Her Immoderate Heat

Men shoveling chairs. The curious drawing for which this blog is named made me laugh out loud when I first saw it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago. I mean, chair-shoveling? Who does that? I was charmed by the image of people engaged in an activity so illogical, so ridiculous, so completely absurd--who nevertheless are going about it in a very earnest, determined fashion. Look at their faces, the energy in their bodies. It's as if they believe shoveling chairs is work worth doing.

The image has lingered in my mind over the years as a metaphor, rich and flexible in its meaning, as all great art should be. At times, when I have felt frustrated in my work, boxed into a job description that did not allow for the fullest use of my best talents, I have let off steam by laughing, thinking to myself, "Well, it's better than chair-shoveling!" Other times, when I have felt compelled to take a risk, a memory of the drawing has silenced the scared voice inside me warning me to beware of looking foolish. If you believe this is important, the chair-shovelers whisper, who cares if you look foolish? Just start shoveling.

Humpty Dumpty famously said, "A word means what I want it to mean." I realize I have done the same with this artwork, adding layers of meaning surely not intended by the artist, a medieval Netherlandish painter named Rogier van der Weyden [1399-1464]. So I set out to try to uncover what he was "trying to say" with this particular sketch, which in Dutch is titled "Scupstoel" [literally, shovel chair]. It turns out the drawing, done in pen over a chalk sketch, was created in 1447 as the plan for a sculptured relief around the top of a pillar in the town hall of Brussels, where van der Weyden was, at the time, the official City Painter. He did a number of paintings with themes related to justice for the interior of the town hall, works which Albrecht Durer later admired. Van der Weyden is, in fact, best known as a painter, primarily of religious themes. He traveled to Italy in 1450 and did a number of commissions for the Medici before he died in 1464. This work sticks out among his oeuvre as an oddity.

Why, you may ask--as I did--would an artist choose the motif of men shoveling a jumbled pile of chairs to decorate a structural column of the town hall? I found the answer in a reference to Van der Weyden's design in Brussels: A Cultural and Literary History [Andre De Vries and Jacques de Decker, p. 34]: "A house that stood on the site of the Town Hall, the Scupstoel, or Ducking Stool, is commemorated in . . . [the] ingenious design."

So: Van der Weyden celebrated the symbolic significance of the town hall's location with a literal interpretation of the place-name. But why was the torn-down house called Scupstoel? What's a Ducking Stool?

According to Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, a ducking stool was a form of public punishment, an alternative to being placed in the stocks. In the simplest design, a wooden chair was attached to a long beam that rested on a shorter post placed in the ground next to a pond or riverbank. The transgressor was strapped into the chair, the beam was swiveled on the post so that it extended out over the water, and, in a see-saw motion, the person in the chair was repeatedly dunked under water. The ducking stool seems to have been used primarily to punish those who were seen as being "quarrelsome" or "too out-spoken" -- perhaps a troublesome vagrant caught inciting a crowd in the public square, a brewer who falsely claimed a competitor's ale would make people sick, or a married couple who argued loudly in public. Most often, however, it was an outspoken woman. A Frenchman visiting England in 1700 made this observation:

The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough. They fasten an armchair to the ends of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long and parallel to each other, so that these two ends embrace the chair, which hangs between them by a sort of axle . . . They place the woman in this chair and so plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate heat.

To cool her immoderate heat. Women who were subjected to this "pleasant enough" torture were those who were too "hot" in their passions--prostitutes and sharp-tongued wives, to be sure--but also heretics and witches, or rather, women who spoke their minds or demonstrated a healing, creative power that others lacked.

Unlike many women throughout history and some women in parts of the world today, I have the opportunity to speak my mind, explore my interests, and make foolish mistakes without fear of being subjected to medieval forms of water-boarding. I have tremendous respect for women who, despite knowledge of such consequences, have had the courage to be themselves, to look crazy in the eyes of other people. Women who have dared to shovel chairs.

This blog is dedicated to them.