668; Kenneth G. Zysk, Religious Healing in the Veda, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 75, 7, 1985, p. i–xv, p. xvii, p. 1–311, p. 62. Berber women also see the sieve in connection to the honeycomb. The honeycomb refers to the checker motif and thus to the beehive. The Berber word for ‘life’ d-r is connected to the word for beehive: edder (live), taddart (beehive, home) en taddurt (life). This root is also the base for idir, base, ground, cavemen, furrow, like we saw in connection to the ‘net’. Azetta, the basic root for loom, is also applied to honeycomb, spider web or wasp nest; Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta. Berbervrouwen en hun kunst, (exh. cat.), Brussels, 2000, p. 199–201. For Plato (ca. 427–347 BC), the honeycomb containing bee larvae was the symbol for the human body; Otto Immisch, Sprachliches zum Seelenschmetterling, in Glotta, 6, 3, 1915, p. 193–206, p. 200. Makilam, The Magical Life of Berber Women in Kabylia, New York, 2007, p. 73–75.

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It is assumed that sieves were also used as a potter’s wheel during ‘primitive’ kneading processes. These are also turned counter-clockwise. This according to eye-witness and ethnologist Ivor H. N. Evans on the Malay peninsula, who saw it in the community of the Kuala Tembeling at Pahang (Southeast Asia). The right hand shapes the pot, while the left hand turns the ‘sieve wheel’ counter-clockwise; Ivor H. N. Evans, Papers on the Ethnology and Archaeology of the Malay Peninsula, Cambridge, 1927, p. 69. Comparable stories circulated among the Bulgars; Rachko Popov, Butterfly and Gherman, Sofia, 1989, p. 29, p. 54, p. 59, p. 83. Raphael Patai, On Jewish Folklore, Detroit, 1983, p. 387–388. Patai, o. c., p. 387. Patai, o. c., p. 388. David Brodsky, Mishna Gittin. Family Relations as Metaphor for National Relations, in Mishpachah. The Jewish Family in Tradition and in Transition, (Studies in Jewish Civilization, 27), ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon, Indiana, 2016, p. 15–32. Brodsky, o. c., p. 24. Vandenbroeck, Azetta, o. c., p. 141. The spectrum of the Jewish purification rules and the uterus was the subject of an interdisciplinary research project between art historians, anthropologists, theologians, and Byzantinists that I led between 2008 and 2012, about the story of the healing of the ‘woman with an issue of blood’. How the Haemorrhoïssa healed from her blood flows by touching the hem of Christ’s garment is told in Mark 5:24b–34, Luke 8:42–48 and Matthew 9:19–22. She might have been a so-called zabâ, a woman suffering from irregular menstrual bleeding, one who, according to Leviticus, could not be touched. In short, the passage in Mark becomes contextualized in paleo-Christian culture, in menstruations and blood-flow taboos with a central focus on tactility. In the periscope on purification after childbirth, cosmogonic elements infiltrate the very primordial conceptions. Here I refer to a selection of the resulting publications: Barbara Baert (in collaboration with Emma Sidgwick), Touching the Hem. The Thread between Garment and Blood in the Story of the Woman with the Heamorrhage (Mark 5:24b–34parr), in Textile. The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 9, 3, 2011, p. 308–359; Barbara Baert (ed.), The Woman with the Bloodflow (Mark 5:24–34). Narrative, Iconic and Anthropological Spaces, (Art&Religion, 2), Leuven, 2014; Emma Sidgwick, From Flow to Face. The Haemorrhoissa Motif (Mark 5:24b–34parr) between Anthropological Origin and Image Paradigm (Art&Religion, 3), Leuven, 2014; Barbara Baert, art. Hem, in Textile Terms: A Glossary, eds. Anika Reineke, et al., (Textile Studies, 0), Zürich, 2017, p. 143–148. Jan Willem van den Bosch, The Well of Myriam and its Mythological Forebears, in Religious Stories in Transformation. Conflict, Revision and Reception, eds. Alberdina Houtman, et al., (Jewish and Christian Perspectives, 31), Leiden, 2016, p. 213–233. van den Bosch, o. c., p. 226. David Halperin, A Sexual Image in Hekhalot Rabbati and its Implications, in Early Jewish Mysticism, ed. Joseph Dan, Jerusalem, 1987, p. 117–132, p. 122. This paragraph is borrowed from Sidgwick, From Flow to Face, o. c., p. 141; Richard Whitekettle, Levitical Thought and the Female Reproductive Cycle: Wombs, Wellsprings, and the Primeval World, in Vetus Testamentum, 46, 3, 1996, p. 376–391. Whitekettle defines a homology as a reciprocal interpretation of two phenomena: the understanding of the one shapes the understanding of the other, and vice versa (p. 385). Note also that Whitekettle states that māqôr was mostly figuratively used, but that the literal object to which it referred was most certainly a geological wellspring (p. 382). Irving L. Finkel, The Crescent Fertile, in Archiv für Orientforschung Beiheft, 27, 1980, p. 37–52. Sidgwick, From Flow to Face, o. c., p. 141. Vandenbroeck, Azetta, o. c., p. 115. Jeffrey Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets and their Tradition, in Journal of the Warburg and C ­ ourtauld Institutes, 56, 1993, p. 25–62 (ill. 40/4d: a silver ring, and also on a lead amulet, both from Corinth); Jeffrey Spier, Late Antique and Early Christian Gems, Wiesbaden, 2007. Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets, o. c., p. 30. Spier, Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets, o. c., p. 43, this portrait is often octopus-like. According to Alphons A. Barb, Diva Matrix: A Faked Gnostic Intaglio in the Possession of P. P. Rubens and the Iconology of the Symbol, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 3–4, 1953, p. 193–238 (pl. 6a), these ideas go back to Mesopotamian archetypes. The amulets also protected men, who were infected by a ‘womb’, such as the one for the Russian Basileos. See also: Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside

