What Images of Oxen Can Tell Us: Metaphorical Meanings and Everyday Working Practices

Abstract

The article first briefly presents some historical, geographical, social, and cultural data relating to the draught ox in Slovenia, and then discusses the eloquence of some relevant Slovene pictorial sources (mainly from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries). These are either relatively realistic genre scenes depicting oxen at pasture and at work, or those revealing their metaphorical, symbolic meanings. An analysis of the reasons for the appearance of oxen in such works of art and folk art follows, and an attempt to explain different attitudes on the part of painters or sculptors towards the animals. In further analysis of the selected works of art the article then focuses on the ‘everyday reality’ of the depicted agricultural processes in which oxen were involved, on their social and material cultural aspects — such as people working with oxen, various types of harness, and tools of communication. The findings are comparatively substantiated by analogous documentary photographs, related foreign pictorial sources, oral testimonies from field research, and by other relevant sources and literature.