State of Fragonard

Fragonard continued...

During his apprenticeship with Boucher, Frago won the coveted Prix de Rome with his version of Jeroboam Sacrificing to Idols...he and the other contestants were shut up in their respective rooms for a week, working everyday with visions of St. Peter's Square and the Trevi Fountain and the Villa Borghese dancing in their heads. His prize was three years at the Academie de France in the Eternal City.

He spent his time copying and learning from the great Italian masters like Cortona and Tiepolo, studying under contemporary virtuosos like Natoire and Piranesi. Piranesi hasn't really been considered that big of an influence in Frago's work, but the man did draw and paint a number of romantic ancient ruins overgrown with shrubbery and trees--and his drafting method mirrors the printmaker's etching technique.

His instruction with Boucher began to shine through later, and riots of foreground foliage and muted blue-greens in the atmospheric distance provided the setting for his cutesy staged scenes. Landscapes reminiscent of his time spent pouring over Ruisdaels (at the behest of Boucher) flourish in his Tivoli paintings.

The State of Fragonard at his time in the Academie: a gander at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, just outside of Rome, photos provided by Mary Ann Sullivan, found at her spectacular site documenting her trip.

The Maritime Theater:

Nymphaeum on the south side of the Piazza D'Oro:

The Greek Library:

Doorway in the Piazza D'Oro:

The Canopus:

Drawing: J.H. Fragonard. The Belvedere of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati. c. 1759-60. Private Collection.

Painting: J.H. Fragonard. Le Petit Parc. c. 1761-1762. The Wallace Collection, London.

Swinging in the 60s--1760s, That Is

Since I'm on a Fragonard kick, I thought I'd better include a post solely about that infamous, scurvy, gorgeous painting, that little bugbear that would posthumously label him a puff in many eyes, the rococo masterpiece The Swing.

It happened one day that the baron de Saint-Julien, who held the position of receiver general of the Clergy of France, sauntered up to l'artiste du jour of the late 1760s--the painter Gabriel-Francois Doyen--and proposed a rather unusual request. Now Doyen was a good boy...there was no way in hell (literally, because he was under church patronage) that he was going to paint a picture of the baron and his beautiful young mistress on a swing being pushed by--gasp--the bishop! (The baron of course is the man gazing up at the young woman's, a-hem, legs.)

So. Doyen directed the baron to Fragonard, which is pretty revealing about our little Frago's reputation at the time, and he served it up, all pinks and blues.

It's full of Freudian symbolism; swinging implies sexual intercourse, while the twisting and writhing trunks and bursting flowers are indicative of the baron's sexual joy (and excruciation, with the presence of the bishop). And the Cupid raises his finger to his lips: "Shhh...a secret love affair!"

Obscure Artists p. I

OK, so maybe he's not that obscure, but I never think about him when I think "luminaries of engraving" (and I think about that a lot)...Durer and Dore and Goya and Schongauer prints flash through my mind...but Goltzius is definitely one of my favorite print artists. Compositions are amazing and dynamic....definitely a fan of Northern Mannerism.

Looked him up on Wikipedia, and interestingly enough, his right hand was brutalized by a fire when he was a child. Fortunately for him (and us), the misshapen appendage was very conducive to holding and manipulating the burin, the requisite steel cutting tool for engraving.

Above is an engraving of Icarus, the ill-fated son of Daedalus, whose waxen wings could not deliver him from his place of exile (Crete). The boy crashed into the sea near a now eponymous island--Icaria--where my husband's grandfather is from.

Horny Moses

I don't know how many times I've painted and drawn this sculpture. Michelangelo's Moses will always have a special place in my heart. The first time I saw it in person, I was the only one in San Pietro in Vincoli, and I sketched the shadow and light that consummated the shapes and contours and dimension of the statue. So bold and magnetic.


In Michelangelo's version, Moses has horns because of an alternative translation of the Exodus passage citing the prophet's meeting with God. Another interpretation has Moses' face marred by a "divine radiation burn"; however, the first translation of the root in question to "ray of light" is post-biblical Hebrew, while the alternative meaning of "horn" occurs over 90 times in the Hebrew Bible. For artistic purposes, the horns provide an identifiable attribute for the Biblical figure.

Master print of Michelangelo's Moses, Jacob Matham, 1593.
Moses baptismal font, Christoph von Urach, 1518.

