layout: single title: “Met Day 4: Joan in space and time” tags: met nyc travel
I didn’t have a chance to write up my notes earlier. Here I talk about how Joan relates to space and time in the painting.
A painting cut in two
It was only after looking at this painting many times that I saw that it has cut almost exactly in half into two vertical sections. The dividing line is mostly clearly seen by looking at the house in the background. The right edge of this house creates a visual discontinuity. Once I noticed it, I could not help but think that it’s almost like a break in reality. It reminds me of other visual works where the audience understand that something unearthly is at hand. The uncanniness of this break in reality echoes the ghostly supernatural image of the three saints.
The left half of the painting is more brightly colored. The right half is a darker shade. I interpret this as as a journey in time, from left to right. I’ll have more to say about this at the end of this post
A path through time
At first glance, this painting does not depict a progression of time in the manner the way the Column of Trajan or other examples of narrative art.
The painting seems to occur in one moment. On closer inspection, I believe that we can see Joan’s journey in both time and space by tracing the literal path on the floor. We start at the house in the background, then follow the path through the garden in the well-lit left half of the painting, to the spinning station, and then to Joan in the foreground. This is what has occurred in the past. Joan’s otherworldly gaze is the present. The future is the wild path into the forest on the dark half of the painting in the right, receding into the midground and background. The future is dark, uncertain, and possibly full of danger.
This is part of the tangle of the painting. It does not follow some of the Western conventions of time (or natural eye movement) of left to right and top to down. The path is winding, like the brambles in the left foreground, like the branches on Joan’s tree.
One can see the journey that has already occurred, and a hint of the journey to come. Joan left her house to go work at the spinning station. Along the way, St. Michael, St. Margaret, and St. Catherine came to reveal divine visions to her. Joan is thunderstruck, her stool falls over, and she wanders away from the spinning station to stare at things unseen by us. Ahead of her are the wars to come.
The past and the future neatly dovetail the left and right halves I identified earlier.
Joan caught between her past and future
On the left half of the painting is civilization, domesticity, safety. It has marks of civilization: a house, cultivated flowers. The left is her past. On the right side is wilderness, danger, the unknown. It is the tangled path that is unknown to her. But we know her future: hardship, struggle, glory, martyrdom.
In between the past and the future, Joan stands transfixed in a pregnant present.