"Agua pasada que mueve molino...: Notas sobre iconografía y cultura tradicional", Studia Zamorensia, XI (2012), pp. 255-278 (original) (raw)

These notes aim to review the milling iconography, from the landscape point of view to the hagiographic and from the psychological to the philosophical. Some saints hold a grinding stone as an attribute (Vincent Martyr, Felix of Girona, Christopher, Quirinus, Florian, Callistus, Mammes or Christina of Bolsena). Besides, mills have also had an undeniable erotic significance, quintessential public space away from population centers, places where ideas circulated and initiation centers for lovers. Windmills were considered to be symbols of madness and during the carnival festivity, people threw plenty of flour to each other, a clear ritual of fertility and regeneration. In a drawing by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a witch rides a grinding wheel. In the engraving Sloth (1557), there appears the enigmatic figure of a defecating miller, bothered by a group of farmers who spear his bottom, as though the miller was purging sins which greatly irritated the common people (perhaps an allusion to the glutton and thief stereotypes). In the enigmatic Melancolia I (1514) by Albrecht Dürer, putto appears scribbling a table which is resting on a millston. Is it perhaps an allegory of humanity, or an allusion to the vice of sloth that paralyzes profane geniuses and should be exorcised? Or does he just want to draw our attention to the tormented genius of artists, exceptional human beings although limited before the greatness of creation? Are we perhaps before a spiritual self-portrait of Dürer, as Panofsky suggested?