bosch ...
giotto ...
conrad von soest ...
fra angelico and filippo lippi ...
giorgione ...
george de la tour ...
botticelli ...
gossaert ...
jacopo bassano ...
vicenzo di biagio ...
Friday, December 25, 2020
Saturday, December 19, 2020
An interesting letter to The Times Lit., concerning Bronzino's Allegory ... leads me to learn about the commission jointly executed by Michelangelo and Pontormo ...
In his review of the exhibition Sin at the National Gallery (November 13), James Cahill remarks on the “enigma” at the heart of Bronzino’s “Allegory of Venus and Cupid”, a “quixotic fantasy” with which “art historians have grappled vainly for answers”. Like Duchamp’s “Large Glass”, the painting “almost seems to be a joke at their expense – a mockery of the will to pinpoint and explain”. And yet those of us who work on Bronzino see no enigma here. Bronzino was responding to a painting by Michelangelo and Pontormo of Venus coupling with Cupid (the theme of coupling is relevant given the dual authorship), and knew the text it referred to: Columella’s De re rustica, where “in the mating time of the world” the goddess Venus, “driven to frenzy by Cupid’s passionate darts, makes love with her own children and fills with offspring … nor does the generating mother scorn the love of her son, but inflamed with desire accepts his embrace”. (More than “just a kiss”, in other words.) A poet as well as a painter, Bronzino amplified the focus on erotic vitality in his sources, above all their imaging of Eros as a turbulent force of nature that flouts boundaries of propriety and licit sexual expression. It is his intelligent handling of his sources that gives the painting resonance in multiple frames from his own time to the present: the “wounds of love” in Petrarchan convention, epidemic syphilis, the dynastic politics of the Medici and Bourbon courts, debates about the imitation of Michelangelo and Dürer, Freud’s Oedipus complex, queer aestheticism, and finally the present dialogue in the Sin exhibition with a work by Tracey Emin. If interpretations proliferate, that is not the result of the failure of a community of interpreters, any more than new interpretations of Hamlet signal a failure on the part of literary scholars to “get Shakespeare right”. Ambitious pictures respond to what interpreters (historians, artists, curators) bring to them: they are not puzzles to be solved.
Stephen J. Campbell
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2018/michelangelo-raffle-ticket-venus-kissed-by-cupid
... and here's a link to the Queen's painting ...
https://www.rct.uk/collection/405486/venus-and-cupid
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
my favourite things ... lyric and images
My Favorite Things
Raindrops on roses
and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles
and warm "woollen" mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things ....
2.
Cream colored ponies
and crisp apple strudels
Door bells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into spring
These are a few of my favorite things
When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad
bootsy collins ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sh9cezHNec
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo4FS6UcL38
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootsy_Collins
other projects ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3CUHnUsk8M
and ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/14/bootsy-collins-funkadelic-funk
Sunday, December 13, 2020
william blake's illustrated poem MILTON ...
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/william-blakes-milton
people are very fond of william blake's verses called jerusalem
not many will know that the verses are part of his introductory commentary on his long poem called "milton", which opens with the preface shown above
the new york public library have one of the four very rare sets of blake's milton ... and you can "turn the pages" if you have the patience to engage with his didactic pomposity ...
every page of the book was hand-drawn and hand-coloured over a period of several years ... none of the four surviving sets are thought to be complete
blake's use of biblical names, and biblical-sounding names, can be very confusing ... for instance ... "Beulah" ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beulah_(Blake)
adriaen collaert's engravings, after martin de vos' designs ... the elements ...
from the rijksmuseum's excellent archive ...
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