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Reimagining the sinister left.




A further recovery from a past blog: on reassessing the left-hand side.

"If the soul is looking into eternity with its right eye, the left eye must cease all its undertakings and act as if it were dead," counsels the Theologica Germanica that was published by Martin Luther in 1516.

It was a sentiment with a history as James Hall painstakingly demonstrates in his 'The Sinister Side: How left-right Symbolism shaped Western Art'. The right is robust, righteous and of God's otherworldly part, the left is weak, vulnerable, and sensuously attached to the transient world.

Thus, does Christ die looking to his right, right foot folded over left, with the good thief destined for paradise at his right side, the wound dispatching him plunged into this side, dispatching the redemptive blood into the world to the right...

When He returns in judgment, the saved stand stiffly to attention at his right hand, attendant on heaven, the damned are judged with his left hand that sends them fleeing back into hell, often with the left side of their bodies vulnerably exposed to view: the sides that led them to perdition now the future sight of their torment.

However, if the symbolism were as straightforward as this, one might soon tire of the book: you would get the point and could move on, but life is happily more complex. For one thing slowly, as time proceeds, and of which there have always been intimations, there is a re-evaluation of the 'left' - of the value of the world and of the body - and second, there is the matter of the heart, the center of felt life, that is, inescapably, located on the left. (Aristotle thought this was to compensate for the naturally cold landscape of the left as opposed to the right).

Thus, by the Renaissance there emerges a counter-vailing appreciation of the left: none more so than in the work of Michelangelo. Here Christ finds himself looking to his left, wounded to his left, and companioned by the good thief to his left - the assumption being that if Christ is truly the 'incarnate one' incarnation requires that he penetrate wholly and completely our vulnerability. He must take on the 'left' into his full humanity. The site of our fall must be fallen into by divinity in order for it to be redeemed.

This might suggest that the 'left' is still seen in a wholly negative light but, in fact, it is a witness to a new celebration of embodiment; and, Hall shows how it is accompanied by complex changes in the understanding of love, the relationship between the sexes and the values of mortality.

It is a book that will make you see art with both different and more detailed eyes; and, strikingly reminds you that in history cultures are not at all like our own: most pressingly here (in the Renaissance) by being lived out in grand narratives of shared meaning with many subtle reference points.

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