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Her, New York, 1978; Charles W. Bodemer, Historical Interpretations of the Human Uterus and Cervix Uteri, in The Biology of the Cervix, eds. Richard J. Blandau & Kamran Moghissi, Chicago, 1983, p. 1–11; Jean-Jacques Aubert, Threatened Wombs: Aspects of Ancient Uterine Magic, in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 30, 1989, p. 421–449; Barbara Baert, “Qui a touché mon manteau?” La guérison d’une femme atteinte de flux de sang (Marc 5:24b-34) à la croisée du texte, de l’image et du tabou dans la culture visuelle du haut Moyen-Age, in Archaevs: Study in the History of Religions, 13, 2009, p. 1–30. Paul Vandenbroeck, Matrix Marmorea. The Sub-Symbolic Iconography of the Creative Energies in Europe and North Africa, in New Perspectives in Iconology. Visual Studies and Anthropology, eds. Barbara Baert, et al., Brussels, 2012, p. 180–210, p. 180. Helen King, Sacrificial Blood: The Role of Amnion in Ancient Gynecology, in Helios, 13, 2, 1986, p. 117–126. Juan E. Cirlot, art. Sieve/Cribble, in A Dictionary of Symbols, London, 2001, p. 296. Malcolm Jones, Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art I: Proverbial Follies and Impossibilities, in Folklore, 100, 2, 1989, p. 201–217, p. 205: “The motif certainly survived into the nineteenth century, appearing, for instance, in Halliwell’s 1849 Nursery Rhymes and Tales in a nonsense tale which begins, ‘I saddled my sow with a sieve full of buttermilk and leaped nine miles beyond the moon into the land of Temperance’.” Robert K. Ritner, Anubis and the Lunar Disc, in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 71, 1985, p. 149–155, p. 151. Levon Abrahamian, The Chained Hero. The Cave and the Labyrinth, in Iran & the Caucasus, 11, 1, 2007, p. 89–99, p. 94–95.

The Sieve Dances 1

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László Kürti, Language, Symbol and Dance: An Analysis of Historicity in Movement and Meaning, in Shaman. Journal of the International Society for Shamanistic Research, 2, 1–2, 2007, p. 23–82. Kürti, o. c., p. 32. Róheim, o. c., p. 136, p. 137, p. 164. Romanians use(d) the drum/sieve in divination. In the archaeological museum Oksi Muzej in Zagreb (Croatia), there is a collection of sieves made from horse hair. From the sixteenth century on, a flourishing trade in these types of woven sieves came out of Zagreb. “The merchant-suppliers were supplying sieve-makers with horsehair and marketing their products. They were buying horsehair in Kranjska and Bavaria, and then exporting sieves to Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Spain, and also to Hungary and Romania. Loka’s sieve-makers and merchants also established their own guild in 1658 and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary. In the 1870s, 2000 people from villages between Kranj and Škofja Loka were making a living with sieve-making, but by the beginning of the twentieth century only 900, of which two thirds were women and a third were men. With the discovery of new materials, especially nylon, this craft entirely died away in the 1950s.” http://www. loski-muzej.si/en/permanent-collections/ethnological-collections/sieve-maker-s-trade/. Kürti, o. c., p. 49. Tal Ilan, Dance and Gender in Ancient Jewish Sources, in Near Eastern Archaeology, 66, 3, 2003, p. 135–136, p. 136. Erdőn vágják,/ falun szárasszák,/ s az asszonyok táncot járnak Mellette/ Szita; Kürti, o. c., p. 31. Kürti, o. c., p. 55. Circular motions are ‘read’ in nature: Ruach, wind, and thus ‘enthusiasm’ descends into the dancing body. These paragraphs are borrowed from Barbara Baert, Pneuma and the Visual Arts in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, (Art&Religion, 5), Leuven, 2016, p. 12–13. Marin Roseman, “Blowing” Cross the Crest of Mount Galeng. Winds of the Voice, Winds of the Spirits, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 2007, p. 55–69, p. 63. https://indo-european.info/pokorny-etymological-dictionary/index.htm: lemma: derbh-. https://indo-european.info/pokorny-etymological-dictionary/index.htm: lemma: kelg-. https://indo-european.info/pokorny-etymological-dictionary/index.htm: lemma: lek-2 (: lek-) and lēk- : l k(*leˆgh-). From: http://www.truthortradition.com/articles/threshing-winnowing-sieving-separating-the-good-fromthe-bad. – There is still the expression, ‘the autumn wind winnowing its way through the grass’. The process of winnowing provided a clear picture of how God will treat people on Judgment Day. The people who have believed in God and have lived obedient lives will be treated like wheat – they will be gathered together and be safely kept. In contrast, the unbelievers and disobedient will be treated like chaff – they will be burned up in

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the lake of fire just like chaff is burned up in an oven. Matthew says: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). Bettina L. Knapp, Yizhar’s “Midnight Convoy.” Wheels, Circles, Eyes. The Dynamics of the Feminine Principle as Eros/Logos, in Modern Language Studies, 20, 3, 1990, p. 58–66, p. 60–61.

