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Spiritual
scarecrows WALKING through the University of Chicago, if one were to look skywards, what arrests the eye is a large number of gruesome, or even funny, stone figures atop gates, arches, pinnacles, turrets or spires of some of the neo-Gothic buildings in the campus. These mysterious caricatures of apes, griffins, serpents, foxes and dragons, with glaring eyes and protruding mouths, often with tongues sticking out, are what they called ‘gargoyles’. In English the word is derived from the French gargouille which means ‘to gargle’. There is an italian word for it which means ‘protuding gutter’ and its German equivalent ‘spitting water’ seems to suggest that they were installed to throw rain water away from the buildings so that it did not fall on stained glass windows or seep into the walls. |
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 But there were simple ways of achieving
this end. Creations such as these cannot get away with
such simple explanations. Considering that the medieval
artisans, who invented this art form were a very
superstitious lot, it is more probable that gargoyles
were installed as some kind of spiritual scarecrows to
scare the devil out of its wits. Which is also why they
are found mostly on church buildings. Such figures are
found all over the Notre Dame and other cathedrals in
Europe.In the Chicago University there is even a class on this subject. It is taught by Michael Camille who is of the opinion that these figures were "placed on the physical margins of the cathedrals — far from the interiors, which were meant to symbolise the kingdom of heaven on Earth. Inside was sacred; outside was secular, even bawdy, with anal and phallic images nudging onto the walls of Christendom’s great shrines". Yet another theory has it that the clever medieval masons found a way through these caricatures, to deliver biting commentaries on the crooked rulers, clergy and merchants of the day. This idea has been carried forward in recent times. The National Cathedral in Washington displays a crooked figure of a politician. Outside the Chicago Tribune building there is an elephant holding its trunk as if to protect itself from the stench of scandal. Back at the University of Chicago, the students have given the gargoyles their own labels. For them the more grotesque faces cannot be any other but those of the admissions counsellor and the college examiner! The most striking, possibly because its the closest to the ground and the easiest to look at, are the figures on Cobb’s Gate on the East 57th Street. Within it one of the serene quadrangles designed by Ives Cobb exactly 100 years ago. Outside, winged dragons with huge fangs snarl at the base of the entrance’s triangular peak while other grotesques seem to be scampering up the slope. At the Bartlett Gymnasium built five years later funny bird-like phoenixes rise from the mythical fire. There are some gargoyles at the Theological Seminary as well, where they continue to spit water or scare the devil or do whatever else they have been doing here for the last hundred years. |
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