This image, which is a detail from a painting by Lucas van Leyden of ‘Lot and His Daughters’, shows the destruction of the city of Sodom. At first glance, its realism is striking. Many of us in our lifetime have seen cities burning like this one, the buildings reduced to bare cages for the savage fires within them. The electric colour of the water lit by flares seems strangely modern to have been painted by a sixteenth-century artist. Nevertheless Lucas van Leyden’s vision of the wrath of God is fundamentally a medieval one. It is conceived according to two principles which are naturally opposed to one another: the order, the rationality of God, as opposed to the disorder, the chaos of the world of man. The city of men not only burns; it tilts into the sea; men run up its streets as up the slanting deck of a sinking ship. The masts of the ships smashed in the harbour are contrasted with the foreground tree which belongs to nature, created by God and relatively uncorrupted by the interference of man. In the whole picture the scale of the city is like that of a toy, the toy of a disobedient child who has provoked his father. The power of this father lies not only in his ability to rain fire down upon the city, but in the very form of the fire in the sky. It is symmetrical, ordered, lucid – like a perfectly developed part of a chrysanthemum. It is part of the order of justice which man fails to understand but cannot escape. Perhaps the reason why such an image can still work on one powerfully – if one allows it time – is to be found in the fact that in one’s dreams and unconscious the notion of a higher order may still remain. The word ‘father’ can be very potent in this respect, while scenes of destruction by fire often possess, if we are not in immediate danger, something of the quality of a dream.
1972
