Dr George John

The image of the self-sacrificing pelican first emerged in the medieval bestiary manuscripts (Book of beasts) as an image of a selfless protector of the young and a fearsome hunter of demons form the dark ages. The wattle-necked pelican whose home is in the Nile valley delta of Egypt doesn’t easily compare with the herons or fennec foxes that inhabit the same neighbourhood. How then did the pelican come to be tied to the real and imagined creatures of the Christian allegories? The answer to that question clearly points to the artistic and textual work of the 7th Century medieval Egyptian Coptic monks, who portrayed the pelican to represent the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Their ancient manuscripts had started to feature stories connecting the pelican behaviour to the idea of sacrifice.
The standard version of the pelican story, however is however closer to reality which is an emotive account of a mother pelican with a brood of young chicks. When the young grow older, they become boisterous and turn violent toward the parent that had selflessly cared for them. The mythological account goes on to describe that when they start to hurt and mutilate her, in anger the mother pelican retaliates striking her young dead but three days later, she regrets her actions and pierces her own side with her sharp pointed beak and allows blood that flows from her self-inflicted wound to revive the young as she herself dies.
To those familiar with the core beliefs of Christianity, the symbolism may seem obvious – the fall from grace of mankind, the crucifixion of Jesus on behalf of mankind and their consequent redemption, all woven into one poignant story that even the youngest Christian child can understand. This legend of the pelican is a scene of the bird with its beak curled back on to its blood dripping breast with a nest of chicks who await her ultimate sacrifice soon became standard depiction as a decorative symbol on par with liturgical crosses in church doorways and alters. For well over a millennium now the pelican has served as a standard symbol of selflessness and sacrifice and the bird takes its place among the noble animals like the lion and the phoenix in the Christian compendium as an animal of exemplary moral virtue.
In 1418 bishop Cornelius O Dea of Limerick, Ireland commissioned the famous O Dea Crozier (now in the Hunt Museum of Ireland) with its crooked head as a symbol of his episcopal status in Catholic Ireland and on it is found the pelican as a decorative object directly beneath the Virgin Mary’s annunciation scene, as a symbol of Jesus’s sacrifice.
Artistic lies becoming accepted as truth are not uncommon in the history of the art. “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” said Pablo Picasso. If you tell the truth, it becomes part of your past. If you tell a lie, it becomes part of your future. Conventional wisdom suggests that a lie travels around the world while truth is still putting its boots on. Even when people don’t wilfully lie to contaminate the truth, being lied to essentially implies that you are not worth the truth. While it is argued that because the essence of art is free expression, there is no absolute necessity for truth. Wassily Kandensky, the Russian art historian of repute once commented, “The artist must train not only his eye, but also his soul”.

“The artistic and textual work of the 7th Century medieval Egyptian Coptic monks, who portrayed the pelican to represent the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Their ancient manuscripts had started to feature stories connecting the pelican behaviour to the idea of sacrifice.”

Roy M Thottathil SJ is noted artist who says that for him, art is a spiritual process. For the artist it is an inner process in which, realities of life, hopes, dreams, aspirations, struggles, frustrations and challenges are all part of their art. If indeed, the cosmic and human realms, merge into one for the artist, is there any room for a lie in art?.
Art is subjective and because it is a matter of personal judgement as to whether an artwork is good or bad, there can be no right and wrong in art. Although many truths are also expressed through art, the truth expressed by an artwork is commonly not scientific or philosophical truth. Instead they tend to be experiential or imaginative truths. The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance – wrote Aristotle. When philosophers first started taking notice of art, it was to debate whether or not art is a kind of deception. They concluded that art is a friendly kind of deception, because art must deceive in order to succeed and it must be friendly in order to keep its viewing audience happy.
If something is copied line by line, with the aim of producing an exact replica, that is not art. By so doing, one is simply copying someone else’s artwork. On the other hand, if someone takes bits and pieces from different sources and combine them in new ways, that is making original art. Copying pre-existing artwork is legal, so long as the original is in the public domain, meaning that copyright on the original piece of work is deemed to have expired. Art can also be paradoxical in nature when it reflects the past as well as creates a future much like the riddle of the Escherian staircase.

In neurosciences, there is increasing evidence that art enhances brain function. It has been shown that viewing art not only has an impact the patterns of electrical activity in the brain, but that it also affects emotions by increasing the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonine. Indeed, Art has the ability to evoke emotions in perceivers. People are known to have cried when viewing Mark Rothko’s artwork on display at Tate Modern in London and elsewhere and Rothko himself famously wrote “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience that I had when painting them”. Artists use lines, shapes and colour to express their feelings and it is clear that Mark Rathko unlocked the emotional power of colour.
In a 1964 interview the novelist and humourist Peter de Vries said “Sure, the artist has an obligation toward the material from which his work is created, but the obligation isn’t a literal one. He may have to exaggerate an environment he’s delineating in order to portray it effectively – select, omit, even distort”. In other words, it is a lie that tells the truth.
Be it the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the French existentialist Albert Camus, the French poet Jean Cocteau or even an apocryphal work of art, yes, art is indeed a lie that makes us realise the truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
The French say “je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la verite” which when rendered into English reads “I am a lie that always tell the truth”.

(The author is retired British Emeritus Consultant Psychiatrist, now living with his wife in Kochi, India)