Landscaping in Hell

I'm not sure why I chose this particular etching from Dore's Illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, but it's probably something subliminal. Hmm. This is one of the pics showing some of the tenants of the middle ring of the seventh circle of the Inferno--the suicides. In Christian belief, those who take their own lives are directly usurping a sovereign power of God. So in Dante's version of hell, they're relegated to pretty nasty real estate. And they get turned into shrubs. Gnawed on by Harpies. The lost souls will not even be reunified with their bodies on Judgment Day--their corpses will hang in the branches of the shrubs for eternity.

I remember first being introduced to this book and these illustrations when I was in sixth grade. A girl named Keira asked me to come sit and look at the book with her in the library (I can't believe this was in the library)...the same girl who let me borrow the movie Seven a year later. Interesting friendship. But those images became embedded in my aesthetic...influenced my taste in the years to come...probably why I'm so attracted to print media.

Reading and Alchemy

I went to visit my parents and my sister who is on R&R from Iraq, and I've been reading Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I love this man. He has such a way with words...gets right to the point but very eloquently, and he knows how to spin a good yarn. What a raconteur.

I have an older version of the book--one that cost $2.95 when it was printed :) Love that illustration.

As it says on the cover, it is the chronicle of a family living in an enchanted little village called Macondo. Before I began reading, I had read all about the magical realism genre and went through some Kafka and Saramago but didn't know what to expect. What a pleasant surprise. Alchemy, magic carpet rides, and contagious insomnia in perpetuum. I was especially moved by the mystical charm and transcendence and absolute wretchedness of Pietro Crespi's death (I'm still relatively at the beginning).

The progenitor of the Buendia brood is Jose Arcadio, husband to Ursula Iguaran. J.A. just becomes fiendishly fascinated by the knowledge and inventions that the gypsies bring to town, and he befriends the gypsy leader Melquiades, who introduces him to alchemy.

The engraving to the right was taken from the Elementa chemicae of the Leiden chemistry professor J.C. Barchusen. In the manuscript, there are a whole series of illustrations that illuminate the process that alchemists call the Opus Magnum (Great Work), which alludes to their belief in the divinity of creation and the plan of salvation within it. Materia prima, the volatile and chaotic base of all matter, contains incompatible opposites and seeks to be regulated and transmutated to a "redeemed state of perfect harmony" (from Alexander Roob's Hermetic Cabinet)-- the Philosopher's Stone or lapis philosophorum.

In the first medallion, there are the emblems of the lapis on the crescent moon: the lion represents normal gold, which must be twice driven by antimony, the wolf, in order to be purified. The dragon represents philosophical quicksilver--mercury. In circle #2, God corroborates with the alchemist--laying to rest any fear of impiety in the work. #3 shows chaos. #4 depicts the coat of arms of the lapis, and #5 shows the four elements.

Demented and Schizo Parents

I'm watching the HBO series Rome again, and I forgot how much I absolute LOVE it. The sets are gorgeous...I'm painting all the major rooms of my house al buon fresco. And it makes me want to get back into historical fiction writing. Atia is probably my favorite...she's a grossly unorthodox mother and a diabolical bitch in general.

SO. I'm using that last bit to segue into my art topic for today: Demented and Schizo Parents. Goya's painting of Saturn Devouring His Son is a pretty well known illustrative example of this subject, and everyone knows the basic story from Hesiod...Cronus (Saturn in the Roman pantheon) was the head Titan who ate his children (a little over half of the Olympian crew) because he thought it would prevent them from taking over his turf (rational, absolutely mental, but rational). But baby Zeus was destined to dethrone his presumptuous dad, and somehow he forced Cronus to regurgitate his siblings. Hmm.

All of the paintings depicting this episode of the Theogony never portray Saturn popping the corpora whole...they alway show maniacal eyes and mouths wrenched into screwy shapes of taboo famine, ragged chunks and limbs missing from fragmentary deities in pain.

*sigh* Artists are so romantic.

And an audience loves the macabre and the grotesque...it gives us something to gauge beauty by.

But this...the Rubens Saturn. Dis. Tur. Bing. Cruelty and beauty combined. That Saturn is old and looks like he has a cane and the victim is a toddler makes it even worse. Like Choderlos de Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, or Cruel Intentions.

To cite Umberto Eco in his History of Beauty, "the beauty of bodies no longer has any spiritual connotation [with unfettered reason]; all it expresses is the cruel pleasure of the torturer or the torments of the victim, stripped of any moral frills."

