Miscellany
This week I've been reading some wierd and wonderful things at some ghastly hours of the morning. Here are a couple of tidbits I've found in my early morning trawlings:
Art (in How to Read a Painting, Patrick De Rynck (2004))
That the Old Masters (Europeans pre-1800) depicted many religious scenes. Derr, and? Well, I was struck by how graphic some of them are, how well they took me into the scene, and got me imagining what was going on in the hearts and minds of their subjects.
For example, Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus, in which Jesus is eating with two of his disciples after his resurrection. The disciples' alarm -- their master is alive! -- is palpable. The disciple to Jesus' left (James?) has outstretched arms, one of them almost touching the painting's border, and, so it seems, reaching out to the viewer.
The memento mori is also new to me. Two took my interest: the first, a skull on the desk of a wafer-thin Jerome, working away at his translations; the second, a highly distorted skull at the feet of two stately-looking men in Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'. Rather than shamelessly paraphrasing, I'll quote De Rynck on this skull's significance:
Art (in How to Read a Painting, Patrick De Rynck (2004))
That the Old Masters (Europeans pre-1800) depicted many religious scenes. Derr, and? Well, I was struck by how graphic some of them are, how well they took me into the scene, and got me imagining what was going on in the hearts and minds of their subjects.
For example, Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus, in which Jesus is eating with two of his disciples after his resurrection. The disciples' alarm -- their master is alive! -- is palpable. The disciple to Jesus' left (James?) has outstretched arms, one of them almost touching the painting's border, and, so it seems, reaching out to the viewer.
The memento mori is also new to me. Two took my interest: the first, a skull on the desk of a wafer-thin Jerome, working away at his translations; the second, a highly distorted skull at the feet of two stately-looking men in Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'. Rather than shamelessly paraphrasing, I'll quote De Rynck on this skull's significance:
When we position ourselves so that we can see the skull as a skull, the other, supposedly realistic objects are in turn distorted. The moral is that death is everywhere and always, but we do not recognize it. And wnen we do finally make out its shape, life in turn becomes twisted and blurred (ibid. p. 164).More early morning trivia to come soon.
Labels: art
posted by Sauntering Walker at 7:48 PM
4 Comments:
I love that Ambassadors painting. The bizarre skull thing makes it hard to believe it was painted in the 17th(?) century or whenever.
I wasn't reading an art book, but rather watching jtv this morning and was struck by the likeness between yourself and Jake Shears, lead singer of the scissor sisters. Well done on the graduation, too.
Hmmm... there is a slight Walkerian air about Mr Shears.
However I don't think there are many other similarities between them. I'm pretty sure Mr Shears has spent about as much time in church as I've spent in the Mariana Trench.
Stevo: what I don't get is how the heck Holbein painted the skull. My art guide says the official term for what he did is foreshortening (or anamorphosis). Thanks for the well-wishes on the graduation; given that I began in 1999, I felt as though I was limping across the finishing line at the end of a marathon!
Bland: I don't know of Shears or the 'sisters', but he looks like far too much of a Euro pretty-boy to me. Tell me I look like someone TOUGH and I'd be much happier.
Walks.
Carroll talks about the ambassadors in "Humanism: the wreck of Western Culture" -- he took the skull to be flying in the face of the two epitomies (epitomi?) of Renaissance man standing there among the apparatus of their science that had dethroned God. They bulge against the frame, closed in by the walls of their small worldview, mindless of the fact that death, for all their new powers, is still their master. ... Or so he reckons :)
I remember hearing somewhere that devices indicating time and death and the fleeting pursuits of life etc. in paintings of that period are termed 'Vanitas'? (as in vain?) Skulls, dice, candles, money...
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