A Short Break. The Nun in Affile 1

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Umberto Moricca (ed.), Gregorii Magni Dialogi, (Fonti per la storia d’Italia, 57), Rome, 1924, p. 71–75; Pamela Z. Blum, The Saint Benedict Cycle on the Capitals of the Crypt at Saint-Denis, in Gesta (Essays in Honor of Harry Bober), 20, 1, 1981, p. 73–87, p. 76. There is a curious analogy with the Mishna Gittin (supra), which also mentioned borrowing a sieve from another woman. Carolus du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, II, ed. Léopold Favre, Graz, 1954, p. 129: Pamela Z. Blum refers in her note 28 to examples in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 55, Vita et ­Miracula Sancti Benedicti, fol. 2v, a manuscript dating to the first decade of the fourteenth century, in which the ­capisterium resembles a trough. http://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/opere-arte/schede/4f030–00327/. Oil on panel; 168 × 81cm; the left wing represents The Meal of Saint Benedict and the Abbot of Mount Preclaro. The back represents a Mass of Saint Gregory. The diptych was possibly ordered for a Refectory. Manfred Lurker, art. Gefäss, in Wörterbuch der Symbolik, Stuttgart, 1991, p. 232–233; Erich Neumann, Die Grosse Mutter. Der Archetyp des grossen Weiblichen, Darmstadt, 1957, p. 51, p. 123–146. See also my analysis of the attributes of Saint Verena von Zurzach: the comb and the jar (jug, pitcher); B ­ arbara Baert, Jar and Comb. Verena of Zurzach as an Example for the Limits and the Possibilities in Iconology, in Annual of the Antwerp Museum, 2006, p. 9–25; in translation as: Wasserkrug und Kamm. Die Darstellung der Verena von Zurzach, ein Beispiel für neue Tendenzen in der ikonologischen Methodik, in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 60, 109, 2006, p. 35–62. Both objects can be understood within the feminine pattern of (pre)-Christian symbols for hygiene (comb) and fertility (the pitcher, the well). The comb as well, like the sieve, has a purifying function: it removes dirt and lice. And the comb is also an image of the womb given its ‘teeth’ referring to the vagina dentata. Massimo Leone, On Broken Glass: For a Semiotics of Anti-Materiality, in Chinese Semiotic Studies, 13, 1, 2017, s. p.; with thanks for an insight into the unpublished and not-yet-paginated article at press. Leone, o. c., s. p.

The Sieve as an Organism 1

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4 5 6 7 8 9

Term borrowed from: Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques. Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, (Meaning Systems, 22), trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, New York, 2015, passim. Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant, art. Tamis, in Dictionnaire des Symboles, Paris, 1982, p. 921–922. Paul Kockelman, The Anthropology of an Equation: Sieves, Spam Filters, Agentive Algorithms, and Ontologies of Transformation, in Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3, 3, 2013, p. 33–61, p. 31. Douglas, Purity and Danger, o. c., passim; Gregory Bateson, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind, New York, 1972. Tim Ingold, The Textility of Making, in Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, 2010, p. 91–102, p. 91–92. Ingold, The Textility of Making, o. c., p. 92. Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2: The Nature of Nature, trans. Heinz Norden, ed. Jürg Spiller, London, 1973, p. 269. Ingold, The Textility of Making, o. c., p. 97. Ingold, The Textility of Making, o. c., p. 95. Suzanne B. Butters, From Skills to Wisdom. Making, Knowing, and the Arts, in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, eds. Harold Cook, Amy Meyers & Pamela H. Smith, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014, p. 47–85, p. 47–81, p. 48.

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Elizabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold, Making and Growing: An Introduction, in Making and Growing. Anthropo­logical Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, (Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception), eds. Elizabeth ­Hallam & Tim Ingold, Farnham, 2014, p. 1–24, p. 1. Ingold & Hallam, Making and Growing, o. c., p. 1. James Elkins, On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History, in 31. Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie (Taktilität. Sinneserfahrung als Grenzerfahrung), 12–13, 2008, p. 25–30, p. 30. Tim Ingold, Part I: Introduction, in Creativity and Cultural Improvisation, eds. Elizabeth Hallam & Tim Ingold, Oxford-New York, 2007, p. 48. Venice Lamb, Looms Past and Present. Around the Mediterranean and Elsewhere, Hertingfordbury, 2005, p. 43–46.

Grid/Lozenge/Trellis 1 2

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Sebastian Egenhofer, art. Grid, in Textile Terms, o. c., p. 133–135, p. 133. I also expanded on these ideas in: Barbara Baert (in collaboration with Hannah Iterbeke), Revisiting the ­Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries (15th century onwards). Gender, Textile, and the Intimate Space as Horticulture, in Textile. The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 15, 1, 2016, p. 1–31. Ernst Gombrich in his The Sense of Order. A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, London, 1994 (reprint), p. 53–54. Vandenbroeck, Azetta, o. c., p. 198. For example: a goddess figurine from Trento and a female torso, covered with a net-cloth from the Starčevo culture (Serbia, sixth millennium). In the Neolithic graves of Sardinia, the net is accompanied by the cross and hourglass motif; Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization, San Francisco, 1989, fig. 134. Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, San Francisco, 1991, p. 246. Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, o. c., p. 81. Vandenbroeck, Azetta, o. c., p. 198. Birgit Schneider, art. Digitality, in Textile Terms, o. c., p. 72–76, p. 72. Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art, Philadelphia, 2000, p. 53–54. Many thanks to Roland Krischel, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, who alerted me to this fact during the workshop at IKKM Weimar, entitled: “Excessive Spaces. Considering Media Genealogies of Trompel’œil in Netherlandish Book Illumination and Early Still Lifes,” which took place on 21–22 January 2016; Roland Krischel, Ein ‘vergiftetes’ Meisterwerk? Theologie und Ideologie im Altar der Stadtpatrone, in Kölner Domblatt, 80, 2015, p. 1–100, notes 250–253. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, o. c., p. 53–54. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, o. c., p. 53–54, p. 57–59, images 3.3, 3.4. See also: Herbert L. Kessler, Medieval Art as Argument, in Iconography at the Crossroads. Papers from the Colloquium sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March 1990, (Index of Christian Art, Occasional Papers, 2), ed. Brendan Cassidy, Princeton, 1993, p. 63–64. Herbert L. Kessler, Il mandylion, in Il volto di Cristo, eds. Giovanni Morello & Gerhard Wolf, Milan, 2000, p. 67–76, p. 74. See also: Kessler, Spiritual Seeing, o. c., colour image IVb. Barbara Baert, The Gendered Visage. Facets of the Vera Icon, in Annual of the Antwerp Royal Museum, 2000, p. 10–43. Teichoscopy or teichoscopia meaning ‘viewing from the walls’, is a recurring narrative strategy in ancient Greek literature. One famous instance of teichoscopy occurs in Homer’s Iliad, Book 3, verses 121–244. Teichoscopia makes it possible to describe an event taking place in the distance while integrating it into the narrative frame. Patricia C. Miller, Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure. Eros and Language in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 54, 2, 1986, p. 241–253; Henri Couzel, Origène et la Connaissance Mystique, Bruges, 1961. On biblical hermeneutics and lire au-delà du verset according to Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), see: Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Lire aux éclats. Éloge de la caresse, Paris, 1994, p. 37, p. 136, p. 283.

