Continued from: A Different Da Vinci Code
Q: But why the substitution of feminine figures for characters who were clearly understood to be men?
A: Hermes is more than just a hero, he is immortal, angelic in nature and distinctly gender-bending…as is his son Hermaphroditus, whose dual nature may have blended back as an additional halo effect that might appeal to the artistic imagination… Angels are often depicted as beautiful women…among these, let's not leave out the divinely feminine Sophia, Hermes' Gnostic alter ego. Hermes is also the cosmic jokester, the Till Eulenspeigel of the gods, full of tricks and hoaxes. So Hermes can quite appropriately appear as an almost male John the Baptist …the subject of an important branch of the
cult… pointing upward, as I mentioned, in Leonardo's representation, and looking like dead ringer for Leonardo's androgyne Angel in the Flesh (who, you might notice, is pointing up as well)… Hermes might also appear as a more or less feminine archangel which was pretty safe to portray, or as any other man or woman such as St. Anne… or as the stealth intrusion of a feminized Hermes in place of John the Apostle…seated most importantly at the right hand of Jesus in The Last Supper , and lunging away so very pointedly and uncharacteristically of John…like a similarly charged object in an electric field!…and by the way that whole painting is an electric field!...and a mine field
Related Resources:
|
|