Caput

Having just watched an interview with the lawyer representing Jacob Chansley (AKA Jake Angeli) – the self-professed QAnon Shaman, who was dressed in furs, horns, body paint and carrying a spear while participating in the siege on the Capitol Building in America’s capital, Washington DC – I have been reflecting on the word ‘capital’.

Both capital and capitol are derived from the Latin word caput, meaning ‘head’. Capital evolved from the words capitālis, ‘of the head’, and capitāle, ‘wealth’. Whereas capitol comes from capitōlium, the name of the temple dedicated to Jupiter that was situated on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

Capital lends its name to ‘capital punishment’ or the death penalty and it is notable that during the current American administration, President Trump ended a 17-year hiatus on the federal death penalty last July. Since then twelve people have been executed by the state, including the first woman in 70 years, and Trump is due to sanction one final execution before the Biden administration takes over on 20 January. A podcast on ‘Trump, the death penalty and its links with America’s racist history’ can be found at: www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/jan/15/trump-the-death-penalty-and-its-relationship-with-americas-racist-history

The word ‘capital’ is also connected with the ‘seven deadly sins’ which are known as the capital vices in Christian teachings. A series of vices were originally classified as ‘capital’ in the fourth century by the Desert Fathers – particularly the early Christian monk and ascetic, Evagrius Ponticus.  These were then revised into a list of sins which were enumerated by Pope Gregory in the 6^th century. In the 13^th century, St Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, defended and elaborated upon Pope Gregory’s list and confirmed them as ‘capital sins’ as they are the head and form of all other sins.  

The standard list of ‘capital vices’ includes pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth and these are considered to be abuses or excesses of natural faculties or passions. Dorothy Sayers, in her Introduction to Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, views them as perverse or corrupt versions of love where the excess or disordered love of good things leads to greed, gluttony and lust; while the perverted love which is directed toward other’s harm results in pride, envy and wrath. Sloth, on the other hand, can be seen as a deficiency of love.

The ‘capital vices’ have been the subject of art and literature since the Middle Ages. The second book of Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ (early 14^th c.) is structured around them. The last tale of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ (late 14^th c.), the ‘Parson’s Tale’, is a sermon that the parson gives against the seven deadly sins. William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’ (c. 1370-90) and Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queen’ (c. 1590s) each feature characters who personify the sins. More recently, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s ‘Bedazzled’ have provided a contemporary take.

Many artists have depicted the ‘capital vices’ collectively or individually, and the sins are found in works ranging from Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breugel, to Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Bruce Nauman and Jeff Koons. The theme was particularly popular in European woodblock and engraving art from the 16^th century. In the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, there are works by Hans Burgkmair the Elder from his ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ series (1510) and from Heinrich Aldegrever’s ‘Virtues and Vices’ series (1552).

Hans Burgkmair, born in Augsburg, was the son of a painter. Although a successful portrait and religious scene artist, he is best-remembered for his 834 woodcuts, the majority of which were intended as book illustrations. He was an important innovator of the chiaroscuro woodcut technique and seems to have been the first to use a tone block in his works.

Heinrich Aldegrever was a painter, goldsmith and printmaker from Westphalia who was one of the ‘Little Masters’ – a group of German artists making small old master prints in the generation after Albrecht Dürer. Due to his close resemblance to the style of Dürer, he has been called the ‘Albrecht of Westphalia’. Aldegrever’s works range from ornamental engravings to mythological themes to folk subjects. He actively supported the Reformation of the Church and executed portraits of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. In a significant group of works, the ‘Power of Death’ cycle, he criticised the vices of the Catholic Church.

In recent times we seem to have not just accepted the ‘capital vices’ as our fate, but even reify some who flagrantly and wantonly engage in them. It is not hard to cite innumerable examples where President Trump’s pride, envy, avarice, wrath and sloth have contributed to the seditious behaviour we witnessed last week at the Capitol building.

The current NGV Triennial Exhibition features an eerily prescient work from 2011 by American artist, Jim Shaw. Titled ‘Capitol viscera appliances mural’ and painted on a recycled repertory theatre backdrop, it is described as ‘an oneiric vision depicting the obliteration of Capitol Hill … by an eruption of molten lava overlaid with a floating matrix of (1950s) domestic appliances’. Shaw’s art looks at how the golden age of American domesticity has been overtaken by the social and ideological dominance of neoconservatism, consumerism, conspiracy theory, and celebrity culture.

In an interview with artist Tony Oursler in ‘Illumination’ volume 2 of the NGV Triennial catalogue, Shaw describes how he uses the ‘language of the conservative Christian right, their symbols, to worm my way into their world’. In elaborating on his vision of America, and its contemporary media, he says: ‘we have a consumerist kind of anarchy and zombie-attack narratives that slake our thirst for actual bloodletting, [where] serial killers are a kind of perverse superstar as they act on the basest urges we need to suppress in order for society to function’. This raises the question of what happens when there is incitement for these basest urges to be unleashed.

(Jim Shaw’s current exhibition ‘Hope Against Hope’ is currently on view in London and features a painting of Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, descending an escalator into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell where they find a group of traitors (including former aides) frozen alongside Satan in a sea of ice).

In the extensive, and ongoing investigations into the insurrection in Washington DC, many people have been charged with criminal actions, although none of these are capital offences (despite the five deaths which resulted). So far Chansley has been charged with civil disorder, violent entry and disorderly conduct, as well as demonstrating in a restricted building. According to his lawyer, Chansley’s defence is that he was ‘invited’ to engage in these activities by President Trump. And, to that end he is actively seeking a pardon from the US President for his ‘encouragement’ to participate in the alleged illegal activities – an extraordinary legal defence even in these unprecedented times … or is it?