The Eyes of the Goddess: The Secret of Red Catherine

It all starts with this painting: Caterina Rossa  (Red Catherine) painted by the Neapolitan master Giovanni Ricca, probably around 1630. I saw it in Naples, a few months ago, and Caterina has been lingering in my mind ever since.

Now, when something makes this effect on you, it means that there is some meaning that you can't catch exactly, but it is there. So, I set Caterina's face as the screen background of my PC and I kept looking at it every day. I knew that, at some moment, Caterina would speak to me and tell me her secret. 

And she did. In part, the dark/white dichotomy of her face immediately hinted at the Moon Goddess. But there was more, it was not just a dark/white face that was staring at me. Penetrating that secret took longer, but I think that now I have it, although maybe not completely, yet. But something went through. 

The flash came a few days ago when I was visiting a museum that exhibited some medieval Madonnas. I looked at them, and the face of Red Catherina flashed in my mind; why that? And then I had it: the elongated eyes; a typical feature of Medieval Madonnas. Look at this one by Giotto. (ca. 1320, National Gallery, Washington D.C.) 

Not all Madonnas painted by Giotto have these elongated eyes, but several do and, in general, you can often find this kind of eyes in many Medieval paintings. Note also how  that these slant eyes are typical of female figures: male figures of saints and prophets normally have round eyes. 

It may well be that Giovanni Ricca was inspired by Giotto or by some other Medieval image when he painted her wife as such a richly symbolic figure. Yet, that leaves a question open. Why those elongated eyes in Medieval Art? Well, it turns out that they are a characteristic of Byzantine art, too, the main source of inspiration for Medieval Art. Also there, not all Madonnas have elongated eyes, but several do. Here is, as an example, the Theotokos of Vladimir, the much venerated Vladimirskaya, created by a byzantine medieval painter. 

So, there is a thread from Ricca, to Giotto, to the unknown author of the Vladimirskaya. But where is the thread leading us to? I toured ancient Roman and Greek art, but I didn't really find faces with elongated eyes. But, if we go further back, to Etruscan art, well, there is something. Here is the sarcophagus of the spouses, (Villa Giulia, Rome)

Look at how the woman has elongated, nearly elvish eyes. Also, the man has somewhat elongated eyes, but much less. Did that Etruscan guy marry a girl from China? Not very likely. That's not supposed to be a realistic portrait; it is an iconographic convention that had some meaning for the ancient Etruscans, although nowadays it escapes us. And here, too, women have elongated eyes, but not men.  

If we keep going backward in time, we may get to something even more interesting: here is the Venus or Lady of Brassempouy, the Lady in the Hood, from Aquitaine, is a fragmentary figurine made from a tusk or mammoth ivory from the Upper Palaeolithic and about 25,000 years old, possibly the earliest representation of a human face we have.

Did the people of 25,000 years ago have the epicanthic fold that we often define as "slant eyes"? Perhaps. They lived during an ice age and the epicanthic fold is supposed to be an adaptation to cold wind and snow. So, could it be that when Giovanni Ricca painted Red Catherine he was influenced by an iconographic element that originated during the last ice age? Maybe; but I think there is more. Much more. 

Now, take a look at this, one of the female figurines found in Ubaid, in Mesopotamia, that go back to 7000 years ago. 

Now, these are slant eyes! And if you look at the few male figurines found in Ubaid, they have different eyes, not round, but not so elongated, either. So, the conclusion is that the Goddess has slant eyes because those are the eyes of a snake. The goddess is a snake.

What that means still escapes me, but it casts the Biblical legend of Eden in a completely different light. Eve and the serpent, actually, were the same person. It was the Moon Goddess that disappeared from human consciousness for millennia, but that somehow resurfaced in the face of a Neapolitan woman named "Caterina Rossa" who lived during the 17th century and who was so splendidly painted by her husband, Giovanni Ricca. 

Tearing apart the veil of lies: Yelena Isinbayeva speaks

Yelena Isinbayeva, Russian pole vaulting champion, speaks out after having been excluded from the Olympic Games in Rio. 

We are so used to being lied at in TV that we tend to classify as "lies" anything and everything we hear and see on a screen. Several people have reacted in this way to this video of Yelena Isinbayeva, Russian Olympic champion, who was overwhelmed by emotion during her speech. "It is a piece of theater," some said in the comments. "It is just to hide her guilt." 

Allow me to think otherwise. I can't believe that this is theater; this is not lying, it cannot be. This woman is speaking the truth, she is speaking from her heart, she is genuinely showing her feelings for her team having been unjustly discriminated for political reasons. That's what you would expect from someone who is the daughter of a plumber and of a shop assistant and who surely was never trained on how to be a politician. 

And about accusing her of doping, that's the silliest thing I can imagine. Doping is a plague in sport, yes, but it is mainly done to improve endurance in sports such as swimming or cycling. But pole vaulting doesn't require brutal endurance, it requires skill, intelligence, concentration, control, and grace. And, of this last quality, this woman has plenty. Look at her, jumping toward the sky.

God is a girl: homage to Yelena Isinbayeva

If God is really a girl, She must look a little like Yelena Isinbayeva: Russian pole vaulting champion.

