14 James Hall, Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1974)

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As a young man, Bowie was ravenous for greater knowledge about art, a subject that fascinated him almost as much as music. Modern art, from impressionism onward, he found relatively easy to decode. But older art, the sort of art his parents’ generation considered “real art,” was different. Understanding its form was one thing. But what about its content?

One of critic George Steiner’s worries (see p. 62) was that the art of the past had become incomprehensible to younger generations because of a decline in educational standards. At school, Steiner believed, children no longer studied the Bible or Greek and Roman literature as closely as they once had. Consequently, their ability to “read” art grounded in biblical or mythological imagery was limited.

Teasing out this meaning requires Hall’s Dictionary, a friendly, at-a-glance guide not to individual paintings as such, though it cites plenty of examples, but to symbols and themes in Western art. Thanks to Hall, nonspecialist art lovers can understand why a pig with a bell around its neck standing beside an old monk identifies that monk as St. Antony the Great—it’s something to do with grazing rights—and work out what all those skulls, jugs, and bunches of grapes in Dutch paintings stand for. Equally, a character may sometimes mean less than we think: Venus turns up everywhere but, as Hall explains, often has no symbolic resonance whatsoever. She’s just, well, a naked woman.

For all his air of patrician authority, Hall was not a trained art historian but a production manager at the publishing firm J. M. Dent & Sons who had left school at seventeen and taught himself everything he knew by wandering around London’s museums and galleries—Dent’s office was in Covent Garden—during his lunch break. The book took Hall several long years to write. He would work on it early in the mornings before catching the train into town from his home in Harpenden. After it was published, art experts couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been written by one of their own kind.

Bowie loved the potency of traditional art symbols, perhaps because of the freight they carried from having been around so long. They crop up in stage shows, album artwork, and videos throughout his career. But he used them in a more careful, concentrated way in the extraordinary videos for “Lazarus” and “Blackstar.” With Hall’s help we can deduce that Button Eyes, the blindfolded beggar character Bowie plays in both videos, is either a saint about to be executed or a symbol of spiritual or moral blindness. Although in the “Lazarus” video it’s all too clear what the skull on the desk means as Bowie sits scribbling frenziedly, desperate to commit his final ideas to paper.…