Feline Fascination
There is probably nothing like a cute feline for an immediate shot of pure joy and serotonin. Isn’t this why cats have taken over social media? Beautifully regal one moment, comically wacky another, cats on the internet are a perfect pick-me-up for when we can only spare a minute or two. They have become a means of stress relief, a coping mechanism when we are at our most harried.
Cats have always been our puckish companions throughout history and we have, preserved in art, a number of playful kittens. For early modern painters in Europe, cats were a sign of the domestic ordinariness of life. Rembrandt has a cat pawing the hem of the Virgin Mary's dress and scenes of Jesus revealing himself on the road to Emmaus often have a cat amidst the tumult.
Veronese’s Wedding at Cana has a feline (in the bottom right corner) on its side toying with a vat of wine.
While the cat in some other instances has been used to symbolise erotic lust (given the feline proclivity for noisy matings at night), the cat in these paintings is a sign of normality, of everyday life chugging along while supernatural events unfold. We are meant to partially identify with the cat because, likewise, we are all too often too caught up in our own concerns to recognise the momentous events taking place before us.
The appearance of cats in the popular genre of Japanese woodblock prints called Uikoyo-e that thrived between seventeenth and nineteenth centuries perhaps comes closer to our contemporary fascination with cats. Here is a cat petted and snuggled by an elegant beauty.
On a more erotic note, a kitten plays with the robes of a lady fresh from her bath.
In contrast, Utagawa Hiroshige focuses his woodcut “Revelers Return from Tori no Machi Festival” on a cat with paws and tail tucked sitting quietly by a window in a room empty of humans or festivities. There are a few traces of activity—a used towel carelessly thrown on the ledge next to a bowl, for example—but we get to share a moment of repose with a cat calmly observing the outside world. Here is a cat quietly being a cat.
The Uikoyo-e cats are not relegated to the margins but are very much stars in their own right. We take pleasure in their mischief, their nonchalance, their self-interested agenda. Perhaps we wish we could be more like them, going their own way with an insouciance we cannot quite achieve. We both admire and laugh at their antics, but perhaps at the root of our fascination is envy for their self-possession. Oh, to be like a cat which is nothing but pure cat when we are so often forced to be other than ourselves….