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The same conceptual osmosis between novel and love, body and the erotic readership, is analyzed by Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York, 1975. Barthes, o. c., p. 8. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, New York, 2000, p. 339. Rosalind Krauss, Grids, in October, 9, 1979, p. 50–64. Krauss, o. c., p. 54–55. Krauss, o. c., p. 61. Krauss, o. c., p. 59. After William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) in his The Second Coming, 1919. See also: William B. Yeats, Michael ­Robartes and the Dancer, Churchtown, 1920.

Moi-peau 1

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Eran Dorfman, Foucault versus Freud On Sexuality and the Unconscious, in Sexuality and Psychoanalysis. Philosophical Criticisms, eds. Jens de Vleminck & Eran Dorfman, Leuven, 2010, p. 157–170, p. 160: our sensorium is both screen (energy, quantity) and sieve (qualitative characteristics or stimuli that Freud calls periods); Erika D. Galioto, Split-Skin. Adolescent Cutters and the Other, in Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, eds. Sheila L. Cavanagh, Angela Failler & Rachel A. J. Hurst, London, 2013, p. 188–214, p. 198: the buffer between me and the other is the sieve (Jacques Lacan [1901–1981]). Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology. The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, London, 1989, p. 364. See also: Jay Prosser, Skin memories, in Thinking through the Skin, eds. Sarah Ahmed & Jackie Stacey, London-New York, 2001, p. 52–68. Marc Lafrance, From the Skin Ego to the Psychic Envelope: An Introduction to the Work of Didier Anzieu, in Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, o. c., p. 16–44, p. 22. Yves Hendrick, Facts and Theories about Psychoanalysis, London-New York, 2013, p. 56. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, New Haven, 1989. Victor Stoichita, art. Skin, in Textile Terms, o. c., p. 231–234, p. 231. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, o. c., p. 105. Didier Anzieu, Functions of the Skin Ego, in Reading French Psychoanalysis, eds. Dana Birksted-Breen, Sara Flanders & Alain Gibeault, London-New York, 2010, p. 477–495. Anzieu, Functions of the Skin Ego, o. c., p. 488–489: other functions of the skin-ego are storage of fats as an image of memory, the function of production (hair, nails), and emission, for example sweat and pheromones. These are the skin-ego’s defense mechanisms. Leen De Bolle, Desire and Schizophrenia in Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. Philosophical Essays on Deleuze’s Debate with Psychoanalysis, ed. Leen De Bolle, Leuven, 2010, p. 7–33, p. 24. The following two paragraphs are borrowed from my Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries, o. c., p. 51. Paul Vandenbroeck, The Energetics of an Unknowable Body. The Sacred and the Aniconic-Sublime in ­Early Modern Religious Culture, in Backlit Heaven, (exh. cat.), eds. Paul Vandenbroeck & Gerard Rooijakkers, ­Mechelen, 2009, p. 174–204, p. 178. Vandenbroeck, The Energetics of an Unknowable Body, o. c., p. 179. Vandenbroeck, The Energetics of an Unknowable Body, o. c., p. 186. Vandenbroeck, The Energetics of an Unknowable Body, o. c., p. 188. Paul Vandenbroeck discusses this vision of the artistic impulse in a recent synthetic work: Paul Vandenbroeck, A Glimpse of the Concealed. Body, Intuition, Art, Antwerp, 2017. The following two paragraphs are borrowed from my Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. A Contribution to the Study of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), (Studies in Iconology, 1), Leuven-Walpole, 2014, p. 24. Wolfgang Kemp, Visual Narratives, Memory, and the Medieval Esprit du System, in Images of Memory. On Remembering and Representation, eds. Susanne Küchler & Walter Melion, Washington-London, 1991, p. 87–108, p. 87. Kemp, o. c., p. 88.

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21

22

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Kemp, o. c., p. 88._ See also: Georges Didi-Huberman, Warburg’s Haunted House, in Common Knowledge, 18, 1, 2012, p. 50–78: The term Engramm is borrowed from German zoologist Richard Wolfgang Semon (1959–1918), Mnème, London, 1921, p. 190, who used it to describe a biologically inherent memory trail of a species. Readers can learn more on this topic in my earlier mentioned Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium, o. c., p. 102–108: “The interruption towards the self.” Sofie van Loo, Gorge(l): Oppression and relief in Art, Antwerp, 2007, p. 37. Van Loo is acquainted with the ­matrixial borderlinking psychoanalysis and art theory of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. The matrixial space is a space that may be characterized first and foremost as containing an energy or potentiality that has ‘not yet’ manifested itself at the phallic level, only at the feminine, internal, uterine level. So-called in-sight is located in a liminal zone where transfer between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ are able to originate; it is a locus of a certain transformational potentiality. This conception could be said to correlate to, or be a concrete and culture-specific expression of, what was psychoanalytically (or, even better: from the perspective of a correction on classical, orthodox Lacanian psychoanalysis) identified as ‘matrixial borderspace’, a transsubjective psychic sphere, that can be grasped according to the model of the maternal womb (matrix) and its co-emergence-in-differentiation (fusion nor separation) of an I and an uncognized non-I, and their ‘borderlinking’ as a nonfusional transmission, connectivity. In the matrixial perspective, frontiers become co-poietically transgressive and limits become thresholds. A matrixial borderspace is as such a mutating co-poietic net with a co-poietic transformational potentiality, where co-creativity (‘metramorphosis’) might occur. As such it equally entails a particular mode of meaning and knowledge production, and is able to describe certain aspects of human symbolic experience; Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis, 2006, passim. – This is further discussed in my About Stains or the Image as Residue, (Studies in Iconology, 10), Leuven-Walpole, 2017, p. 57. The image and phantasm of radiating energy is a formal and content-related archetype of the psycho-­ energetic type found on early Christian sarcophagi (though it also occurs on ceramic utensils of that period), namely the strigil motif. Strigils are curving lines that fan out from a central point in the composition (often a void or a mandorla) in a concentric-symmetric way. Strigils occur so frequently and persistently in the early Christian period that the motif must have had an inherent meaning. The form of its meaning coincides with the khōra (the underworld of the dead) in giving expression to the sub-symbolic impulse to create meaning: a fluid invisible power that bounces back and forth between objects and people – the energeia or dunamis. For a unique study of this phenomenon, see: Emma Sidgwick, Radiant Remnants. Late Antique Strigillation and Productive Dunamis/Energeia, in Ikon, 7, 2014, p. 109–130.

