This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.
The New Moon is here! And the night bird owl, taking up its observation post, is perched on the moon crescent – the doorstep of its house in the hollow of a tree.
An owl can see in the dark and its quiet night flight accompanied by the shrill hooting sounds creates an image of a sage endowed with the gift of prophecy and possessing some mystic knowledge unavailable to lesser mortals.
In the ancient classical tradition owl represented wisdom and appeared with the Greek goddess Athena (Roman Minerva). It is also found in the Roman scrolls as an attribute of allegorical figures of Night and Sleep.
In literature owl often stood for shrewdness and book-learning (remember ‘a wise old owl’).
Let us now compare some artefacts in this painting and in an earlier work of the artist Moonlight Mystery ( 2007)