From the Primordial Ooze

So I came across a few images in my Hieronymus Bosch book by Laurinda Dixon, and I found they tie nicely in with my recent obsession with evolutionary biology.

Back in Bosch's golden years, the later 15 century, people believed in spontaneous generation, specifically life from water, mud, and dung. Aristotle hypothesized that the heat generated during the rotting of some substance created new organisms from the dissolution of particles during putrefaction-- organisms which later came to be regarded as deformed because of their asexual means of reproduction.

Hence, mer-creatures! These woodblocks are from the Hortus Sanitatis/Gart der Gesuntheit/Garden of Health, a pharmaceutical bestiary printed and translated a number of times during the 15 c.

Amongst others are the MONK FISH, described as having "a head like a monk...but the face is nosed like another fish and also his body." A very bookish creature. The aqueous unicorn is below him. And then there is the merknight. In Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, a merknight flirts with a siren-like creature who bends her tail backward and over her head, simulating the familiar alchemical symbol of the ouroboros. The serpent devouring its tail illustrates the cyclical essence of distillation--autocannibalism and auto-regeneration. Craziness.

The Immense Journey talks about how Darwin's On the Origin of Species stimulated more materialisic philosophies (rather than mythological, or cosmo-magical) about the wellspring of earth. Urschleim, a protoplasmic semi-animate substance on the floor of the abyssal plain, was thought to be the development of the living out of the nonliving, from which arose complex life.

Bathybius haeckelli is another interesting story.

Hellfire and Destruction

Traditional depiction of Satan in scenes of the Last Judgment during the late 15th c.:

Like some kind of diabolical port-a-potty...even though I could elaborate for days on the simile, I won't. See how the ground is divided into parallel levels in the background? The registers remind me of the relief decorations on Roman sarcophagi. They depict the fate of the damned in hell. It seems to combine several of the cardinal sins, the most obvious being gluttony, avarice, and sloth.

Not a whole lot turns up on the internet about Binsfeld's classification of demons in conjunction with the seven deadly sins (but you can always count on Wikipedia), but I thought it was an interesting tangent nonetheless, especially because Beelzebub is the demon associated with gluttony and the fact that the name has come to be synonymous with Satan (in the New Testament). In the Old Testament, however, he was the Philistine god of Ekron 25 miles outside of Jerusalem, his name, which means "lord of the flies," was probably bestowed not because he brought the flies (originally, he was thought to be a sun god, and flies typically pester during the daytime) but because he was invoked to drive away the flies at a sacrifice.

Fountain of Youth

Oh how I love four-year-olds:

Miss T: C, why do you have marker all over your nose??

C: Because I wanted freckles.

Miss T: laughs Why'd you want freckles? Did you see someone who had freckles?

C: Yeah, F and Miss M. And I always wanted freckles.

I will miss the little whippersnappers this summer.

Different interpretations are put forth about the anomalous imagery of the artist in his paintings, especially the Garden of Earthly Delights. Usually the basic message is this: humanity is naive and wreckless and taking the shortcut to hellish destruction. Boom, there it is. One historian even saw the famous triptych (Garden) as a manifesto of the heretical Adamite group. The proto-hippies...in a nut-shell, people who practiced "amoral" sexual bonding without guilt (and by abolishing marriage) in order to experience life as Adam and Eve knew it. They were also advocates of "holy nudism"...sign me up. I'm calling a revival, taking the medieval Dutch name "Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit."

I recently watched a program about the Black Death on the History Channel, and similar groups toured Europe like rock stars; everyone thought the world was coming to an end and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers fell victim to the horrible disease while priests and legit representatives of Rome ran and hid or failed to provide the spiritual answer...before neo-Platonism and Descartes and modern Western medicine...I'd definitely kick up my heels and run wild.

This engraving was used in Bosch's biography to show a similarity between his paintings and the late medieval traditions of the love garden and fountain of youth. The book elaborates on that view, citing that the bathing couples, flowers and birds in the Garden all belong to the realm of Venus--a prominent figure in astrological and humoral traditions, of which Bosch was part.

self-sacrifice

In Brunswyck's Book of Distillation, first published in 1490, the blood of the pelican brings healing and renewal and was frequently compared to the blood of Christ throughout medieval Europe. The pelican was thought to be particularly attentive to her young, providing her own blood when no other food was available. The bird became a symbol of self-sacrifice in bestiaries.

