(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
When Charles IV came to the throne Goya became still more firmly established in Court favor, though he produced the most impudent portraits of royalty that have ever been painted. Nowhere can we find a more pitiless exposure of serene stupidity than his ‘Charles IV on Horeseback’. ‘He sits there, asthmatic and fat, upon his fat asthmatic horse.....like a Moloch,’ says Dr Muther, ‘an evil god who has battened upon the life blood of his people.’ When he painted the Queen Maria Louisa, Goya portrayed her as the brazen old courtesan she was; he shows up the Crown Prince as a sly, spiteful, hypocritical meddler, and the favorite minister Godoy as a nincompoop and a panderer. When the French novelist Gautier first saw Goya’s large portrait group of the Spanish Royal Family and its favorites, his comment was, ‘A grocer’s family who have won the big lottery prize’; and that is exactly the impression the picture gives us, a collection of stupid, ill-bred people who owe their fine clothes and position to no talent or merit of their own but to sheer luck. It is amazing that this daring satirist of royalty should have gone unpunished and unreproved, but the King and his family circle were themselves too stupid to realize that the artist was holding them all up to the ridicule of the world.
As, while outwardly a courtier, he insidiously undermined the pretences of the Spanish monarchy, so while appearing to respect the observances of Catholicism, Goya surreptitiously attacked the Church which was blinding the eyes of the people. In 1797 he began to produce a series of engravings which, under the title of ‘Caprices,’ pretended to be nothing more than flights of fancy, but which were in reality biting satires on the social, political, ecclesiastical conditions of his age. He drew devout women with rolling eyes worshipping a scarecrow, priests drawling out the Litany with obvious indifference, and in one fantastic plate—which he had the audacity to dedicate to the King!—he showed a corpse rising from the grave and writing with his dead finger the word Nada, i.e ‘Nothingness.’ It was tantamount to saying that the hope of immortality held out to the people was only a murmuring, while kings and priests grew fat at their expense. If the Court and high ecclesiastics were too stupid to comprehend Goya’s message, the people understood, for the revolutionary era was at hand.
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Medieval Ivories
(via iht) @ COURTAULD INSTITUTE OF ART -- To March 9: 'Medieval Ivories From the Thomson Collection.' The Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, is being rebuilt under the aegis of the American architect Frank Gehry + it will house the full collection of medieval ivories from which 45 items have been selected for the exhibition + they include statuettes, folding diptychs, boxes and various instruments, both religious and secular, that attest to the skill of carvers of ivory, a hard and resistant material. (The sale of ivory is protected by strict legislation but not banned, contrary to conventional wisdom)
Useful link:
www.courtauld.ac.uk
Useful link:
www.courtauld.ac.uk
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Quebec 2008
A joint conference organized by the Geological Association of Canada + Mineralogical Association of Canada + Society of Economic Geologists + the Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits will be held in May 26-28, 2008, a unique geological/gemological/historical experience + it will include special sessions on Diamonds: From Mantle to Jewelry by Serge Perreault/James Moorhead + Rough Diamond Handling by Alain Bernard + other interesting events.
Useful link:
http://quebec2008.net
Useful link:
http://quebec2008.net
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger by Peter Bevelin is a wonderful book on wisdom and decision-making written by a wise decision-maker + it was written by a practitioner who knows what he wants + I think the book would be an excellent gift for someone considering starting an own business.
Here is what the description of Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger says (via Amazon):
Peter Bevelin begins his fascinating book with Confucius' great wisdom: "A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake." Seeking Wisdom is the result of Bevelin's learning about attaining wisdom. His quest for wisdom originated partly from making mistakes himself and observing those of others but also from the philosophy of super-investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger. A man whose simplicity and clarity of thought was unequal to anything Bevelin had seen. In addition to naturalist Charles Darwin and Munger, Bevelin cites an encyclopedic range of thinkers: from first-century BCE Roman poet Publius Terentius to Mark Twainfrom Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmanfrom 16th Century French essayist Michel de Montaigne to Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. In the book, he describes ideas and research findings from many different fields. This book is for those who love the constant search for knowledge. It is in the spirit of Charles Munger, who says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there." There are roads that lead to unhappiness. An understanding of how and why we can "die" should help us avoid them. We can't eliminate mistakes, but we can prevent those that can really hurt us. Using exemplars of clear thinking and attained wisdom, Bevelin focuses on how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments and tools to improve our thinking. Bevelin tackles such eternal questions as: Why do we behave like we do? What do we want out of life? What interferes with our goals? Read and study this wonderful multidisciplinary exploration of wisdom. It may change the way you think and act in business and in life.
