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Abstract
This article starts from the so-called sieve portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. What is the meaning of this fascinating attribute she is holding in her hand? How does this sieve relate both to her political and female identity? This brings me to a wider scope on sieves and sieving in art history and anthropology. Indeed, the sieve exhibits a wide range of symbolism that extends across art history, philosophy, ethnology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. The article provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the sieve from three angles of approach: as motif (the sieve is an attribute), as symbol (the sieve is an image), and as hermeneutic (the sieve is a paradigm). Doing so, it will become clear that underneath the sieve the idea of textile, “textility” and texture is constantly resonating.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Prof Dr Paul Arblaster and Stephanie Heremans (KU Leuven) for the translations and the editing of this article.
Notes
§ This essay is the prelude of a larger book project, “About Sieves and Sieving. Motif, Symbol, Technique, Paradigm.” In this forthcoming book (2018-2019), the author, Professor Barbara Baert discuss in more detail the Sieve Portraits of Elizabeth I from the point of view of her ambivalent sexual/virgin status in intellectual history. By having herself depicted as a new Tuccia, the queen demonstrated her familiarity with humanist iconographic conventions of chastity. Professor Baert is currently planning a further chapter-length text on the impact of the sieve and new methodologies, including how sieves/sieving might offer an alternative hermeneutical gaze in the Human Sciences, and in particular in ethnology, gender, literary studies, and the analysis of “framing spaces.”
1. Although these negotiations came close to success, the queen’s Anglican-Protestant supporters were deeply critical of the rapprochement with the Catholic king of France. Furthermore, there were rumors of a relationship with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (Williams Citation2006, 49–51).
2. “Events from the Dido-Aeneas suggesting the parallel between Aeneas’ heroic resistance to Dido’s attractions and Elizabeth’s dedication to virginity” (Hazard Citation1976, 32); (Doran Citation1995; passim); “Leaving the question of the medallions to one side, the pillar itself is not without significance, since it occurs frequently in the iconography as the symbol of Fortitude, Constancy and Chastity” (de Jongh Citation1975–1976, 89); see also: (King Citation1985, 64); (de Tervarent Citation1985, 106–108).
3. Also see: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Greek and Roman Antiquities, 2.69.
4. See my analysis of the attributes of St Verena von Zurzach: the comb and the jar (jug, pitcher). Both objects that can be understood within the feminine pattern of pre-Christian symbols for hygiene (comb) and fertility (the pitcher, the well), christianized by Verena as an exemplum for both Mary and Anna (Baert Citation2006a, Citation2006b).
5. Bonoldi identifies Sofonisba as Artemisia, given the botanical detail of the tree that is argued to link her to the poison artemisia absinthium (Bonoldi Citation2006, n.p. (online)).
6. Inscription right: Alexander Broix, indicating Alessandro Bonvicino of Brescia or Moretto da Brescia.
7. “to purge the seedes/From chaffe” as Geffrey Whitney put it in his version of the emblem.
8. “Those portraits which might be described as representing the genitive of quality or description, are the most problematic to interpret—partly, as we have seen, because of the contextual ambiguity of the inflection: the ambiguity of relationship between picture and text, often a recherché source; the ambiguity intended by a political subject, patron, artist, or some combination of these. Such pictures were probably as difficult to interpret for Elizabethans as for us” (Hazard Citation1990, 79).
9. The poem On Monsieur’s Departure might refer to the leaving of Francis, Duke of Alençon, in 1582, or to her concealed love for the Earl of Leicester (Teague Citation1987, 536).
10. Moreover, the “net” and in particular the “fishing net” also underlie the development of lace. There is a sense of this in legends about the origins of lace in Burano, Veneto (Harrison Citation1989).
11. See also: the sieve in the Verbeeck’s Peasant Wedding. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes (Vandenbroeck Citation1984, 98; on folk customs Marmorstein Citation1922, 235); on swinging in folk belief (Fehrle Citation1916–17, 547–551).
