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.

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."

The Tree of Sorrow

Arbor tristus was believed to be a native South American tree, which bloomed at night and had a trunk in the shape of a woman's body. Legend has it that the daughter of the mighty chief and warrior Parizataco fell in love with the sun. The sun rejected her and the beautiful princess went into the wilderness to seek solitude and peace to grieve. She never got over her loss, however, and could bare the pain of rejection and lovelessness no longer and killed herself.

Her body was eventually found by her people and cremated. From the ashes sprouted the tree of sorrow, whose blossoms opened under the light of the moon and stars but closed at the first hint of the sun. In the daytime, the leaves withered, and the tree appeared dead. And whenever a human hand touched the blooming tree in the calm of the night, the flowers closed shut and their sweet perfume vanished.