The Procession by Paul Moore:  

 

                                            Part II - Other Assorted Processions

 

Both composers and visual artists have had their hand in evoking processions in their respective media.  A lot of narrative musical compositions conjure them up as aural narratives, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Since music moves through time, it's easy to conjure up the auditory experience of a passing parade, soft in the distance, getting louder as it passes by, and then diminishing in volume as it moves away--continuity being established by a repeated cadence, so a person could imagine a passing caravan in Alexander Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880), or a more dynamic one in Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome  (1924) where a ghost army of Roman Legionnaires emerges faintly from shadows along the Appian Way to stop very loudly in front of you.).  Even more relevant to Moore's work is Isaac's Albéniz' El Corpus en Sevilla (1906), for its similar theme and its cadence, though on a far more elaborate and theatrical scale.

 

To understand how singular Paul Moore's The Procession is in its visual impact and emotional charisma is, it's also worth doing a bit of classical art historical comparisons.  There are many works of visual art that have processions and parades as their principal subject.  The problem here is to show movement through static media. I am restricting my examples to religious processions, which offers examples going as far back as far as we have organized societies and artists to commemorate them.

 

A famous procession in Egypt, the feast of Opet was celebrated in Luxor from the New Kingdom right up to the introduction of Christianity.  It commemorated the season when the Nile flooded, bringing the time of farming, and was extended to fertility in general.  The parade was the grand finale, when images of the city's greatest gods, Amon-Ra, his wife Mut and their son Khons were ceremoniously carried on boat-like floats from Karnak to Luxor. This journey was depicted in a relief from the Red Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Karnak, with marchers bearing the boat

Feast of Ophet Temple of Amon-Ra

containing the shrine of Amun-Ra.  Following Egyptian conventions at the time, the shallowly carved representation of marchers, bark and shrine is in a single visual plane, along with accompanying hieroglyphics in the same two-dimensional space.  The bearers are in identical poses, suggesting a cadenced stride of a military cohort.  Movement? Yes, but in two dimensions and not in your own viewing space. It's something you can read rather than taking in in with one glance.

 

Over many centuries, religious processions were generally shown with the participants moving along a horizontal plane, shown with far more three dimensionality, but always parallel to the onlookers, not intruding into their space. The original, brightly painted frieze of the Parthenon is a nice example: a horseman might twist on his mount, but neither he nor his gaze is directed out of his plane.

 

Gentile Bellini - Procession in St. Mark's Square

The same can be said of the marchers in Gentile Bellini's Procession in St Mark's Square (Venice, Accademia) : in spite of the deep perspective of the square behind them, the marchers are still seen marching parallel to the picture's viewer, but not deviating from their confined zone.

 

It's when we get to 19th and early 20th centuries that romantic narratives of religious processions really get going, the painted equivalents of Borodin, Sorolla and Respighi.  But how parades and their progress is conveyed has to be done statically, unless it is things like Chinese hand scrolls, where the time of a journey is sequenced by rolling through it, achieved by only unrolling and then rerolling a portion of it to reveal a moment of progress.

 

Solomon A. Hart -Simhat Torah at Livorno Synagogue

An example of a narrative of a procession in a single painting is Simchat Torah at Livorno Synagogue by the British-Jewish academician Solomon Alexander Hart in the New York Jewish Museum (1850).  It commemorates the annual celebration of the Torah.  In this scene all of the torah scrolls are being processed through this Italian synagogue by the leading members of the congregation, led by the Rabbi.  As in Moore's sculpture, the marchers of various ages wind from the ark where they are kept, behind the reader and some singers on the elevated bimah or
reading platform.  They are draped in prayer shawls as they carry the scrolls, covered richly colored cases and polished silver staves or crowns.  Unlike Moore, the action stays within the setting, and appears to be passing towards the right, where an elderly congregant walks to meet them so that he can touch the scrolls with his own shawl.  Other male figures, to the left and right, watch the scene in reverence. Maybe Livornese Jewish males dressed in such oriental robes for festivals back then.  Hart had visited the old synagogue in Livorno and this is an accurate recording of the building.  It is beautiful and sumptuous, but presumed spectators in front of the canvas are viewers only to a passing spectacle; they are not invited to participate. 

