What The Fire Said: Danaë

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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What The Fire Said by David Bergen a.k.a. Hawkwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License covering all written and visual material at: http://whatthefiresaid.blogspot.nl/.

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Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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Acrisius, king of Argos, fearing from a prophesy that the future son of his daughter Danaë will be his slayer, ensures that his virgin daughter remains inaccessible to any and all potential suitors. Acrisius incarcerates Danaë in a circular tower of bronze. The tower has only one opening: a small lunette in its domed roof high overhead. This is all the access which amorous Zeus needs to gain entrance to the chamber, and the form which the god chooses is that of a shower of gold. The result of this encounter is the semi-divine hero Perseus, who goes on to slay the gorgon Medusa and rescue the fair Andromeda from a sea monster.

What became of Danaë and the prophesy is a story for another time; my focus here is on her portrayal. Artists from Titian to Klimt have tackled this incident from mythology, all of them apparently concerned, either to show her demurely opening her skirts, or reclining with graceful languor, or (in Klimt's case) to show her seemingly sleeping blissfully unaware through the whole deific encounter. And none of them really seem to capture the goldness of the gold. Where is the gold? I wondered. Where are the fires of passion? In my own version I have sought to portray both, and still to touch the human drama of the moment.

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