Easter and Christmas differ in one significant detail. Christmas is tangible. A child was born, it will grow up, live and die. The straw in the manger is coarse, the breath of the ox and donkey is warm, the sheep smell of wool and milk. The assumption of Christ, on the other hand, is not tangible. No one witnessed his journey into another dimension. It is a question of believing his words. This is why Easter, from the human perspective, is always in need of a metaphor. Searching for that metaphor, we turn to everything that is restored, everything that returns, everything that re-emerges from the earth into which it had disappeared.
The imagery linked to these guarantees and testimonies is fantastic. It includes buds, seeds and sprouts, young boughs, nests with eggs, joyous animals with their offspring. Amongst them, we can easily discern that fluffy and benevolent creature that is so good at begetting offspring: where there were two, soon there are ten, and so they populate the Earth. The rabbit is, therefore, our favourite symbol of Easter, although there is another, darker and more painful, side to its infantile iconographic role. Namely, the rabbit is a favourite prey, a victim. This is the topic of the beautiful “Romance of the Rabbit”, written by the French author Francis Jammes, a friend of Nikola Šop. So the rabbit has to pay the price for its cheery presence in the most mysterious of our holidays.
Apart from the rabbit, the main symbol of Easter in most households is an egg. An egg as the most perfect creation in form and matter, an egg as a tin can full of life. Its shape is so well-suited to our hands. Its shell, finer than the finest porcelain, is made to be painted and decorated, to honour life. Fine art has plucked both the rabbit and the egg from their surroundings defined by nature and household celebrations and transposed them onto its own terrain. Let’s remind ourselves of Dürer’s hare or Fabergé’s eggs for the Russian royal family.
Through the choice of the motif for its this year’s Easter stamp, Croatian Post evokes those beloved elements of our private Easter celebrations. A small glass nineteenth-century egg, part ruby red and part transparent, has been turned into a real work of art through meticulous handicraft. From the leaves of grass to the leaf on the small bough, the world surrounding the small pensive rabbit is magnificent. Just one single element in that entire image belongs to the human world. The fence. On which side does the rabbit sit? Did it cross to the human side or was it left outside? Does it trust the humans who fawn over it or does it not?
As we ponder on that, turning the small egg over in our hand, the egg onto which the artist has attempted to transpose an entire world, a glow comes from its interior, responding to each change in the external light. Those two lights that meet are a true Easter answer.
Željka Čorak,
Fellow of the Croatian Academy of
Sciences and Arts