(Un)heimlichkeit. Back to the Queen, the Portrait, and the Sieve 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8

Ernst Fischer, Writing Home. Post-Modern Melancholia and the Uncanny Space of Living-Room Theatre, in Psychoanalysis and Performance, eds. Patrick Campbell & Adrian Kear, London-New York, 2001, p. 115–131. Fischer, o. c., p. 123. Egenhofer, o. c., p. 134. Egenhofer, o. c., p. 133. Siegert, o. c., p. 116. Jean-Max Albert, L’espace de profil, Paris, 1993. Siegert, o. c., p. 97: “Xenophon’s Oeconomicus introduces taxis as a fundamental cultural technique of the economic domain. Taxis refers to an order of things in which each and every object is located in a fixed place where it can be found. Humans however, differ from things. ‘When you are searching for a person’, Xenophon cautions, ‘you often fail to find him, though he may be searching for you himself’. Humans defy the fundamental rules of economy because for them ‘no place of meeting has been fixed’. This modern taxis is implemented by means of a new cultural technique which takes into account that something may be missing from its place. In other words, it encompasses the notion of an empty space.” The technique in question is the grid or lattice; Xenophon, Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, trans. E. C. Marchant, Cambridge, 1938, p. 439. Leon Battista Alberti was already aware of these ‘spatial’ implications in the painterly arts. “Since painting, in fact, aspires to represent the objects seen, let us note in what way they themselves come to sight. First of all, when we watch an (object), we can certainly see that there is something that occupies a place;” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting. A New Translation and Critical Edition, New York, 2011, p. 49. “Something real (res) is something that occupies a space, that is in its place. It is crucial to be mindful of the connotations that the term locus (Greek topos) possesses in both rhetorics and ars memoriae;” Siegert, o. c., p. 100.

Notes

9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35

36

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Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis, 1988, p. 34. Siegert, o. c., p. 97. Fischer, o. c., p. 124; Arnaud Levy, Evaluation etymologique et semantique du mot “secret”, in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 14, 1976, p. 117–130; see also: Gérard Vincent, The Secrets of History and the Riddle of Identity, in A History of Private life, 5, eds. Antoine Prost & Gérard Vincent, Cambridge-London, 1991, p. 539–592. Fischer, o. c., p. 124. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in ten Books, trans. Neil Leach, Joseph Rykwert & Robert Tavernor, Cambridge, MA, 1988; Mark Wigley, Untitled: the Housing of Gender, in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina, Princeton, 1992, p. 327–377, p. 332: patriarchal authority, spatial order, and surveillance. Fischer, o. c., p. 125, citing Wigley, o. c., p. 388. R. P. Lawson (ed.), Origin, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, (Ancient Christian Writers, 26), Westminster, 1957, p. 230. In the eleventh-century magisterial epic by the Japanese lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Kyoto, 1000–1008, these ambiguous and eroticizing limitations within the space are often topoi. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Royall Tylor, London, 2002. Fischer, o. c., p. 125; the dresses match with the white and unadorned walls (after Alberti) as blank surfaces on which the man projects himself. Fischer, o. c., p. 125: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, 1988, p. 32. See too the highly recognizable grille that separates priest and penitent in the confessional. The grille (or curtain) ensures anonymity, but from the Fischer-Deleuze perspective this ‘sieve’ of separation, secrecy, can also be read like the dissolving wall. Alberti, Family in Renaissance Florence, o. c., Book III, p. 2078. Fischer, o. c., p. 125. Special thanks to Dr. Avinoam Shalem (Columbia University) who told me about this work. Cambridge English Dictionary: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/grater. Janine Antoni & Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, in BOMB – Artists in Conversation, 63, 1998, p. 54–61. Barbara Baert, In Response to Echo. Beyond Mimesis or Dissolution as Scopic Regime (with Special Attention to Camouflage), (Studies in Iconology, 6), Leuven-Walpole, 2016, p. 67–73. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries. Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, New York, 2010, p. 43. The expression is from Krauss, o. c., p. 60–61. More on these in Barbara Baert, An Odour, a Taste, a Touch. Impossible to Describe. Noli me tangere and the Senses, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture, 26), eds. Wietse de Boer & Christine Goettler, Leiden, 2013, p. 111–151. Stella North, The Surfacing of the Self. The Clothing-Ego, in Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, o. c., p. 64–89. North, o. c., p. 81. North, o. c., p. 79–80. North, o. c., p. 64–89. Hazard, An Essay to Amplify “Ornament”, o. c., p. 27–32. Para + ergon; Greek for side issue, side-work; Jacques Derrida & Craig Owens, The Parergon, in October, 9, 1979, p. 3–41. Representative for this reawakening is the collection by Stephan Hoppe, Matthias Müller & Norbert Nussbaum (eds.), Stil als Bedeutung in der nordalpinen Renaissance. Wiederentdeckung einer methodischen Nachbarschaft, Regensburg, 2008. Borrowed from Cicero’s De Oratore who gives the highest distinction to this style figure; Harris Rackham & Edward W. Sutton, Cicero. On the Orator, Cambridge, 1967: 3.27.104; Hazard, An Essay to Amplify “Ornament”, o. c., p. 18. In his Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold sets out in search of the origin and the effects of lines in our interaction with the world. In relation to the knot and, by extension, the notion of connecting, tying or braiding a cord or a thread, the author refers to an association with meshes, with lacework and with the labyrinth, all of which used to be considered to possess apotropaic qualities. Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History, London-New York, 2007, p. 53; based upon a study by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory, London-Oxford, 1998, p. 83–90.

