Nettles’ work suggests the rich symbolic language of the two fruits. According to Judeo-Christian tradition, Adam and Eve, with Eve as the temptress, ate the fruit from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge and were expelled from Paradise, casting humanity into a mortal world of sin and suffering. The apple thus represents temptation and sin, but knowledge as well, something that humans after The Fall would have to struggle to obtain. The pomegranate, a crucial symbol in the myth of Persephone, also has both negative and positive connotations. Because Persephone is both the Queen of the Underworld and the Goddess of Spring or Vegetation, the pomegranate is paradoxically both “the fruit of death” and a symbol of fertility and abundance.
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The pomegranate, with its brilliant jewel-like seeds and flamboyant color, has been revered and invested with symbolism and mystery since ancient times. In her book Punica Granatum, Harriet Bart calmly embraces this myth-saturated fruit and, in a brilliant counterintuitive move, strips away all of its fabled floridity by presenting it in delicate, all-white embossments. Here the pomegranates rest serenely on the page, joined by similarly reserved images of the Goddess Aphrodite. Their power resides in their quiet self-containment. The text is excerpted from both classical and contemporary writers, among the latter, André Gide, Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. By commingling these writings, Bart creates a new text that, like the images, sits gently on the page, seemingly nudging the eye along from line to line.
Punica Granatum
Harriet Bart
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