Extracts from THEURGY IN THE AGE OF AIDS: THE NEOPLATONIC DESIGN OF DURAND'S VOTIVE OFFERING
by James Miller

When I first set eyes on the photograph of Sonya Sherman in the July 1985 issue of Life magazine - the same photograph that moved André Durand to paint VOTIVE OFFERING two years later - I was struck by the massive erotic energy of the pent-up figure. There was no 'lust in action' in this shot, no 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame'; it was all potential eros, love constrained, desire under pressure.

Though her legs were demurely closed and her feet primly set together, Sonya Sherman did not look like a coy mistress.

Sonya, who called herself 'Sunnye' in sunnier days, was definitely not being presented here as a love object, though she was gracefully posed and lithely beautiful. I'm sure I wasn't the only viewer to do a doubletake on discovering that she was dying of AIDS.

I wondered whether I should pity Sunnye, or fear her. Perhaps she was a postmodern Pandora casually lifting the lid on all the horrors of the Age of AIDS. After all, had she not had a year-long affair with a male bisexual, the new bogie man of our era, and therefore deserved to be regarded as the female cause of all our woe? So the gossipy text beside her photo suggested.

Yet like Pandora, and her biblical counterpart, Eve, Sunnye was still alluringly lovely after the Great Mishap - that was the strange part. The hideous reality of her disease and the haunting loveliness of her figure were paradoxically fused in the shot so that the dying model and her deathless image were inseparable in the hyper-reality of mediated 'Life'.

Sunnye Sherman was not a frail person living with AIDS at the time this shot was taken. She was a forceful symbol of American Womanhood dying, impossibly dying, of what had been known up until then as 'Gay Plague'.

So what had gone so wrong in her life? How had she ended up dying for love in Life magazine? A tabloid-style headline centred in the margin to the left of her photo supplied the answer: she had been 'Betrayed by a Stealthy Invader'. The unwritten libretto for Sunnye's swooning-unto-death scene is easy to read as political allegory: it plays upon a lingering McCarthy-Era fear that America the Beautiful has been invaded and violated by the secret agents of a body-snatching, soul-destroying foreign government.

When I considered Sunnye's photo from an iconographic angle, its artful composition and allegorical contents reminded me of various Renaissance paintings in the 'memento mori' or 'vanitas mundi' tradition. The profound impact of the Black Death on pre-Enlightenment European culture can be sensed, even today, in the remarkable body of religious paintings designed to provoke pious meditations on the vanity of the world and the inevitability of death. In such art the living confront the dead or the dying or touch concrete symbols of mortality in an effort to make sense of the Plague, to render its seemingly senseless outbreaks culturally significant, to conceptualize and hence to contain the expansive horror of pestilential death within a restrictive religious or philosophical context.

I can't think of a more compelling example of 'vanitas' art than Mantegna's third and last portrait of St. Sebastian, which was completed around 1480: here we see the patron saint of plague-victims straining at head and foot to pass through the narrow frame of this life, to step out of his own picture as it were, to escape the conventional icon of the tormented Flesh and the transient World (symbolized by the gutted candle at his feet) through an heroic burst of anagogic energy. A quieter but no less provocative image of saintly transcendence is Georges de la Tour's chiaroscuro portraits of Mary Magdalen contemplating symbols of earthly transience. No arrows prick the Magdalen's conscience or goad her into meditations on her own mortality: a skull or a candle is all she needs to stimulate her penitent thoughts on the postlapsarian frailty of woman's flesh - her own still beautiful flesh. As Thomas Nashe lamented in 1590 in his 'Litany in Time of Plague,' beauty is but a flower that worms shall devour.

So might we all piously lament on viewing the allegorically composed photo of Sunnye Sherman. Like Mantegna's Sebastian, Sunnye is a martyr for the plague years -- a celebrity victim straining to transcend fleshly agony and yearning for a return to original innocence. And like De la Tour's Magdalen, she is a solitary daughter of Eve contemplating the utter worthlessness of worldly beauty as she fixes her gaze on a traditional symbol of inexorable death.