 

Ilya Repin Religious Procession in the Kursk Governate

Marchers and witnesses alike in Ilya Repin's Religious Procession in the Kursk Governate (1880-1883) (Tretyakov Museum) are also a passing spectacle, but on a much grander and more chaotic scale. A lot has been written about this painting and its societal commentary, and I give you references to the best of these analyses available online below.  The main point here is that like Hart's painting, the vast procession and its spectators are all conceived on a diagonal that passes to the right of the viewer, but not into his or her space and part of its purpose is to focus on varying individuals and the diverse roles they play.  The viewer is emphatically not a participant in the event nor is invited to be.

 

Closest in the shared tradition of Catholic holy religious processions to Moore's work is Joaquín Sorolla's Los Nazarinos (1914) showing a Holy Week Procession (which is close to Albéniz' musical procession too).  A group of hooded figures parade with a crucifix and a paso image of  the Virgin under a canopy, down an urban street in Seville--identified as so by the iconic tower of the city's cathedral in the background.  It has been observed, though, that there is no street in the city that offers this particular view of the tower; the black caparotes of the marchers, and the image of the Virgin are not specific to a particular confraternity or church. Though processing generally forwards, the figures are directed slightly to the left, as is the gaze of the left hooded

Joaquin Sorolla -Los Nazarenos

foreground figure, and the crowd of spectators hems the marchers in.  And there is a further difference: the Nazarinos painting is part of a large series of murals commissioned by Archer Huntington for the Hispanic Society in New York and carried out by Sorolla between 1911 and 1919.  The Nazarinos are located in a corner, with a much larger painting of bulls being wrangled to transportation at its left (El Encierro)at its left, and a painting of Toreros in Seville's bullfight to its right, and is therefore an incident within a much larger entity depicting various regions of Spain and their typical activities.

 

It can be said that the church in Moore's Procession is generic too.  He did small works of acrylic paint and gold leaf of various southwest mission facades, but the isolated one in The Procession appears more generic.  And none of these painted or sculpted comparisons discussed above have the same jolt of movement outwards, and the almost magic realism of the procession leader, at once someone identifiable and yet Everyman. Coming at you.

 

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Recordings of Borodin's Steppes exist in several versions in YouTube, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4tlQxaHetI.  Those Legionnaires really march in a  remastered recording of Fritz Reiner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9El5Hzh3jM, while Gustavo Díaz-Jerez rendition of Corpus is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_55-4CpCro.  But there are many versions of each piece to choose from online. Have fun and close your eyes!

 

Feast of Opet relief shown is from the Red Temple of Opet.  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/ancient-egypt-royal-feast

 

An Explanation of the Parthenon frieze and its participants by Paulina Wegrzyn can be found at "The Parthenon Friezes: Their Story Explained" TheCollector.com, August 2, 2020, https://www.thecollector.com/parthenon-frieze/.

 

For Bellini's painting, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procession_in_St._Mark%27s_Square

 

Chinese hand scrolls: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chhs/hd_chhs.htm

 

Old photos of Livorno's synagogue before its destruction can be seen at https://livornodailyphoto.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-old-synagogue.html

 

For two of the best accessible analysis of Repin's monumental work, see the article by Ben Pollit for the Kahn Academy at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/x4910f52e:eastern-europe-1800-1900/wanderers/a/ilya-repin-krestny-khod-religious-procession-in-kursk-gubernia

 And also the analysis by David, the author of a blog on Russian icons at  https://russianicons.wordpress.com/tag/ilya-repin/

 

On Sorolla see Wikipedia for information and a complete list of the Visions of Spain

paintings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_of_Spain

A specific discussion of Sorolla's Nazarinos, its context and meaning is available at:

Dr. César Lopez Gomez- Joaquin Sorolla "Los Nazarenos," 1914. Nueva York, Hispanic Society of America -- https://cesarlopezgomez.com/joaquin-sorolla-los-nazarenos-1914-nueva-york-hispanic-society-of-america/