Page - 114 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

reality).The painter claims that we can see how every single thing in the painting stems from the same source, the same figure – Mary. Mary personifies creativ- ity and the energy of the world on the abstract, non-religious plain. Everything arises from the shape elements of her dress and crown – the source is singular while the shapes are infinite. The spaces in the painting seem isolated from one another, which is what linearity feels like; however, in fact, all times coexist si- multaneously. The poet (represented by the harp) drowning in the sea, Laoc- oön and his sons battling reality, they are all struggling against something which is not stable or real, which flows out of the dress and comes back to it – this is dream time and cyclical, feminine time. Everything stems from the same figure and makes its way back to it. Mary’s hands are crossed and she is depicted in a stable position which is symbolic of the Platonic ideal reality. Her eyes look with compassion upon the entirety of creation, while the second Madonna, her American counterpart in the bottom right corner, is the Madonna of material- ism. Agur’s painting “The Two Madonnas” presents, in my opinion, a critical point of view upon the linear time concept of the capitalist culture. This is why I chose to include it in the summary of the article. Maria looks on with compassion at humanity’s Sisyphean struggle in and with time. Her compassion stems from the broader perspective from which she observes reality. In the painting Maria herself is the source of all the seemingly changing forms that come from her and return to her. This cyclical conception of time presented by the artist, so different from the dominant narrative in the West, appears already in Ecclesiastes: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (1:9), and resonates in the words of Shakespeare in Sonnet 123: Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire What thou dost foist upon us that is old, And rather make them born to our desire Than think that we before have heard them told.61 According to Shakespeare the quick aging and changing of everything “new” is actu- ally an illusion that conceals the cyclical truth. 61 Booth 1977, 107. 114 | Bina Nir www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 95–116