Here is what the description of Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger says (via Amazon):
Peter Bevelin begins his fascinating book with Confucius' great wisdom: "A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake." Seeking Wisdom is the result of Bevelin's learning about attaining wisdom. His quest for wisdom originated partly from making mistakes himself and observing those of others but also from the philosophy of super-investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger. A man whose simplicity and clarity of thought was unequal to anything Bevelin had seen. In addition to naturalist Charles Darwin and Munger, Bevelin cites an encyclopedic range of thinkers: from first-century BCE Roman poet Publius Terentius to Mark Twainfrom Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmanfrom 16th Century French essayist Michel de Montaigne to Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. In the book, he describes ideas and research findings from many different fields. This book is for those who love the constant search for knowledge. It is in the spirit of Charles Munger, who says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there." There are roads that lead to unhappiness. An understanding of how and why we can "die" should help us avoid them. We can't eliminate mistakes, but we can prevent those that can really hurt us. Using exemplars of clear thinking and attained wisdom, Bevelin focuses on how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments and tools to improve our thinking. Bevelin tackles such eternal questions as: Why do we behave like we do? What do we want out of life? What interferes with our goals? Read and study this wonderful multidisciplinary exploration of wisdom. It may change the way you think and act in business and in life.
The Mysterious Journey Of An Erotic Masterpiece
Konstantin Akinsha writes about Femme nue couchée, one of several Courbets owned by the Hungarian Jewish collector Baron Ferenc Hatvany + The Gustave Courbet show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the 27th of this month, the largest retrospective devoted to the artist in 30 years + other viewpoints @ http://www.artnewsonline.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2442
Jewelers Of Renaissance
(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:
But even though the jewels made by his hands may be missing or unidentified, Cellini gives us up-to-the-minute jewelry news of the sixteenth century such as would undoubtedly find a place in our own daily papers if it were current today. Always a student of the antique, Cellini was much interested in the fine examples of Etruscan and Grecian gems which were constantly being unearthed. It must be admitted that his interest was twofold; there were artistic values but also financial values in jewels. He tells of dealing with certain traders who had been buying up old gems:
The peasants, while digging in the ground, frequently turned up antique medals, agates, chrysoprases, carnelians and cameos; also such fine jewels as, for instance, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, and rubies. The peasants used to sell things of this sort to the traders for a mere trifle, and I very often, when I met them, paid the latter several times as many golden crowns as they had given giulios for some object. Independently of the profit I made by this traffic, which was at least tenfold, it brought me also into agreeable relations with nearly all the cardinals of Rome.
He continues with a description of some of the finer ‘of these curiosities.’ There was an engraved emerald, ‘big as a good-sized ballot-bean’ and ‘of such good color, that the man who bought if from me for tens of crowns sold it again for hundreds after setting it as a finger ring.’
The versatile Cellini could turn his hand to almost any branch of metal work and jewelry making. He explains his method of designing and executing a jewel, boasts of the customer who, after looking at Cellini’s drawings, asked if he were a sculptor or a painter, to which the artist replied that he was a goldsmith. After this particular design was approved by the customer, Cellini made, as usual, a little model of wax in order to show how the jewel would appear when completed. This is of interest today because sixteenth century methods of designing jewels still survive. Should you commission one of the finer jewelry houses of New York, such as Cartier’s, to make for you a special necklace, before the jewel was executed in final form you would, like Cellini’s customer, be able to judge the effect, first from a detailed drawing and then from a little model of wax in which real gemstones were mounted.