Sometimes I experience intense crying fits in the middle of the night. In fact, I had one last night. And a lot of them have to do with suffering. Rather, thinking of the people I love suffering. So, suffering is frequently rooted in love, which can be just as detrimental as hatred, but self-sacrifice gives us a chance to reaffirm our existence and essentially substantiate ourselves (ad hominem, goddammit) with respect to those we love. Sacrifice and suffering in general are very familiar concepts to me, considering I was raised Catholic. And it's always been difficult to rid myself of the obligation to pain in order to feel purpose, or to feel alive and on the right track.  Yes, it's masochistic, and yes, it's probably unnecessary, but regardless, that's how I'm wired. Other religions posit that life's resolution is to abolish suffering, but in order to do that, one must be not only compassionate toward those one feels threatened by or hates...but you must also free yourself from love and the consequent pain it inflicts. Why would I want to do that? I would hurt those who love me by not loving them back. But I would be hurting them, which is the exact opposite of what I want to achieve. I don't know.

Life is still beautiful, and I love magnolias. They're so ancient.

The Art of Dying

Another post from way-back-when, when A and I were introduced to the demented and utterly entertaining acts put on at the Palace of Wonders last year. After witnessing the truly spew-inducing (well, maybe not spew-inducing, but I definitely pulled out a few chunks of hair) panoply of warped, self-injuring stunts of the gifted Zamora the Torture King and also in the spirit of the crazy fun times had with Thrill Kill Jill and her beau Tyler Fyre, whose props include an array of swords, an albino python (think From Dusk Till Dawn), a synthetic confetti-filled placenta, and a whole lotta fire, I present this print.

From the popular illustrated treatise The Art of Dying (Ars moriendi), this is a blockbook print of the Avaricious Man. All of the woodcuts feature a dying man lying in bed, accompanied by an angel, a devil, and other pertinent figures to show a particular form of temptation--which becomes dangerously alluring when one is at the end of his rope. The book outlines over the course of several chapters ways in which the ill-fated can overcome temptation and accomplish peace because "the devil with all his might is busy to avert fully a man from the faith in his last end." Blah blah blah.

(The Avaricious Man, from The Art of Dying, 1465-70. Blockbook)

Children of Luna

This is a block book print.  Still cleaning out the attic at my old blog and touching up my new place here. The Children of the Planets pictorial series was a popular subject with Renaissance artists, and I chose this particular one because I myself am a child of Luna.

During the 15th c. when this piece was created, the geocentric model of the universe was the established, accepted model, with the earth snug in the center of cosmos and surrounded by the seven spheres of the known planets, the fixed stars of the zodiac, and the empyrean heaven of God. Within this ancient order, human beings were intrinsically linked with the cosmos, and like the stars and planets, the body was thought to contain the four elements. Each element possessed essential qualities, which in turn were associated with bodily temperaments, humors, and dispositions. The element of water was cold and wet and linked with phlegm and the phlegmatic type.

Luna, the moon was associated with phlegm and the realm of water. The children of Luna were thought to have a propensity for sailing, fishing, and swimming; but they could also be restless and unstable, vacillating back and forth like the tides. The brain was also associated with Luna, as it is a moist organ and prone to the sway of the moon. It was believed that an overabundance of lunar influence caused insanity (thus, the etymology of "lunatic"). Phlegmatic personalities also tended to be stupid, slothful, and gluttonous.

(Children of Luna, c. 1470. Blockbook. Staatliche Museen, Berlin)

Japanese Woodblock

Yoshida Hiroshi was part of the Shin Hanga ("New Prints", c. 1910-1960) art movement, which sought to marry Western elements and trends with the traditional Japanese woodblock technique. Shin Hanga is sometimes called Neo Ukiyo-e because of the subject matter shared by both traditions, but Shin Hanga pieces tend to be naturalistic, displaying three-dimensionality using soft, airy color tones--characteristics at odds with the Ukiyo-e canon. Looking at Shin Hanga pieces, it's not difficult to see the influence of the European Impressionists.

I love this print; it's gorgeous and if you happen to be in the D.C. area, even for a short time, I recommend a visit to the Freer and Sackler galleries. They're part of the Smithsonian, i.e. they're FREE.

(detail of Kameido Bridge, from the series Twelve Scenes of Tokyo.: Yoshida Hiroshi. 1927. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper. Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art.)