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See also on Elizabeth’s costumes and color symbolism: Jane A. Lawson, Rainbow for a Reign: The Colours of a Queen’s Wardrobe, in Costume, 41, 2007, p. 26–45. Gombrich, o. c., p. 169. North, o. c., p. 83.

Galloping! 1

2

3

4 5 6

7 8

9

Alain Desreumaux, et al. (eds.), Histoire du roi Abgar et de Jésus. Présentation et traduction du texte syriaque intégral de la doctrine, (Apocryphes, 1), Turnhout, 1993, p. 138–145; Kurt Weitzman, The Mandylion and Constantine Porphyrogennetos, in Cahiers archéologiques, 11, 1960, p. 163–184; Colette D. Bozzo, Anna R. Calderoni Masetto & Gerhard Wolf (eds.), Mandylion. Intorno al Sacro Volto, da Bisanzio a Genova, Genoa, 2004; Herbert L. Kessler, Configuring the Invisible by Copying the Holy Face, in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Bologna, 1998, p. 130–151. Giraldus Cambrensis, Speculum Ecclesiae. De vita Galfridi archiepiscopi Eboracensis: sive certamina Galfridi Eboracensis archiepiscopi, IV, 6, (Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi Scriptores, 21, 4), ed. J. S. Brewer, London, 1873, p. 274; Ernst Von Dobschütz, Christusbilder. Untersuchungen zur christlichen Legenden, Leipzig, 1899, p. 210; Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth. History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image, Cambridge, 1991, p. 107–111. Roland Betancourt, The Icon’s Gold: A Medium of Light, Air, and Space, in West 86th. A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 23, 2, 2016, p. 252–280, p. 267: “In the icon, the gold ground literally circumscribes the bodily figure as space, giving the figure a ground not only from which to present itself as sensible form, but also placing it within a space that confines and delimits the bounds of its outline. […] Thus, place here is a form of activated or practiced space, whereby it is in the deed or act of receiving that bodiless form in matter that the body becomes present itself. Topos suggests place precisely as that event of giving plasticity to the immaterial, of giving materiality to that which is absent.” Kuryluk, o. c. Georges Didi-Huberman, Un sang d’images, in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 32, 1985, p. 123–153. Sidra Stich, et al. (eds.), Tagebuch vom 27 Februar 1951, in Yves Klein, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 26; Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin, 2010, p. 258. Schneider, o. c., p. 72–76. This is a reference to Marie-José Mondzain, L’image naturelle, Paris, 1995, p. 11: Idolâtres et acéphales, voilà, me dit-on, ce que, par sa faute, nous sommes devenus. Je réponds haut et clair: l’image n’est nulle part; l’image n’est coupable de rien. In her manifesto, Mondzain defends the iconophile image: the figurative image embraced by mankind. I have treated Marie-José Mondzain’s essay in Barbara Baert, Iconogenesis or Reflections on the Byzantine Theory of Imagery, in A-Prior, 7, 2002, p. 128–141. I made this association with galloping based on the relationship between the sieve and the horse skin from Chapter 4 The sieve dances. I also remember an association that Georges Didi-Huberman discussed during his introductory lecture on May 27 2015 during the IKKM Weimar congress Dis/Appearing: L’image est en galoppe. Later he published this paper as Georges Didi-Huberman, Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7, 1, 2016, p. 109–124, p. 113 (quote). Didi-Huberman borrows this idea from a psychoanalyst friend and from Cornelius Coastoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, 1975, p. 404–407.

Notes

117

Digital Sieves 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

15 16

Barbara Baert calls this ‘the double self’, see Chapter 2 The queen, the portrait, and the sieve. Kockelman, o. c., p. 34. Kockelman, o. c., p. 38. In German, algorithms for sifting data are called filters. The corresponding theory is the filter theory, German: Filtertheorie. Melissa Terras, Image Processing in the Digital Humanities, in Digital Humanities in Practice, eds. Julianne ­Nyhan, Melissa Terras & Claire Warwick, London, 2012, p. 71–90, p. 82. Kockelman, o. c., p. 35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Sundaram; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Atkin; https://en.­ wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendre_sieve; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brun_sieve; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Turán_sieve; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selberg_sieve. The page rosettacode.com presents 247 different computer algorithms executing the sieve of Eratosthenes in 127 different computer languages: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_of_Eratosthenes or Guido Walz (ed.), Lexikon der Mathematik. Band 2: Eig bis Inn, Heidelberg, 2001, p. 65. Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, in Great Books of the Western World II: Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Nicomachus, trans. Martin L. D’Ooge, ed. William Benton, Chicago-London-Toronto, 1952, p. 817–818 (chapter XI, 3). Per Waldal, Das Sieb des Eratosthenes. Eine Studie über die natürlichen Zahlen, Diersdorf, 1961, p. 11. Ernst P. Wolfer, Eratosthenes von Kyrene als Mathematiker und Philosoph, Groningen, 1954, p. 39. Nicomachus mentions the sieve of Eratosthenes, the kóskinon Eretosthénous, in the Introduction to ­Arithmetic, o. c. (chapter XII, 2). Other occurrences of kóskinon are Servius, G.1.166, Diocletian’s price edict 15.60a, and Plato, Gorgias 493c1–3. Plato reports that there was a myth in ancient Greece that in Hades the uninitiated carried water in a sieve and poured it into a leaky jar. Socrates turns this myth into an allegory of the soul of the ­uninitiated that are not able to retain words of wisdom or wise ideas because they forget what they are told or what they discovered. See R. S. Bluck, Plato, Gorgias 493c 1–3, in The Classical Review, 13, 3, 1963, p. 263–264. For help sifting out the kóskinon from ancient sources, I thank Giovanni Fanfani. See Myron L. Stein, Stanislaw M. Ulam & Mark B. Wells, A Visual Display of Some Properties of the Distribution of Primes, in The American Mathematical Monthly, 71, 1964, p. 516–520. Peter Plichta, Das Primzahlkreuz, 3 vol., Düsseldorf, 1991–2004. See http://www.jainmathemagics.com/DecalsStickersPrimeNumberCross/#.

