Alfred Jarry Exhibition

The wheels of torture are broken up with the explosion and death of the executioner and the sky is battered and beaten with stones, but the terrestrial fire turns away from St. Catherine, who was finished off by a sword-blow to her neck.

There are other things in this image, or, to put it another way, there are things that would be more completely written in the eye of eternity by the woodcut artist.

The wheel in the center, a bit oblong, is like the center of a fan, which is whole though not a disk; and there is a crank to move the wheel, and the wheel is double and the two halves turn in opposite directions, which is also like a fan.

The flames flow with this rotation like water through a small mill, and the bits of soil from the hill fall toward the flames -- continuing them ... and the trees above are mounded up horizontally and descend from the right under a cloud, fueling the rotation of the wheel.

The heavenly shower forms two sides of an isosceles triangle whose horizontal members are the base: the base filled up and curved (in the shape of a rain gauge) and creating the right arm of the executioner, who raises his cloak and sword in his right hand while the other covers the left arm that likewise raises his cloak to the wind, following the currents of wind emanating from the blades of the wheel --- and they are the two sides of a pentagon or an inverted kite: and the form of a triangle is visible too, to signify God: the fiery Father thunders between the co-personal clouds.

And above the city, carried by the wheel, is a hill that descends from the sky and that sinks down to earth and dead executioners, and the leaves flutter around the wheel: and there are three stages to the image to signify the three worlds. The hill flows harmoniously with the pleats of the robe and the fine line and twin curved muscles that are Dürer's legs.

This robe and these legs are the train and the robe of a most grand decapitated saint who fills up the image, with the rump to the shoulders of the executioner, the navel to the eye of Catherine, the waist to the terminal horizontal line at the edge of the hill. The throat cut, the Saint expires following the hard line of intersection of the radius of the retreating man, in the prolongation of the sole shape of the thundering cloud that is not so much point as blade and the head and hair are rolled amidst the sloping city and the trees ... toward the mill of the wheel, that it have a new gyration.