12. Sifting is the final stage in the rural process of grain consumption. First is threshing. “Essential to threshing was a ‘threshing floor’, a flat area of hard dirt or rock on which freshly harvested wheat could be piled. Quite a few verses, from Genesis to the New Testament, mention threshing floors, which makes sense because grain was so essential to life. … Winnowing was the process that separated the mixed up pile of grain, stalk, and husk so that the edible grain could be sifted and eaten. To winnow the grain, the farmer scooped up the pieces of the crop he had just threshed and threw it all up into the air. The wind blew the light pieces of stalk to the side, while the grain, which was both heavier and roundish, fell almost straight back down. Thus, over time, the threshing floor was covered with three quite distinct piles of material. The kernels of grain fell almost straight down or were not blown far at all. The larger pieces of stalk, or ‘straw’, had blown a little ways off to the side, and the small pieces of stalk, called the ‘chaff’, had blown even further away” (http://www.truthortradition.com/articles/threshing-winnowing-sieving-separating-the-good-from-the-bad).
13. Blum Citation1981 refers in note 28 to examples in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 55, Vita et Miracllla Sancti Benedicti, fol. 2v, a manuscript dating to the first decade of the fourteenth century, in which the capisterium resembles a trough.
14. See the Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: “sieve and shears” on divination with shear points along the sieve’s frame (Brewer Citation2001, 999).
15. “The motif certainly survived into the nineteenth century, appearing, for instance, in Halliwell’s 1849 Nursery Rhymes and Tales in a nonsense tale which begins, ‘I saddled my sow with a sieve full of buttermilk and leaped nine miles beyond the moon into the land of Temperance’” (Jones Citation1989, 205).
16. I return (see note 4) to Verena von Zurzach. The comb, like the sieve, has a purifying function: it removes dirt and lice. As an object of cleanliness, it refers to Verena’s virginity. But the specifity and the capacity of the object—its possession of “teeth”—provide a primal association with the female intimacy of giving birth: “the vagina dentata” as a fantasy of the womb. As we shall see below, the sieve’s ability to drip, its permeability, make it an image of the mniotic sac or of the placenta (Baert Citation2006a, 9–25, Citation2006b, 35–62).
17. Circular motions are “read” in nature: Ruach, wind, and thus “enthusiasm” descends into the dancing body (see the first chapter of Baert Citation2016a). The process of winnowing (see above and note 12, and below under Textilities) ties sorting to the natural power of wind and air movements.
18. (Lamb Citation2005, 42–45) refers to hide sieve weavers in Tunis. They make the sieves on the spot in little stalls on the market. A wooden frame 10 cm wide and about 96 cm long is bent to produce a round holder, over which the skin is stretched.
19. In his fascinating work Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold sets out in search of the origin and the effects of lines in our interaction with the world. In relation to the knot and, by extension, the notion of connecting, tying or braiding a cord or a thread, the author refers to an association with meshes, with lacework and with the labyrinth, all of which used to be considered to possess apotropaic qualities (Ingold Citation2007).
20. “The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. … bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body-sieve. … Other bodies always penetrate our body and coexist with its parts” (De Bolle Citation2010, 24); “Our sensorium is both screen (energy, quantity) and sieve (qualitative characteristics or stimuli that Freud calls periods)” (Dorfman Citation2010, 160); “The buffer between me and the other is the sieve (Lacan)” (Galioto Citation2013, 198).
21. Other functions of the skin-ego are storage of fats as an image of memory, the function of production (hair, nails), emission for example sweat and pheromones. These are the skin-ego’s defence mechanisms (Anzieu Citation2010, 488–489).
22. The dresses match with white and unadorned walls (after Alberti) as blank surfaces on which the man projects himself.
23. See too the highly recognizable grille that separates priest and penitent in the confessional. The grille (or curtain) ensures anonymity, but from the Fischer-Deleuze perspective this ‘sieve’ of separation, secrecy, can also be read like the dissolving wall of anuses (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1988, 32; Fischer Citation2001, 125). See also on the grid/net/lace surface as dissolution surface in the paradigm by Tim Ingold.
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Barbara Baert
Barbara Baert (1967) (www.illuminare.be) is Professor at the University of Leuven. Her research is situated in the field of Iconology, Art Theory, and Medieval Art. She published several books and articles, with emphasis on the role of the sensorium in the arts, on visual culture and new hermeneutical paradigmata such as Echo and Kairos, and on the past, present, and future of visual anthropology. She is the founder of the series Studies in Iconology (Peeters Publishers) and of the annual Recollection. Experimental Reflections on Texts, Images and Ideas (University Press Leuven). In 2016 Barbara Baert was awarded with the prestigious Francqui Prize (www.francquifoundation.be) for her outstanding interdisciplinary achievements in the Bildwissenschaften, in particular and for her international impact on the Human Sciences in general.