Wick (Thos McKay): Week 9 – 12 August

Back in the cool and gloomy North, after a long, uneventful drive from Edinburgh.  It’s not a bad drive – unless you find yourself behind some very slow traffic, as I did – an exceptionally plodding van, whose top speed was 50 mph and which was also large enough to block the view ahead.  Patience is a virtue, they say.  Sometimes it’s difficult.

The Olympics end this evening, and rather belatedly I found out yesterday what the puzzling mascot is supposed to be.  Was it a flame in soft toy form?  A pyramid, like that outside the Louvre?  Surely it wasn’t a red poo emoji?  Then I read that it represents a Phrygian cap.  Of course I’d heard of those –  but the explanation of ‘the cap worn by French revolutionaries’ doesn’t tell you much.  It is most famously seen in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, which hangs in the Louvre. 

Hardy Fuchsia

This work, painted forty years after the 1789 revolution and one year after the second in 1830, was Delacroix’s response to the turmoil in France during these years.  He is quoted as saying, “. . . if I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her.” It was exhibited at the Salon of 1831 for the first time, after which it was bought by the French government.  The plan to display it in the throne room, as a reminder to the King of who was boss, came to naught, and it was returned to Delacroix in 1832.  The subject was considered ‘inflammatory’.  Eventually the government acquired it again in 1874, and it has been in the Louvre since, apart from a trip to the US in 1974/5 for the Bicentennial and to Tokyo in 1999.

Marshland textures

But we’ve wandered away from the Phrygian cap itself.  Its origins are from eastern Europe and ancient Persia.  To quote from Wikipedia,

“The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of emancipated slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty.  In the 16th century, the Roman iconography of liberty was revived in emblem books and numismatic handbooks where the figure of Libertas is usually depicted with a pileus.”

Going to Seed

For the following two centuries, it was frequently used in the Netherlands, “where the cap of liberty was adopted in the form of a contemporary hat.  In the 18th century, the traditional liberty cap was widely used in English prints, and from 1789 also in French prints; by the early 1790s, it was regularly used in the Phrygian form.”

So there you have it.  An ancient garment revived during the Renaissance and taken up throughout Europe as a symbol of liberty.

Busy

With a bit of clumsy footwork, I can say that the knitting on the ancient garment of the current gansey has been revived.  An inch or two have been done, and the gussets have been started.  It feels like progress, when the gussets are begun – one third down, two thirds to go . . .