I feel like I just took a dip in hot wax and now it's drying and pinching the hell out of my skin...I'm tight all over and insanely tired.  My face feels like it's falling off--yeah, I feel like Sylvester Stallone looks in Rambo IV. (Yet, he still manages to kick ass) Not feeling on par for work, but the fact that I kick off the day with an hour and a half of nap-time makes me feel a little better. And after that we make pinwheels. There are worse jobs.

danse macabre

Alright, another greatest-hits post.  Woodcuts have always been a huge influence on my art--print media in general, be it etching, engraving, or drypoint. And most especially the examples from the Renaissance on through the Mannerist period.

So I frequently find myself buying books on the subject, and I've accumulated a veritable library. My most recent addition is The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger. I read the reviews given by people on amazon, which were mixed, but without hesitation, purchased it. Why? No matter what mildly disparaging things people say about "size" and "reproduction quality" blah blah blah, woodcuts nearly always reproduce awesomely. And when I got the book, I was not disappointed, and I think the small plates actually add to the book's appeal (approx. 2" x 3").

The Dance of Death, danse macabre, Totentanz. Scenes of figures from every station of life and accompanying cadavers or skeletons. Holbein's is considered one of the most intellectually interesting and aesthetically distinguished examples. His also illustrates the concept of memento mori...."remember that you will die"...no matter who you are.

The Emperor...one of my favorites.

Order thine house while thou hast breath,
Bestow thou goods; for thou must die,
And soon within the realms of Death
The chariots of thy state shall lie.

(English translation from Les simulachres & historiees faces de la mort)

St. Anthony Part II

Another of St Anthony.  This woodcut depicts the saint with a t-shaped tau cross with bells, flames, and a pet pig, which befriended him during his exile. He is associated with fire because of his encounters with the demons of hell.

In this piece, the pestering demons are replaced by victims of the holy fire or "St Anthony's Fire," and detached limbs dangle above the saint and his entourage. The explanation? Sufferers of St Anthony's fire were racked with gangrene of the extremities, which resulted in the withering and eventual detachment of affected limbs. This image reflects the practice of hanging amputated limbs of victims above entrance portals of Antonite monasteries, called to act as hospitals and authorized to heal in the name of the saint.

Unfortunately, body rotting and the subsequent dismemberment were not the only hellish indices rendered by the infectious bete noire. Hallucination, muscle contortions, convulsions, and an agonizing, burning chronic pain. Ouch. And all caused by a stupid mould. Known today as ergotism, holy fire was caused by the contamination of grain, most often rye, by the ergot mould. When heated in the oven, the mould transforms into a type of LSD. Notwithstanding, that trip does not sound like a fun one.

(St Anthony, c. 1445. Woodcut. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich)

St. Anthony Part I

Alright, so I've decided to bring some posts from my bygone blog to join the party here at Evillustrator. They're graphically inclined, so I thought, hey what the hell.  So, here's a post in honor of my beau.

St Anthony was a popular subject in Northern Renaissance art because his stoic endurance of pain mirrored Christ's Passion and offered a perfect example of forbearance in the midst of suffering and of emulating the path of Christ himself.

Also known as St Anthony of Egypt, he is considered the father of monasticism and probably lived from the mid-3rd to the mid-4th centuries of the common era. The torments of St Anthony would have been well known to Renaissance audiences via the accounts in the bestselling Golden Legend and Lives of the Church Fathers, both of which borrow from the biography of Anthony by the 4th c. bishop Athanasius. Apparently the devil wracked the man's brain with naughty images of women, demoralized him with laziness, and drove him crazy with boredom. Huh, hard to imagine such things happening out there. In the desert. Alone. He retreated to the tomb where he lived, sealing himself inside. Or so he thought--the devil went into a jealous rage when confronted by this intense devotion to God and voluntary, stalwart asceticism and beat him severely.

This engraving is a disturbing, yet utterly mezmerizing, depiction of St Anthony and his demons. The man looks completely calm, albeit slightly uncomfortable, as the malignant beasts pinch and pull and prod and grope.

The cult of St Anthony increased in popularity during the 15th and 16th c. in Europe partly because of a rekindling of the dreaded St Anthony's Fire, also called holy fire (ignis sacer). 

(Martin Schongauer, Temptation of St Anthony, c. 1470-5. Engraving)