The Dangling String

La Madonna della Misericordia
The Dangling String On the campanile of the Catholic church, I Carmini, in Campo Santa Margherita, a statue of the Madonna standing on a crescent moon holds two strings attached to what appears to be a wet rag. This represents the Scapular, a sacred cloth which Mary offers to the Carmelite faithful, who believe that it can protect them from the eternal fires of Purgatory. How far back in Mediterranean cultural history can we trace a link between women and suspended, sacred cloth?
Snake Goddess of Crete	Pompeii Family Shrine	The Virgin Ascending
Marija Gimbutas in her The Language of the Goddess documents the Bronze Age worship of a Snake Goddess, who often sports a snake-like girdle. Elizabeth Wayland Barber in her Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years, uses linguistic reconstruction of a proto-Indo-European language and visual clues found in Paleolithic figurines to discover an ancient link between string girdles worn by women since the Gravettian culture of 20,000 BC and women's fertility, sexuality, and spiritual powers. The word zoster, which means a sacred girdle, dates from 3,000 BC and is found today in Greece as zostra, a fringed red skirt used as a talisman for women in labor. Barber believes that this girdle was the ancestress of the hundred-tasselled zone, Aphrodite's belt or girdle, which contained all of her amorous powers. Jungian analyst Ann Shearer in her book Athene: Image and Energy, describes an archaic 5,000 BC statue of Athene: on a pediment on the Acropolis the goddess holds out a cape fringed with writhing snakes, symbols of regeneration and eternal life. On the island of Crete, mid-second-millennium Snake Goddesses wore snakes on their wrists and waists. For ancient Egyptians the knot on the girdle of the goddess Isis was a symbol of the key of fertility and life. A fresco in a family altar in a home in Pompeii visually connects the loop of a woman's shawl and the coils of a serpent. Marina Warner, in her Alone of All her Sex, the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, shows how the tradition of Aphrodite's girdle and the girdle of the Amazon Queen Hippolyta was transmuted into Mary's girdle or belt. I suggest that the girdle which the Madonna gives to Doubting Thomas as she ascends heavenward in Venetian painter Palma il Vecchio's Assumption of the Virgin is a variation on the magic girdle theme and is thematically connected to the symbolic serpents of the Cretan Snake-Goddesses and to the chthonic Athene. Titian's Madonna as she surges heavenward reenacts this iconographic tradition.

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Would you like to meet some more Venetian housewives?	Would you like to see some more Laundry?	Would you like to find out more about laundry, cloth, and draped fabric in Venetian art?