And if God is a girl, hell is the place reserved for the idiots who didn't want her to participate in the Brazilian Olympics!

The beauty of the human body

Yelena Isinbayeva: Russian pole vault champion. This clip doesn't really require comments; just watch it! But note how the idiotic politicized bureaucrats who run the Olympic committees forbade this woman from participating in the Brazilian Olympic games. Which is just as well; they don't deserve her. 

Moon Goddess

The Goddess goes through many cycles of varied lengths, and She returns over and over in many forms. Here, She appears in a painting by the Neapolitan master Giovanni Ricca, probably made around 1630.

Note the play of light and shadows on the face of this beautiful woman - reminding those of the half moon. The human features of this image are, probably, those of Ricca's wife, Caterina Rossa ("Red Catherine") as she appears in a red dress in the full painting. But she is just an avatar of the true Goddess.

If you ever thought that Baroque painting was all about mannerism, think it over. If you think that no Baroque master could emulate the master of them all, Caravaggio, think it over. This is a painting that, alone, can justify the existence of the human species as it evolved in order to, eventually, produce it.

But women partake the nature of the Moon Goddess in many forms, and sometimes you don't even need a master painter to see it appear, as it does in this image of Ugo Bardi's daughter, Donata, photographed in 2016 at the Escher Museum in Delft, Holland.

Caravaggio: the epiphany and the sacrifice

Caravaggio is not a painter: he is a prophet. Caravaggio doesn't show what you can see, he shows what nobody can see. Caravaggio doesn't see, he penetrates. Caravaggio's painting are not about religion, they are a religion. Caravaggio does not paint, he reveals. And these are merely some characteristics of a painter that has gone beyond the mere world of things and who found ways to show things, while at the same time showing what's behind things. He is Caravaggio. That's all.

Look at this painting: the martyrdom of St. Ursula. Perhaps the last painting Caravaggio painted, it is the extreme synthesis of all what Caravaggio had painted before. This is the ultimate epiphany of the divinity, shown as the final crowning of a sequence of images that followed Caravaggio's own existence on this world.

The painting shows the death of Ursula, British princess, who refused to marry Attila, king of the Huns, who in revenge killed her and all her retinue of 11,000 virgins. A naive story for our modern tastes but not for Caravaggio, who has seen the deep meaning of the myth. The divine spirit can take a human form; can step into the material world for a short while. Then, it has to return. And returning, for the divine being, means death for its human form but, for the divine form, it is resurrection.

It is the basis of the Christian myth, but it goes much deeper and much earlier; it is the most ancient myth of all: the sacrificial myth that goes to the very center of the interaction of the divine and the human spheres.

And that's what Caravaggio is showing to us. Ursula, hit by an arrow, is the human form of the divine spirit. She had already appeared in an earlier painting by Caravaggio; in his "Our Lady of the Pilgrims".

Perhaps the same woman, surely the same spiritual entity. Caravaggio has been starting with this divine epiphany to end it with the one of Ursula. It is a complete universal cycle in two paintings: the same creature that has appeared for a brief existence on the lower sphere, to leave the material world in a spiritual apotheosis, later on.

Only Caravaggio could do it. 

The mysterious power of Caravaggio

Caravaggio: the Martyrdom of St. Ursula (ca. 1610).


I have a curious story to tell about this painting by Caravaggio. A few years ago, I was in Naples for a meeting on waste management. I was taking a walk in town and I stumbled into the announcement of a special exhibition of a newly discovered Caravaggio painting. I went inside, and there it was: the martyrdom of St. Ursula, seen in public perhaps for the first time after that Caravaggio had painted it, probably just before his death, in 1610.

At that time, I was already a Caravaggio lover, not yet a Caravaggio addict, as I am now. But seeing that painting was a big step forward in that direction. And you never know what effects Caravaggio can have on you; really, it is stuff so powerful that it can shock you, or make you weep, or maybe it can push you through a multi-dimensional gate that takes you directly to the planet Tralfamadore.

What happened to me on that occasion was not as spectacular as taking me to a remote planet, but weird nevertheless. That afternoon, I took a train to Rome where I had been invited to give a talk at the convention of the Italian Radical Party. I duly spoke to the audience and, afterward, the speakers were invited for dinner, together with some politicians. We sat at a large, round table and I found myself seated near an old lady. We chatted a little and the conversation moved to Caravaggio and to the painting I had seen just that morning. It turned out that the old lady, too, was a Caravaggio lover: we are a community of addicts. She was very interested in this recently re-discovered painting; the martyrdom of St. Ursula.

In the meantime, the conversation had been going on at the table, with people engaged in some deep political discussion about I don't remember what. At some point, someone turned to me and asked me: "but, Ugo, what's your opinion?" and then he asked me what I thought of some current political event. I turned in his direction and I said, "I don't know; we were discussing the martyrdom of St. Ursula."

There was a moment of silence at the table with people looking at me, frozen. Then, they shook their heads and they restarted their political discussion, probably denying to themselves that they had heard what I had said.

I have never been invited again to another political convention; I don't know if it is because of this story, probably not. Anyway, it shows how the mysterious power of Caravaggio can appear in many forms.

About the painting itself, the martyrdom of St. Ursula, I will write another post.