Morning Venus over Khajuraho

Venus will reach on Wednesday August 12 its greatest distance out from the Sun in the morning sky.

See the end note about enlarging illustrations.

The elongation, or angular distance from the Sun, peaks at nearly 46°.  The illustration is actually from page 43 of my new Venus book, exemplifying this phenomenon of greatest western, or morning, elongation.

In our online “Astronomical Calendar” for the year (see the menu at the top of the web page), the moment of the maximum elongation is given as August 12 at 24h Universal Time.  There’s always this question: how can there be an hour 24? – isn’t it just the same as 0?

What it means is that the instant of the event happens to fall in the latter half of the last hour of the day.  So, rounded, it is 24.  If we gave it as 0, that would put it in the next day, which it is not.  After all, if an event is at, say, 22h 45m, we would round that to 23h, not 22h.

So the actual instant, just before the end of the Universal Time day, is 5 or more hours earlier by American time zones.  This will be more than half a day after the instant of our American picture, with Venus rising half way around the world.  Not that it matters much; greatest elongation is a “soft” event.

Venus is (at the time and place of the picture) about vertically above the east point of the horizon; conspicuously high in the possibly visible company of the first-magnitude stars of Gemini and Orion, thought slightly less high because at present on a course south of the ecliptic.

The ecliptic arches up to about 23° above the celestial equator, and Venus’s present declination (height above the equator) is 20°.  This means that in the middle of the day Venus – this “star” that is sometimes findable in daylight –  is passing overhead for places like Mexico and India.

Which gives me a pretext to talk about another of the pictures in the Venus book: one of those on the “goddess of love” side, the very Venereal example (on page 87) of the sculptures at Khajuraho in India.

What strikes everyone about Khajuraho is the orgiastic sexuality of some of the sculptures, and we wonder about such things as why this was so accepted in the Chandela kingdom in the tenth century, and, in this example, which legs belong to which bodies.  But there is also the sheer skill of the sculptors.

Here is a small part – non-erotic, like the majority – of the miles of friezes.  The figures are supple.  They can’t compare, for anatomical grace, with Michelangelo of centuries later, or Myron of centuries earlier; the limbs are somewhat tubular, and the faces are stylized.  But consider how they were carved.

Descriptions I have found do not mention whether statues such as these were carved out of the masonry, or were carved independently and fitted into the spaces in it.  The two figures on either side of that corner in the wall appear to be joined to it and to each other, part of the same mass of stone.  If that is so, the required skill seems almost superhuman.  When the carver started, those two facets of the wall were inside the sandstone block.  The carver had to imagine them in there, and find his way to them with his chisel, feeling in around the figures, then exposing those two flat surfaces precisely.

This was surely more difficult than Michelangelo’s celebrated feat of “liberating” a slave from a block of stone.

The feat is considerable even if the statues were carved out of separate blocks.  The figures often overlap; in the erotic scenes they are intertwined.  The carver may have started by chalking an outline, or several superimposed outlines, on the raw surface of a block; but imagine picking up a chisel and wondering what to do next.

The Khajuraho figures, even in the erotic scenes, are not entirely naked: they wear adornments.  So the sculptor’s tool could not glide smoothly all along every arm or thigh or around a breast or face.  Again, it had to discover that surface from behind the ornament.  The bracelet or eyebrow could not be applied on top of the limb as in modeling with clay.  One slip of the chisel, and a bracelet would be severed or there would be a gash in the body, or in that wall surface.  The craftsman had to be without error, having been trained by practice on many blocks of sandstone.

There were miles of these sculptures, encrusting 85 temples, of which only 25 survived the later regimes of anti-idolatrous Muslims.  The temples themselves are of pleasing forms, of a sort of bottled complexity, built up by layers of blocks, with window layers that invite you to be inside looking out.

There must have been hundreds of trained sculptors over many generations, trained, I feel, up to the level of genius.

I think this is an instance of something about response to art.  It is common for critics to discuss the emotions it expresses, and patterns such as diagonals and balances in its composition.  I find myself trying to discern how it was done, which, mainly, is the order in which it was done.  Here is Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne,” about which I wrote a childhood poem.

Titian may have conceived the two main figure before he started, but he could not have started by painting them.  He had to paint the sky first.  Those cloud streaks could not be laid on with sweeps of the brush after the trees got in the way.  You can discern the further layers in their order, including the cliff on top of the sea, and the leopards in the shadow of an Ariadne who had not yet been outlined as a perhaps final act and filled with the opaque richness of oil paint.

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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.