2:54pm: (But I Think It's The Red Cross Dragon...)
From The Associated Press Sunday, April 7, 2002:
Uffington, England Galloping across the Berkshire Downs, yet never getting anywhere, the White Horse of Uffington is one of the great mysteries of the English countryside.
The stylized figure, some 360 feet long, was gouged from the white chalk bedrock some 3,000 years ago. But why and by whom remains an enigma.
"The latest theory is that it was dedicated to the Celtic goddess Epona who represented the triumph of good over evil," says Sharon Smith, curator of a small museum behind the village church in Uffington.
Over the centuries, legends and folklore have gathered around the horse. Historians in the 18th century argued the elegant design was ordered by King Alfred to celebrate his victory over the pagan Danes in 871.
Others say the design was cut by Hengist, the leader of Anglo Saxon hordes in the 5th century, in the image of the horse on his standard. Folklore also claims the chalk carving is not a horse at all, but the dragon killed by St. George, England's patron saint.
"None of these myths can tell us who made the horse or why," says David Miles, chief archaeologist at English Heritage. "But we can say when it was made and how."
Miles surveyed the site in the 1990s and discovered the horse was made by digging trenches 3 feet deep and filling it with rammed chalk.
Using a process called Optical Stimulated Luminescence, Miles and his team from the Oxford Archaeological Unit determined the lower levels of chalk were last exposed to sunlight in the late Bronze Age, some 3,000 years ago. "Which makes it by far the oldest chalk hill figure in England," Miles said.
Well, that the AP's take. Here's mine: I think it's the dragon slayed by St. George (Spenser's Red Cross Knight). Edmund Spenser wrote The Faerie Queen, an historical allegory of good versus evil, between 1580 and 1590. Spenser drew heavily on the historic pictoral legend of the soldier-saint, St. George (England's patron saint), and on the rich pictoral history embodying the legend, in particular the cornerstone depiction of St. George Slaying The Dragon, by Renaissance master Vittore Carpaccio.
St. George Slaying The Dragon
In their introduction to Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, (Odyssey Press, 1965) Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele discuss the detail of the Carpaccios painting in relation to Spensers work:
In the foreground of Carpaccios picture are the central figures of the combat. On the right is St. George mounted and fully armed as a medieval knight. His lance has just pierced the dragon through the throat and has broken. On the left the great winged dragon is poised to strike. The ground on which the combat takes place is littered with the mutilated bodies and the dried bones of the dragons victims, and the dragons tiny offspring run about. Behind St. George at the extreme right is the princess standing in prayer, and behind her is a rocky hill whose narrow winding paths lead to a domed church at the top. At the extreme left behind the dragon is a marsh full of skulls and a skeleton. Behind this is a great walled city lying on a plain. Its most prominent structure a three-tiered tower upon whose baconies crowds stand watching the combat. In the background between the two central figures is a tree. The limbs growing to the left are withered while those that grow to the right are green with leaves. Although Carpaccios St. George is generally faithful to the legend of literary tradition, still the background is richly allegorical. And it is this quality which makes the picture so close in intention to Book I of The Faerie Queene.
The art historian Erwin Panofsky has noted that the division of landscape background into two halves of symbolically contrasting character is common in late-medieval and renaissance religious painting.6 The low plain at the left in Carpaccios picture represents what Panofsky calls the aera sub lege, mankind bound to the old law of Moses and thus subject to sin, death, and hell. The high rocky ground on the right represents the aera sub gratia, man under the new dispensation, redeemed from sin and death by Christs sacrifice and his grace. The tree behind the central figures is a symbol of the same opposition between grace and damnation. The barren and withered limbs on the left represent not only the sterility of life under the old law; they are also symbolic of the origin of mans bondage to sin and death, for they represent that tree in paradise whose fruit condemned Adam and, in Adam, all mankind to death. The living branches on the right represent the death-dealing tree of knowledge transformed into the tree of life by Christ, the new Adam. By his death on the cross, man is rescued from death and offered eternal life.
6Studies in Iconology, Harper Torchbooks, 1962, p. 64.
Well, its a little heady here, that's true, and a little over the top on the religious end. But that was the Renaissance, can't change that; and the explication is relevant and accurate, and appreciative of the art and literature of these wonderful Renaissance masters. Red Cross Knight--now there's a pilgrim in paradise...
Posted by cronish at April 07, 2002 02:58 PM