Tuccia and the Basket

Tuccia showing the sieve with water.
Art: Giovanni Batista Benaschi

One of the most popular and enduring goddesses in Ancient Rome was Vesta, goddess of the hearth, and it was – and in so many houses still is – the cozy hearth fire which is regarded as the central focus of family life. Vesta’s popularity endured into early Christian times, and even today her name survives (although rather commercially!) as a brand name on boxes of matches.

The temple in Rome bearing the name of the goddess was served only by those dedicated women who were chaste of body and pure of spirit: the Vestal Virgins, and it is the story of one of them which has become legend. In the 3rd century B.C. the Vestal Virgin Tuccia found herself accused of being less than the pure one which her services in the temple of the goddess demanded of her.

From one deceitful mouth to another the false and ugly rumours about Tuccia quickly spread, and the poor young woman saw herself being threatened with expulsion, and separated from the temple – and from the goddess – to which she had chosen to dedicate her life. What must she do against these cruel and baseless claims? How must she show that she was as fully worthy to serve the goddess as she ever was?

Rather than protest her innocence with words of denial Tuccia chose to keep her silence. In so many situations actions can speak louder than any words, and Tuccia’s action in her own situation was to pick up a woven wicker basket. The basket was used as a sieve, and its base was a loose open weave with many holes. She carried the sieve down to the banks of the Tiber and, silently asking a blessing from her patron goddess, dipped the sieve into the flowing waters.

The sieve held. With the wicker basket full to the brim Tuccia carefully and dutifully walked back to the temple to offer the water as a libation to the goddess. Not a drop of the Tiber’s water was spilled, and all who saw her actions were silent and astonished. They knew that only the most pure of heart, only one who was the most deserving of Vesta’s blessings, could perform such a modest miracle. And it was this that was the clear conclusion of all those who witnessed Tuccia’s feat.

How many of us have at some time suffered through injustice? How many have, like Tuccia, been forced to show that they are not guilty of the accusations against them? Sometimes words of protest are not enough, but what then? We might not manage Tuccia’s small miracle, but to remain pure of heart, to be true to ourselves even in the storm, can also be enough. That… and perhaps also to remember that small miracles can, and do, sometimes happen.

Life? Or Theatre?

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was a German-Jewish artist. As a young girl she lived relatively carefree until the National Socialist takeover of power in 1933. In spite of this radical political change she was almost able to complete a course at the Berlin art academy. In January 1939 Charlotte fled Berlin and travelled to her grandparents in the south of France, who had already left Nazi Germany when the National Socialists took control. In 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, her grandmother committed suicide. Only then did Charlotte learn that her mother had also taken her own life in 1926.

The twenty four year-old Charlotte assimilated this turbulent family history and her experiences as a Jew in Berlin in an extraordinary way. In her anguish she resurrected her memories of her former lover, the singing teacher Alfred Wolfsohn (1896-1962). Among other things, he told her that in order to love life fully, one may have to embrace and understand its opposite – death. She decided to save herself with the help of his ideas and to undertake "something totally insanely special" as an alternative to suicide. She withdrew completely and began to paint in an unprecedented explosion of creative activity to ward off mental disintegration. And along the way she recreated her life. She used everything she had in her: her artistry, her visual and musical memory, her insight into the personalities of her relatives, her intellectual faculties, her humor and the inspiration she drew from her love for Wolfsohn.

In a unique interplay of art forms, Charlotte Salomon depicted her life in an artwork of almost eight hundred gouache watercolor paintings with overlaid sheets full of texts and musical references. In it she introduces herself and the people around her with assumed and grandly-resounding stage names as the protagonists in a musical theater play (a ‘Singspiel’). She mercilessly scrutinizes their lives in an ingenious game veering between fact and fiction, leaving her viewers with the question of what they are actually seeing: is this life itself – or merely theatre?

As Nazi aggression escalated, the Berlin-born Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon sensed the end was near. She wrapped over 800 of her paintings in brown paper and handed them to a friend with the words "Take good care of it, it's my whole life". Miraculously, the gouaches survived.

Charlotte Salomon died in October 1943 in Auschwitz at the age of 26.

1939, painting in the garden at the Côte d'Azur, France

After the Second World War her father and his wife discovered Life? Or Theatre? in the South of France. They donated it to the Jewish Historical Museum in 1971.

 "And she saw with awakened eyes all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun and knew: she must disappear from the human surface for a while and make every sacrifice to create her world anew from the depths."

All the works are in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.