Edward Burne-Jones: The Golden Stairs

Resolving the meaning of some paintings is a risky and difficult proposition. You have to show your cards. For other works, it's impossible. The author has either kept it for themselves or the meaning is itself presented as a puzzle. In any event, to say anything at all, after all, is an act of courage through discipline. You commit yourself to the flame. It's interesting to see people fumbling interpretations to symbolist and aesthetic works made in the last decades of the 19th century. This seems to be the case with the Golden Stairs, painted by British artist Edward Byrne Jones and first seen by the public in 1880, when shown with other progressive works at the newly found Grosvenor Gallery in London. Comments made found on the internet seem to echo the tag on the Tate Gallery museum card, which was itself taken as a blurb from published scholarship. We learn, in essence, the painting is not representative of a narrative moment, and thus, without a literary source, is a timeless image, an allegory of sorts, although few writers assign one, depicting young women dressed in classical robes, carrying musical instruments down a flight of spiraling stairs. The type of syncretic figure shown, together with the restricted use of color harmonies, the muted gestures and expressions, and the vague architectural setting, is said to conform to the artist's interest in evoking intangible qualities of mood and feeling. Terms such as poetic, evocative, lyrical, otherworldly, harmonious, dream and dreamlike, ambiguity, and the word veiled are used to describe the formal qualities of the painting, the representation of space, figures within space, and their attributes. It was said, when described by critics in 1880, to be a painting without a subject, with no literary source. This assessment is confirmed in recent scholarship. Simply stated, according to reviewers and historians, we are not in space and time. The meaning of the thing remains ambiguous. Assuredly, as Byrne Jones intended, an ethereal, otherworldly, dreamlike image, a quintessentially symbolist work of academic aestheticism. I would characterize opinion saying the painting is understood as principally decorative, not representing a specific moment in myth or history, and lacking a moral theme, the painting is without didactic import. I agree with the idea that Byrne Jones alludes to the gravitas and severity of meaning to the size and composition of the work. This is a large canvas, a relatively new format for the painter, inflating the traditions of large, vertically formatted Christian altar pieces, and the monumental but shallow compositions of ancient Greco-Roman architectural friezes. He was a keen student of early Renaissance art, and we know he studied closely and made copies of select works by Della Francesca while in Italy in 1871, including this fresco in the church of San Francesco at Arezzo. Yet little is made of the artist's genius at design, the fact he began his career as a designer, then developed as a painter. He became partner in the firm Morris, Marshall, and Faulkner, one of the leading manufacturers of stained glass works. Nothing is made of similarities between the format and composition of the golden stairs and the many vertically formatted designs for stained glass windows executed over four decades. The golden stairs should be considered within the same conceptual framework as sacred works in stained glass, transforming natural light into an array of beautiful color, the effects of which are then examined within the context of late-century musical aesthetics. All I'm saying is, if you want to understand the painting, you should probably look at his windows. As have others, I would give weight to the iconography of the doves, from the book of Matthew, framing a view to the open sky above and beyond, the heavy symbolism of music, musical instruments and musicality, and the image of the temple interior seen through the doorway at the bottom left, glittering with its gilded colonnade, a feature of the painting, in fact, importantly, infrequently mentioned. Again, the motif of doves and, most importantly, the iconography of music are common to the art of stained glass and were frequently used by Burne-Jones throughout his career. The aesthetics of music in the 19th century, a universal language to which all art aspires, as Walter Pater said, is key to the appreciation of the golden stairs. What I don't understand is why more has not been made of the portraits within the picture, no fewer than eight of the figures have been identified as portraits of women within the artist's circle, included is Margaret Burne-Jones, the painter's daughter, holding a trumpet, depicted at the top center, as well as the children of artistic colleagues, patrons, and important political and social figures of the day. These references would have been known at once by viewers when seeing the work at the Grosvenor Gallery and are well known to historians by virtue of testimony, as well as surviving preparatory studies. It seems then somewhat off-base to consider the painting as a pure allegory, as with particular Italian Renaissance portraits Burne-Jones admired, figures from everyday life are shown as allegories with their mythic attributes. Presenting family and friends of the artist within the context of visionary archaeology, uniting the sacred and profane, we must account for the work as a real allegory, expressive of love, friendship, and faith, loyalty, universal sacred truths realized as rooted in the material world, felt and expressed about real people. Presented are 18 figures and 18 stairs, the number of treads before the upper landing. The figures are arranged on a vertical plane in two major groups, which can be further divided into six groups of three. The women may be likened to musical tropes, as if notes upon a stave, where a simple descending melody is overlaid by more complex harmonic currents. Variations in pose, posture, gesture, and expression, the subtle differences in costume and color, the soft dynamics in the fall and folds of the drapery, the curved linear architecture of the stairs themselves suggest a definitive rhythmic progression within an overall calm, staid arrangement. Quietly, on bare feet, the figures come from above, from the blue regions of the sky, the realm of the heavens which the doves inhabit. They descend a golden staircase, a choir of diaphanous angels with laurel wreaths and instruments, themselves embodiments of musical paradise. As a procession of figures, they lead the viewer's attention finally to the open doorway and to the temple beyond. It is here they come, from the sacred precinct of heaven to the holy temple on earth, to sing and play, making manifest as messenger, bringing into being the union of the material human world with the grace of God. What is depicted by the artist is nothing less than the great chain of being, the hierarchical order of the universe that makes known the unique spiritual nature of humans, who share sacred attributes with God and the angels above. The neoplatonic significance of the work is made clear in the recognition of the manifest beauty of forms and figures derived from the pure abstract ideal beauty, love and light in neoplatonic philosophy, having sacred origins. The Golden Stairs is a modern altarpiece, and like its renaissance counterparts, composed with figures of worldly angels set upon the steps of a musical heaven, a holy narrative that may only be expressed through the exquisite language of art.