Johannes Scott, September 2024
For the 2024 Venice Biennale, titled Strangers Everywhere, Walter Ford’s art exhibition titled Lion of God surveys our estranged relationship with animals, for which he focusses on the lion as it exists in our collective imagination. His monumental paintings are not of the real lion that trophy hunters shoot in the wilderness, skin and behead. Instead of this speechless, tangible lion that exists outside linguistic enclosure, Ford shows the symbolic lion with its fangs and crown of mane – the trophy that says, I am King. He probes the gaze of this lion, burdened by the weight of cultural signs stacked on its back since antiquity. Ford asserts that during his survey, he found the greatest enemy of the wild lion is its linguistic location in human culture. The curator, Udo Kittelmann foregrounds the social context of the symbolic lion by placing Ford’s art within a site-specific venue in Venice.
The venue for Lion of God is Ateneo Veneto of Sciences, Literature and Arts, an active cultural institution near St. Mark’s Square, established by Napoleon in 1812. Originally constructed in 1471 to provide spiritual support to those sentenced to death by hanging, the building was restructured in the 16th century to its present layout by Venetian Renaissance artists, architects and sculptors. This prestigious academic institution is a treasure trove for researchers, conserving and maintaining an archive of manuscripts and documents spanning the entire history of the Western cannon. Its library alone contains over 60 000 volumes.
For the Ateneo Reading Room, Tintoretto, in 1580, painted the famous altarpiece titled, Saint Jerome’s Vision of the Virgin Mary. Jerome, a 4th century translator, is central to Venice establishing the winged lion as the city’s emblem. His Biblica Sacra Vulgata is the primary translation of holy scriptures from Greek into Latin, and foundation for medieval understanding of Christianity. In his Vulgata, he connotes the Apostle Mark with that of a lion because Mark’s gospel begins with the analogy that an evangelic cry is akin to a lion’s roar in the wilderness. Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice was built to venerate Mark’s relics, and after adopting Saint Mark as its patron in the 9th century, the winged lion became the enduring symbol of Venice.
In addition, when Tintoretto painted Saint Jerome’s vision for the Reading Room, it is likely he had read The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine, printed a century earlier in Venice. In Tintoretto’s time, and throughout the Middle Ages, The Golden Legend was one of the most widely published books, with editions that exceeded that of the Bible. The Golden Legend tells the famous story of a lion in Jerome’s life, and a full copy of the tale, printed to size-up with Ford’s painting, hangs adjacent to his work in the Ateneo’s Aula Magna Hall, at the entrance to the exhibition. In Saint Jerome’s Vision of the Virgin Mary, which for the duration of the exhibition hangs next to Ford’s work in the Tommaseo Hall, Tintoretto painted this same lion portrayed in The Golden Legend. This same lion is Ford’s pivotal point of reference in The Lion of God. The difference between Ford and Tintoretto’s version of this allegoric lion is that Tintoretto depicts the lion as background figure, in the shadow of Jerome, near his feet. Ford, on the other hand, foregrounds the lion as central focus, disrupting the conventional anthropocentric perspective.
Visitors to The Lion of God are invited to read the full script of The Golden Legend. The story goes that a wild lion came limping into Jerome’s monastery with a thorn stuck in its paw. Jerome removed the thorn from the injured lion, and the two became friends. He then utilized the lion to guard their donkey on its daily route, bringing firewood to the monastery. One day, the lion fell asleep, and the donkey was stolen by caravan traders. However, the monks falsely accused the lion of eating the donkey. As punishment, the lion was tasked with transporting the firewood. Later, the lion rescued the stolen donkey from the caravan traders and returned it to the monastery. The monks then exonerated the lion, allowing it to remain in the service of the monastery.
The Golden Legend, as was customary in the Middle Ages, allegorizes events for eschatological significance. The legend presents the lion as sign from God - obedient, but it neglects to show its predisposition in the face of human bias. Walton Ford’s painting, titled Culpabilis, portrays the lion as the central protagonist, depicting its caring role in saving the donkey while enduring the weight of its disposition. Ford’s objective is to insert ethical correction, reinterpret The Golden Legend, and recast the image of the lion in Tintoretto’s Saint Jerome’s Vision of the Virgin Mary. In other words, Ford aims to disrupt the anthropocentric representation of the lion and invite us to imagine ourselves in the place of the lion – the lion seeing us and forming an opinion of humanity. To fully understand this contemporary concern with anthropocentrism, we need to look back at its ideological foundation – the time when Westerners began to see animals differently.
