Albrecht Durer, "Holy Family with Three Hares"
Christmas is now less than a week away. The practical meaning of this sentence is
that you have no more time to be reading random blog posts than I have to be
writing them. But, then, again, I’m left
with the conundrum of the old ars longa
and the definite vita brevis, so one
plunges on. In this household we career
through pre-Christmas from crisis to crisis, with this day’s crisis being the
Christmas cards. They really do need to
be on their way within forty-eight hours.
I have been printing our own since about 1970, when the first Vandercook
arrived ; but this year the premature descent of chaos, combining with age,
infirmity, and a serious writing obligation conspired against me. God rewarded me with a miracle. While searching for a lost book—which I never
did find of course—I stumbled upon a large
cache of old cards unused by anyone but the spiders who seem to have been
nesting in them for the last decade.
Over the
years we have had a wide variety of designs.
The old Christmas blocks from the Twenties and Thirties that I used to
find among the junk bought at auction are now so retro as to look
futurist. And early in my Christmas card
career I had a reasonably high quality set of four of Durer’s Christmas
etchings reproduced. Among the lesser
known curses of the digital age is that the photoengraver has disappeared from
the earth, so my line etchings are now antiques approaching the value of their
prototypes. But they are large, barely
fitting into an A-6 envelope.
Of the
Durers my own favorite is the so-called “Holy Family with Three Hares,” which
features a pretty well-fed Madonna and Child, and an emaciated Joseph looking
approximately 102. This was the image that
led me to do extensive research into Joseph iconography, and the place to do
that is in the pages of the Cahiers de
Joséphologie. I’ll wager I’ve got
you there. There is a certain genre of
magazine that seems to exist only in the waiting rooms of dentists’ offices. Mainly they have as their subject matter the
latest trends in aluminum tubing or the undiscovered charm of picturesque
shopping malls in Passaic County. The
plausible theory would seem to be that people who are waiting in dentists’
offices are probably so preoccupied with premonitions of the root canal that
stocking Harper’s or The New Yorker, which actually require a
paid subscription, would be a frivolous expense. Since people are only pretending to read
anyway, a dog-eared copy of Dental
Prophylaxis Today for May, 2013, will serve quite well. But even in these
grim antechambers, brilliant with fluorescent lighting and shiny plastic
laminate chairs, you will not find the Cahiers
de Joséphologie, a treat reserved exclusively for obscure medieval scholars
and sub-sub-librarians.
Durer shook
off this mortal coil in 1528. But don’t
think that dead white males, just because they are my specialty, are the only
artists in our salon. We have, whenever
possible, tried to patronize up-and-coming painters as well. Somewhere around 1988 Luke Fleming, then about
ten years old, produced for his Sunday School class at Trinity Church the now
famous sequence known to art historians as “Luke’s Luke”—referring, of course,
to the most tender and feminist of the four evangelists, and the one whose
treatment of the Christmas legend is regarded by many scholars as the most
poetic and inventive of the four of them. Luke, who as we know from extra-canonical
sources produced a portrait of the Virgin, was certainly the only practicing
painter among them. Fleming was particularly
struck by what he called the “urgency of the kinetic moment” suggested by one
textual detail (“And they came with haste…”, Luke 1:16)—a sentence written of
the shepherds, though Fleming’s fecund imagination reassigned it to the magi of
Saint Matthew. Thus was born “Wise Man
in a Hurry”. I was, as I say, fortunate
enough to stumble upon a store of our old cards, which, though mainly
consisting of a more conventional (camelback) treatment by an unknown
commercial artist from Fall River, MA, included several exemplars of “Hurry”.
Luke Fleming the Younger, "Wise Man in a Hurry"
Now, of
course it is I who am in a hurry—too rushed to explain what I learned from the Cahiers de Joséphologie about the
insistence of certain influential theologians of the fifteenth century that all
paintings the Holy Family clearly depict in Joseph a geezer too old to cut the
mustard. We have to get our cards into the
mail, among other things. But it
suddenly occurs to me that a blog post itself might serve as well as any three by
five piece of printer’s stock to send holiday greetings to all our far-flung
friends in many lands. So to all of you
a very merry Christmas, and throughout our whole needy planet let there be
peace and good will to all.
