So it was quite the surprise to have the Black Madonna appear in the film War & Peace, based on Tolstoy's classic of the same name. (EdNote: My relationship to War & Peace is similar to Zelig's relationship to Moby Dick in the Woody Allen classic.)
According to scholar Marcus C. Levitt one of the key features of Napoleon and Napoleonism is the power of image. Supposedly Napoleon is the original source for the famous saying "a picture is worth 1000 words." Hence his willingness to have numerous portraits made of himself at key moments in his career, projecting a bigger than life mythology that gained for him a psychological advantage in battle.
Tolstoy explicitly invokes Napoleonic visual images and juxtaposes them with Russian icons including the famed Black Madonna.
Some legends have it that the Black Madonna was painted on a piece of wood by none other than St. Luke the physician, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. Historians cite a painting of the Black Madonna that stood in Czestochowa, Poland for six centuries which was profoundly revered. The icon, known as the Queen of Poland, is credited with leading a group of monks holding out against a Swedish siege in 1655. More recently, the madonna's image was never absent from Lech Walesa's lapel during the Solidarity leader's struggle against Poland's Communist regime.
In olden times it was not uncommon for armies to carry symbols like this into battle in the belief that "if God be for us, who can be against us?" Like amulets and lucky charms it was intended to put the intangibles in our favor, hence it appears in this manner in Tolstoy's epic.
How very strange, then, for the Black Madonna to make its appearance here in Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden:
The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
The painting on this page is by Daniel Botkin. winner of the Dylan Days Art Competition in Hibbing. It was one of many impressive works that he shared at The Red Mug during Duluth Dylan Fest in 2015. When I asked for permission to share the painting he also supplied some commentary about the piece.
Of course the inspiration for this piece was from the lyrics, "The motorcycle black madonna, two wheeled gypsy queen, and her silver studded phantom cause the grey flannel dwarf to scream as he weeps to wicked birds of prey that pick up on his breadcrumb sins."
Like so many Dylan song lyrics, these words painted a picture in my mind, and this was one of those Dylan-inspired pictures I wanted to put on canvas.
I used a variety of materials to create it: cotton fabric, burlap, leather, wood dowel rods, rope for the motorcycle tires, doll eyes for the madonna, a glass eye and water buffalo teeth for the horse-headed phantom on the front fender, a crying doll head for the dwarf, and pieces of sponge for the breadcrumb sins.
Dylan's lyrics often have a surreal sense that produces concrete images while concealing or veiling deeper things. For example, the line from the following stanza "While paupers change possessions, each one wishing for what the other has got" explicitly describes envy, one of Catholicism's Seven Deadly Sins.
This is immediately followed by "And the princess and the prince discuss what's real and what is not." Here we now stand in the midst of a whirl of ambiguity, because, "It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden."
You can read my 2015 interview with the artist here.
To see more of Botkin's art online, visit http://danielbotkin.com/
Poland's Black Madonna (1990 NYTimes story)
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