“Sie schlafen mit einer Frau, die Sie lieben,” sagte er matt. “Alles, was Sie jetzt schreiben, ist entweder fürchterlich oder sehr gut.” BENEDICT WELLS

Picture Credits Illustrations Fig. 1 © Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (Inv. no ART 246171); fig. 2 © Ministero dei beni e delle ­ ttività culturali e del turismo, Polo Museale della Toscana, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena / Bridgeman Images; a figs. 3, 19 © Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels (Ms. 9232, fol. 448v; Ms. 9916-17i, fol. 30r); figs. 4, 12, 13, 17, 18, 21, 29, 30 no known restrictions on publication; fig. 5 © J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Inv. no. 57.PB.2); fig. 6 © from Jerzy Miziolek, ‘Exempla’ di giustizia. Tre tavole di cassone di Alvise Donati, in Arte Lombarda, 131, 2001, p. 72-88, p. 73, plate 3; figs. 7, 10 © The National Gallery, London (Inv. no. NG1125.1; Inv. no. NG3123); fig. 8 © from Claudia Brink & Martin Warnke (eds.), Der Bilderatlas MNEMOSYNE, (Gesammelte Schriften, II 1.2), Berlin, 2012, p. 90-91, Tafel 49; fig. 9 © Victoria & Albert Museum, London (Inv. no. 425-1869); fig. 11 © from Andrea Bayer (ed.), Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, (exh. cat.), New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008, p. 313, cat. 144; figs. 14, 34 © photographed by the author; fig. 15 © from James Neil, Peeps into Palestine: Strange Scenes in the Unchanging Land Illustrative of the Ever-Living Book, London, ca. 1915, p. 55; fig. 16 © British ­Museum, London; fig. 20 © RMFAB, Brussels / photo: J. Geleyns – Art Photography; fig. 22 © http://www.paoloesse.it/; fig. 23 © from Venice Lamb, Looms Past and Present: Around the Mediterranean and Elsewhere, Herting­fordbury, 2005, p. 43, plate 39.90; fig. 24 © from Paul Vandenbroeck, Azetta. ­Berbervrouwen en hun kunst, (exh. cat.), Brussels, 2000, p. 136; figs. 25, 26, 28 © from Herbert Kessler, Spiritual Seeing. P ­ icturing God’s Invisibility in ­Medieval Art, ­Philadelphia, 2000, p. 59 (3.4), color image III, image 3.4 and color image IVb; fig. 27 © ­Herbert ­Kessler, Il mandylion, in Il volto di Cristo, Giovanni Morello & Gerhard Wolf (eds.), Milan, 2000, p. 67-76, p. 76, fig. 14; fig. 31 © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; fig. 32 © from Keith Christiansen & Pierre Rosenberg (eds.), ­Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, (exh. cat.), New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008, p. 58, fig. 25; fig. 33 © from Christine Macel & Emma Lavigne (eds.), Danser sa vie: Art et danse de 1900 à nos jours, Paris, 2011, p. 133, plate 1; fig. 35 © Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin / AKG Images (Ms. Theol. Lat. Quart. 19, fol. 178v); fig. 36 © from Christoph Geissmar-Brandi & Eleonora Louis (eds.), Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, Tod, ­Vienna, 1996, p. 247; fig. 39 © Courtesy of Powys County Council; Cover image © Courtesy of the artist.

Bilderatlas I Fig. 1 © Neurdein Frères/Neurdein/Roger-Viollet, Paris; figs. 2, 4 © TopFoto.co.uk; fig. 3 © Société Française d'Archéologie et Ministère de la Culture (France) - Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine - diffusion RMN; fig. 5 © Leiden University Libraries (Inv. no. MM.502/001); fig. 6 © Promoter Digital Gallery, http://­ digitalgallery.promoter.it/items/show/1473; fig. 7 © The University of Edinburgh; fig. 8 © Louis Vert/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet, Paris; fig. 9 © TopFoto / EUFD; figs. 10, 11 © Etnografiska museet, Stockholm; fig. 12 © Lynda Oua, larbaanathirathen.blogspot.com; figs. 13a, 13b no known restrictions on publication.

Bilderatlas II Courtesy of the artist Edita Dermontaité.

