21 December: Winter Solstice
To mark the winter solstice today, here is a short article written in The Guardian by art critic Jonathan Jones in 2012, entitled: Winter solstice art: the dark night rises
The Calling of St Matthew by Caravaggio, 1599-1600 (Image: Wikipedia)
"Halfway out of the dark", as Doctor Who put it in that Christmas special with the flying shark. To continue the Time Lord's observation, humans have always celebrated the middle of winter, when the dark days reach their limit and the light begins its gradual return.
The solstice: the shortest day, the longest night. A deeply holy time long before Christianity, when the rich neolithic settlers of Orkney left their stone houses to witness the midwinter sun strike the chamber deep in the mound of Maeshowe. But is the solstice only about longing for light? Is it not also about enjoying the deepest dark?
As many artists have known, darkness is a potent marvel. Rembrandt's honeyed dark is a draught of profundity without which the gold and silver of his fabrics would cloy, the luminous humanity of his faces fade. Rembrandt learned about darkness as the dramatic Other of light from the artists of Utrecht, who got it from youthful wild nights in Rome, where they copied Caravaggio.
In Caravaggio's Calling of St Matthew, men skulk in a dimly lit room at a table, up to no good. As Christ gestures towards the one he wants, a ray of light shoots down the wall towards the lost souls. Yet Christ himself remains in deep shadow, which sets off his glowing flesh. Darkness for Caravaggio is the inky reality of life on Earth, out of which his lantern reveals truth.
The night is the time of contemplation, isolation, and revelation. It is the night in which Mary Magdalene sits in contemplation in the paintings of Georges de la Tour; in which people witness a terrifying experiment in the art of Joseph Wright of Derby; through which Picasso has a child lead a blind minotaur.
Night is the time of imagination. From Goya's Black Paintings to Max Ernst's Pieta, or Revolution by Night, art has found its strangest images in the dark.
Surely, when the ancients opened the barrows at midwinter it was not only to pray for the growth of the sun. As that slim shaft of light hit the rock wall of the chamber, it revealed a shadowy world of myth and magic. Peering into those shadows, they paid their respects to the power of the dark.”