Dinosaurs, Mammoths & Forests Primeval: Celebrating the Great Zallinger Murals at Yale
At the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Ave., New Haven, (203) 432-5050, yale.edu/peabody.

Icons are illustrated lies which meet our expectations. This is particularly the case for those fraught topics where a desperation for certainty confronts evidence which is either fragmentary or lacking entirely. Where amazement or fear predominates, the icon consoles us with recognition. The knight in Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal knows that Death plays chess because he has “seen it in paintings.”
There are, of course, baser motives for such imagined falsehoods. The exhibition of Shakespeare portraits at the Yale Center for British Art a year ago was a telling example of nostalgic paranoia. The one verifiable image of the poet was uncompelling; only the sham but more splendid versions would serve as suitable to the poet’s myth.

A more melodramatic instance of presumption trumping reality is Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ. A commonplace of illustrated piety, reproduced in millions of copies, with its unsurprising xenophobia, it had an audience in waiting. The mass acceptance of the image precluded future variants. But it is the pretense of realism in the portrayal that certifies its authority. The gilt nimbus given to medieval renderings of the Christ is now turned to a radiance of air. Presented with an anticipated stereotype, the predisposed faithful recognized the Anglo-Saxon features because they were what their prejudices required, even though they had never seen the rendering before.

It is a reminder that the iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries—condemned as heretics for their destruction of Christian images—would seem more sympathetic if theirs was not so much a frenzy against idolatry as it was a passion for mystery.

Curiously enough, this is an entry into the workings of The Age of Reptiles mural by Rudolf Zallinger. Completed 60 years ago, a small anniversary exhibition of preparatory sketches and other archival materials related to it (and to a later mural, The Age of Mammals) has been on view since May.

Based on reasonable speculations of experts who oversaw the work, Zallinger’s mural was not initially meant as a fantasy. It also did not have a core audience with preconceived pictures, at least none they were unwilling to relinquish. But the mural established a typology of imagination that would not readily admit to later alteration. A version of the mural printed in LIFE magazine completed the transformation from a popularized natural history to iconic image, with the mistakes, which would be later discovered, already become the realism of dinosaurs.

In the 1960s, when undertaking some needed restoration of the mural, Zallinger offered to make corrections which would update several elements to reflect the newest state of knowledge about the plant and animal life portrayed in it. This was refused on the grounds that the piece was now considered “a work of art,” outside the framework of scientific accuracy. Unlike a textbook in paleontology which would have revisions required of its succeeding editions as a consequence of ongoing research, the mural was granted immunity from fact. It had become believable, even if not accurate.

The landscape, which borrows something from Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire and more from Maxfield Parrish’s heightened color fields, is of an orderly universe, ponderous, intact, with an arrangement of static tableaux that suggests little of the fleet, sleek raptors animated in the film of Jurassic Park. There are accurately rendered geological forms in which fossils were found, although they would obviously not have been visible when those same animals were still living. And the Tyrannosaur is potbellied and foppish, like some murderous bureaucrat, or one of those fez-wearing Blue Meanie cadres from Yellow Submarine, their bulging torsos opening as toothy jaws.

But for all its invocations of order, violence is literally central to the painting: A carnivorous dinosaur, blood-flecked, tears at another animal’s corpse. While the mural on mammals has the pursuit of prey, there is no such ravening visible anywhere.

A wartime work (as was Sallman’s image of Christ) begun in 1943 and completed in 1947, The Age of Reptiles deploys an art that makes wonder bearable, the overwhelming reduced in scale. Read as time, the pictured sequence which stretches over 350 million years is (in a refinement of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s argument of what art does to space) rendered as a miniature that we can read in a moment’s glance.

Zallinger has constructed an essay on hope stretching from the initiate stages of land animal evolution to the small mammal which will survive the catastrophe of species extinction. Even if the entire pictured world vanishes—as it had—the future is still promised, where we will paint our fantasies of the past.
But the constantly mutating current science of prehistory has rendered the mural quaint, and we no longer require icons of forbearance in the face of present wars. Our new realism is a polished indifference.

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