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Index nominum Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

A

D

Aaron  38, 65 Abgar, King of Edessa 85 Aegeria 19, 20, 106 Aemilia 13 Alberti, Leon Battista  22, 78 f., 114 Amirani 40 Amos  13, 31, 33, 36 Andritzky, Michael 32 Anubis 40 Anzieu, Didier  14, 57, 71 f., 80, 82 Apollo 73 Aristotle  58, 73 Artemis 65 Artemisia II of Caria 106 Augustine  21, 28, 45

Delaunay, Robert 82 Delaunay, Sonia 82, 83 Deleuze, Gilles  71 f., 79, 115 Didi-Huberman, Georges 116 Dionysus  38, 73 Donati, Alvise 22, 22 Douglas, Mary  37, 58 Du Cange, Carolus du Fresne 45

B Barthes, Roland  68, 73 Bateson, Gregory 58 Bayer, Andrea 28 Beard, Mary 21 Benedict of Nursia  45 ff., 46, 50 Bing, Gertrude 22 Boden, Leonard  103 Brodsky, David 37 Butters, Suzanne B. 59

C Camenae 19 Cerasano, Susan P. 29 Chastity 21, 21 Chevalier, Jean 57 Christ  28, 66 f., 66, 69, 85, 86, 87, 109 Codreano, Lizica 82, 83 Coninxloo, Jan van 20, 20 Cummings, E. E. 51

E Echo  80 ff., 81 Egenhofer, Sebastian  63, 77 Eliot, T. S. 77 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland 13, 15 ff., 16, 17, 21, 28 ff., 81 ff., 102

Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom 102, 103

Elkins, James 60 Eratosthenes  14, 95 ff., 117 Ettinger, Bracha L. 114

F Fischer, Ernst  14, 57, 77 ff., 83 Francesco Di Giorgio Martini  Francis, Duke of Anjou  15, 107 Francis, Sam  88 Frau Holle 36 Frères, Neurdein  52, 56 Freud, Sigmund 71

G Gheerbrant, Alain 57 Giglioli, Giorgio  53, 56 God (Christian)  22, 67 f., 85 f., 110 Gombrich, Ernst  63, 83 f. Gower, George 15, 16

21

128

Index nominum

Gregory the Great 45, 46, 48 Guattari, Félix 79

H Hatoum, Mona  79 ff. Hauer, Thomas 32 Hildegard of Bingen 48 Hotson, Leslie  18, 106

I Ingold, Tim  13, 57 ff., 69 f., 82 f., 115 Isabella d’Este  22, 25

J Jeremiah 42 John Climacus  Judith  21, 22 Juno  18, 22

Mary  48, 67, 85 f., 110 Maude, Henry Evans 32 Maude, Honor 32 Medusa 39 Metsys, Quentin, the Younger 15, 17 Miriam 38 Montrose, Louis 28 Moretto da Brescia  27, 28, 106 Moroni, Giovanni Battista 25, 26 Moses  38, 67 Mueller, Hans-Friedrich 20

N Narcissus  80 ff., 81, 84 Neil, James  31, 34 ff., 35, 43, 59 Neroni, Bartolomeo 25, 25 Nicomachus of Gerasa  96 ff. North, Stella 82

28

K

O

Kairos 74 Kemp, Wolfgang 73 Kessler, Herbert 66 Klee, Paul 59 Knapp, Bettina L. 44 Kockelman, Paul  57 f., 95 Krauss, Rosalind  63, 69 f. Kürti, László  41 ff.

Origen  68, 78 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 

L Lamb, Venice 62 Le Somptier, René 82, 83 Leone, Massimo 48 Levy, Arnaud 78 Lucretia 21, 21 Luke  36, 109

M Mansel, Jean  19 Mantegna, Andrea  Marduk 32

19, 105 f.

P Paster, Gail K.  29 f. Patai, Raphael  36 ff. Penelope 21, 21 Petrarch  15, 21 Plichta, Peter 101 Proust, Marcel 73 Prudentia 18, 19

R Rachel 31 Rashi 38 Roy, Lucien 

52, 56

S 22 ff., 23, 24

Semon, Richard Wolfgang 114 Siegert, Bernhard  78, 111 Socrates 117

Index nominum

Solomon 22, 22 Sophonisba  22, 106

T Tiamat 32 Tuccia  13, 18, 20 ff., 22, 23, 25, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 45, 81

U Ulam, Stanislaw 101, 101 Uutar 36

V Valerius Maximus  18, 20, 25 van den Bosch, Jan Willem 38 van Loo, Sofie  74, 114 Vandenbroeck, Paul  71 f. Veronica, Saint 85, 87 Vert, Louis  53, 56 Vesta  18, 38 Vestal virgins  13, 15, 18 ff., 22, 23, 25, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 36

Virginia 

21, 22

W Waldal  97, 100 Warburg, Aby  14, 22 f., 24, 73 f. Whitney, Geoffrey 28 Williams, Deanne  15, 18 Wynne-Davies, Marion 29

Y Yeats, William Butler 70

Z Ziegler, Georgianna 28 Ziegler, Günter 95

129

Colophon Shorter versions of this essay appeared in Around the Sieve. Motif, Symbol, Hermeneutics, in Review of Irish Studies, 2, 1, 2018, p. 57–75, and in Textile. The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 2018 (on line). Stephanie Heremans (Bilderatlas) is currently preparing a PhD in art history at KU Leuven. She works on the project ‘Kairós, or the Right Moment. Nachleben and Iconology’. Her research predominantly focuses on the transformations of the visual representation of Kairós, the time god of opportunity, in the late medieval and early modern period. Edita Dermontaité (Bilderatlas) is preparing a practice-based PhD in visual arts at KU Leuven, LUCA – Faculty of the Arts. She focuses on the act of listening in visual arts, particularly on listening to sounds of daily life, and explores how this conscious act can be embodied in such forms as drawing, printmaking and installation. Ellen Harlizius-Klück (Epilogue) is Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant PENELOPE: A Study of Weaving as Technical Mode of Existence at the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science of Deutsches Museum, Munich. From 2012 to 2014 she was Marie-Curie-Research Fellow of the Gerda-Henkel Foundation at the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen. Her field of specialization is the technology of ancient weaving with a focus on its cognitive and logical concepts and construction principles as they appear in Greek cultural and scientific production. I am grateful to Paul Arblaster, Dominique Bauer, Edita Dermontaité, Daniel ­Franco, ­Ellen Harlizius-Klück, Catherine Harper, Stephanie Heremans, Han Lamers, Stefania ­Marzo, Sophia Rochmes, Hedwig Schwall, Avinoam Shalem, Lizzy van Rijswijck, Laura Tack, ­Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Obed Vleugels and Lars Zieke. The cover image is by the Lebanese artist Johanne Allard.