 

SUNNYE SHERMAN IN DURAND'S VOTIVE OFFERING

I'd like now to consider her surprising rebirth as the central figure in Andre Durand's massive plague-icon VOTIVE OFFERING and to contrast its politically and spiritually provocative imagery with the photo that provoked it.

Let me start by suggesting how the painting reverses the psychological strategies of the photo. The Life magazine diptych presents Sunnye first as erotic stimuli and then as moral advertisements of death - Thanatos triumphing in the end over Eros. VOTIVE OFFERING with its seven Persons With AIDS (PWAs) in various physical states (from asymptomatic robustness to deathbed frailty) looks at first like an elaborate illustration for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report; but then, without denying the potent presence of death in the imaginary ward occupied by Sunnye and her fellow patients, it counters this initially morbid impression by visibly asserting the dignity of their sexual natures and the beauty of their still sensual flesh in the face of terrible suffering. For Durand, it seems, Eros must triumph in the end over Thanatos.

My feeling that the Life photographer had been influenced (perhaps at a conscious level) by painterly conventions established centuries ago in the wake of the Black Death - conventions that not only shaped the composition of Sunnye's portrait but also determined the erotophobic significance of its moral subtext - was shared by Durand himself, who, as I was intrigued to discover during our first conversation about his work, had also been struck by the resemblance of the photo to a Renaissance painting.

Where I had seen St Sebastian and Mary Magdalen behind Sunnye's tragic figure, Durand saw La Derelitta - the pathetic figure of an outcast weeping in solitude on the cold hard steps outside a locked palace gate. This tempera painting, originally a side panel from one of a pair of Florentine marriage chests, was attributed to Botticelli by Venturi in the late nineteenth century, but it is now generally believed to have been the work of one of Botticelli's studio assistants, perhaps the young Filippino Lippi, who may well have based it on a cartoon by his master. Despite the outcast's long hair, flowing robe, and tragic diva pose, the popular nineteenth-century nickname La Derelitta is historically inappropriate. She is really a he. Il Derelitto, as he should be called, has been conclusively identified as Mordecai the Jew weeping before the palace-gate of the Persian king Ahasuerus: an identification based on the scenes from the Book of Esther featured on the other panels of the marriage chests.

This iconographic correction by no means undermines Durand's intuitive association of the Florentine painting with Sunnye's photo, though he has stated that what originally reminded him of La Derelitta was the way Sunnye looked like Esther - 'an archetypal Jewish heroine'. Overlooking the sexual difference between Sunnye and Mordecai, we can still see a clear visual parallel between their respective representations as well as a strong political resemblance between their perilous situations. Both figures were posed on stairways, their faces inclined downwards, as if misfortune had suddenly halted their expected progress up the social scale. In both cases, it had. Mordecai and Sunnye both knew what it was like to come down in the world: he because of political suppression, she because of immunosuppression. After seeing his cousin Esther happily married off to the King, Mordecai thought himself safe from social harm until the wicked vizier Haman decreed that all the Jews in the kingdom were to be slaughtered. On the cassone panel, as in Esther 4:1, Mordecai protests this imminent pogrom by weeping and rending his clothes outside the palace. Sunnye's public appearance in Life, despite its fatalistic Christian gloss, is also a heroic Jewish protest against an impending holocaust: she has bravely 'come out' in public - onto the street - as a physically and socially condemned PWA to rally public opinion against a blatantly discriminatory government that in 1985 had barely acknowledged the existence of the epidemic. If Reagan was to play Haman the wicked vizier in the Book of AIDS, Sunnye would save the day by assuming the double role of Esther and Mordecai.

Sunnye for all her 'incredible beauty' (as Durand has called it) is not a tragic heroine dying prettily like Ophelia in Millais' bathtub; nor is Princess Diana an imaginary intercessor leaning out from the 'gold bar of heaven' like Rosetti's Blessed Damozel. Sunnye really was dying when Durand sketched her in hospital, and Princess Diana really did visit an AIDS ward to touch society's new untouchables. Their meeting in the renascent world of Durand's icon is imaginary, to be sure, but that does not mean that it will have purely imaginary effects on spectators who regard the visionary possibility of such a conjunction as more than the quaint aesthetic fancy of a nostalgic pietist.