Anthropocentrism and our conception of animals are deeply embedded in literature, particularly in the poetic writings of philosophy and religion. Anthropocentric texts often depict humans by drawing analogies to animals. In antiquity, before the rise of anthropocentrism, humans and animals shared the same symbolic representation in the Greco-Roman classification of zoe. In contrast, bios was reserved for the higher domain of gods and immortals. When these ancient texts were rediscovered and translated from Greek to Latin, the pagan animistic understanding of zoe was ‘lost’ in translation. Zoe no longer included the speaking animal, and humans were elevated to bios, the realm of the divine. Consequently, humans and nature became two separate realms of life.
In addition, the Renaissance introduced a schema that reinforced this separation, known as the Scala Naturae. In this hierarchical diagram, man is depicted as leading a progression, upright, followed by various crawling animals, symbolizing man’s position as torchbearer of evolution – with his back turned to the animals. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida emphasizes that the leader of the pack is not merely walking away; rather, man is following an idea, a religio-philosophical thought – he is pursuing his ideal self. This abstract thought – exemplified by Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” – serves as his ‘evidence’ of superiority over animals. Consequently, the animal becomes man’s object of study, perceived as a lower form of life, devoid of a true concept of death or suffering. As Derrida puts it: “the animal perishes but never dies, it has no relation worthy of the name of death.” Unworthy of the concept of suffering, an animal is looked at as a thing that is incapable of seeing. “From Descartes to the present time,” Derrida tells us, “philosophy has addressed and looked at the animal, but there is no thematic, theoretical, or philosophical account that it has ever been seen by the animal.”
This hierarchy operative in philosophical discourse has its roots in metaphysics, which is always constituted by metaphor. While metaphysical ideas often struggle with elaborate explanations, metaphor succinctly conveys the same ideas. For example, in Ford’s metaphoric painting titled Phantom, his symbolic lion demonstrates how the natural figure of the lion is idealized into an abstract meaning – a ‘blind’ lion artificially constructed. In other words, the philosophical metaphor lacks physical properties; its natural figure is lost, and it no longer serves as a signifier prompting different meanings in different contexts. The ‘true’ signifier is replaced by a privileged signified – a ‘non-true’ figure that means one thing, and one thing only. Metaphysical illumination obscures clarity and fosters autonomous thought, Derrida explains, “Gradually, the metaphorical element disappears, and by custom, the word changes from metaphorical to literal expression” and image and meaning can no longer be distinguished.
In the curatorial statement for the exhibition, Kittleman recalls modern philosopher Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the speechlessness of animals is the great sorrow of nature. Reflecting on the lion’s melancholic gaze in Ford’s painting titled Apparition, Kittleman wonders if its lament gestures the symbolic burden imposed by human culture. Addressing our symbolic fantasy with animals, Kittleman invokes Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who suggested that once we perceive this world as an illusion and a phantasm, we can view everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. “As we reach the culmination of this somnambulistic odyssey, beyond the dissolving thoughts and memories, freed from the shackles of guilt and mourning, only a phantom remains,” Pessoa writes. In this context, the poet means that for us to reimagine the lion’s natural figure and see its suffering, we must reconfigure its imaginary role in our symbolic fantasy.
Kittleman’s curation integrates Ford’s work with the permanent display of Renaissance bronzes and wall murals in the Ateneo interior. While Ford’s work is fully illuminated, the permanent display remains in darkness, except for small spotlights focused specifically on the animals depicted within the Renaissance background scenery. This unusual use of illumination highlights Ford’s negation of anthropocentric focus. Ford’s work foregrounds Tintoretto’s symbolic lion as phantom, an apparition that, on one hand, casts humans in a divine light, and on the other, holds them culpable for their bias. The reflective gaze of Ford’s lion challenges visitors to consider the lion’s perspective on our symbolic world. The exhibition is on view until 22 September 2024.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.