Image of the Week: Vitruvian Star
© 2022 D. Yael Bernhard
Vitruvian Star is the first image I'm writing about from my newly-published calendar, The Jewish Eye 5783/2023 Calendar of Art. This is a small acrylic painting, just 8"x8" on watercolor paper. It did not take long to paint, but it took months to resolve from initial pencil sketches to finished painting.
The spark that inspired the image was my deep dive into the art of Leonardo DaVinci in a class on Italian Renaissance Art that I took at Empire State College two years ago – one of my pandemic projects. At my request, my advisor arranged the independent study just for me – one of the great things about ESC. I had long wanted to delve into Renaissance art, as I had studied the periods both before and after, and wanted to fill this lacuna in my knowledge of art history. Such a fertile time the Renaissance was! Yet it was not a time in which Jewish artists flourished (or necessarily survived), nor could they participate in an art world dominated by the powerful patronage of the Catholic Church.
My studies led me to Leonardo's famous drawing, Vitruvian Man, which depicts the concept of sacred geometry as conceived by the Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius sought to bring the structure of human form into divine relationship with pure geometry, and to translate these sacred proportions into architecture. What grand architecture it was! Truly, the atriums, porticos, and cathedrals of Renaissance Italy are among the great achievements of humanity, and arguably the most noble and enduring artistic contributions of Christianity.
Yet I noticed a shape was missing from the essential structure of this drawing. The human form is there, the circle is there, the square is there – but where are the triangles? I thought of the two triangles of the Magen David – the Shield of David, or Jewish star. One points heavenward, the other toward the earth. Eight smaller triangles surround a central hexagon. Fitting this into the circle, the figure's feet touch the downward point of one triangle, while his two arms align with the upper points. The head centers perfectly in the uppermost red triangle. The knees intersect with two cross points.
After much trial and error, I brought the star into physical relationship with the geometry of the drawing. Yet the image still didn't feel complete. I wanted to cross-fertilize my hybrid creation with not just Jewish form, but also Jewish spirit. I pondered this for months, leaving the sketches aside until finally the answer came around Martin Luther King Day, when I stumbled across a quote by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, friend of King, in his seminal book The Sabbath. Quoting his own father, an Orthodox rabbi who hailed from a long line of eminent rabbis in Poland, Heschel wrote:
"My father defines Judaism as a religion centrally concerned with holiness in time. Some religions build great cathedrals or temples, but Judaism constructs the Sabbath as an architecture of time. Creating holiness in time requires a different sensibility . . . it is not in space but in time that we find God's likeness. In the Bible, no place or thing is holy by itself."
It was the element of time – and what today we might call "mindful awareness" – that I needed to bring into the painting. Immediately I knew what to do. I filled the shapes with the changing skies of daytime, night, and dusk. The innermost sections bear the colors of sunrise and sunset. Now the figure – androgynous, colorless, and more universal than the man dictated by Leonardo's patriarchal era – stands at the center of a wheel of moving clouds, a cycle of hours and seasons, a rainbow of changing colors. And at the center of that wheel, within the figure's naval, an eye symbolic of awareness itself appears, the Eternal indwelling presence within every mortal human.
My quest was fulfilled. Just as the artists of the Renaissance retrojected their presence into ancient Rome and Greece, standing on the shoulders of their Classical predecessors and commenting on the arts they most revered, in painting Vitruvian Star I have striven to retroject a Jewish presence into the Renaissance, and made a small comment of my own.
What would the Renaissance have been like if Jewish artists had been commissioned to create the frescoes and ceilings, the murals and marble statues that their Christian counterparts so fervently produced?
I can just imagine.
You can find The Jewish Eye 5783/2023 Calendar of Art in my webstore or on Amazon. If you're local, you can buy it directly from me; please respond to this post for more information.
A good week to all!
D Yael Bernhard