Cellini also tells of the beautiful jewelry destroyed during the war of 1527. When the troops of Francis I marched upon Rome, Pope Clement sent for Cellini. The magnificent tiaras and great collection of jewels of the Apostolic Camera were spread before the goldsmith, who was directed to remove all the gemstones from their gold settings. Each stone was then carefully wrapped up and sewed into the lining of the clothes worn by the Pope and his attendant. The elaborate mountings were given to Cellini with orders to melt them down. The gold, Cellini remarked, weighed about two hundred pounds.
At a somewhat later period the Pope sent these same precious stones to Cellini and commissioned him to design and make new settings for them—all the stones, that is, ‘except the diamond, which had been pawned to certain Genoese bankers’ when the Pope had a pressing need of money.
Now and again, Cellini comments on the lack of brilliancy in the diamonds he is called upon to set. One large stone, he said, ‘had been cut with a point, but since it did not yield the purity of luster which one expects in such a diamond, its owner had cropped the point, and in truth it was not exactly fit for either point or table cutting.’
Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)
But even though the jewels made by his hands may be missing or unidentified, Cellini gives us up-to-the-minute jewelry news of the sixteenth century such as would undoubtedly find a place in our own daily papers if it were current today. Always a student of the antique, Cellini was much interested in the fine examples of Etruscan and Grecian gems which were constantly being unearthed. It must be admitted that his interest was twofold; there were artistic values but also financial values in jewels. He tells of dealing with certain traders who had been buying up old gems:
The peasants, while digging in the ground, frequently turned up antique medals, agates, chrysoprases, carnelians and cameos; also such fine jewels as, for instance, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, and rubies. The peasants used to sell things of this sort to the traders for a mere trifle, and I very often, when I met them, paid the latter several times as many golden crowns as they had given giulios for some object. Independently of the profit I made by this traffic, which was at least tenfold, it brought me also into agreeable relations with nearly all the cardinals of Rome.
He continues with a description of some of the finer ‘of these curiosities.’ There was an engraved emerald, ‘big as a good-sized ballot-bean’ and ‘of such good color, that the man who bought if from me for tens of crowns sold it again for hundreds after setting it as a finger ring.’
The versatile Cellini could turn his hand to almost any branch of metal work and jewelry making. He explains his method of designing and executing a jewel, boasts of the customer who, after looking at Cellini’s drawings, asked if he were a sculptor or a painter, to which the artist replied that he was a goldsmith. After this particular design was approved by the customer, Cellini made, as usual, a little model of wax in order to show how the jewel would appear when completed. This is of interest today because sixteenth century methods of designing jewels still survive. Should you commission one of the finer jewelry houses of New York, such as Cartier’s, to make for you a special necklace, before the jewel was executed in final form you would, like Cellini’s customer, be able to judge the effect, first from a detailed drawing and then from a little model of wax in which real gemstones were mounted.
Cellini also tells of the beautiful jewelry destroyed during the war of 1527. When the troops of Francis I marched upon Rome, Pope Clement sent for Cellini. The magnificent tiaras and great collection of jewels of the Apostolic Camera were spread before the goldsmith, who was directed to remove all the gemstones from their gold settings. Each stone was then carefully wrapped up and sewed into the lining of the clothes worn by the Pope and his attendant. The elaborate mountings were given to Cellini with orders to melt them down. The gold, Cellini remarked, weighed about two hundred pounds.
At a somewhat later period the Pope sent these same precious stones to Cellini and commissioned him to design and make new settings for them—all the stones, that is, ‘except the diamond, which had been pawned to certain Genoese bankers’ when the Pope had a pressing need of money.
Now and again, Cellini comments on the lack of brilliancy in the diamonds he is called upon to set. One large stone, he said, ‘had been cut with a point, but since it did not yield the purity of luster which one expects in such a diamond, its owner had cropped the point, and in truth it was not exactly fit for either point or table cutting.’
Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art
(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
4
The life-story of Goya is as full of storm and stress as that of his unhappy country, which between 1788 and 1815 saw more misery and more changes of government than any other country in battle-scarred Europe. Under the rule of Charles IV and his depraved consort, Queen Maria Louisa, Spain was in a miseable condition; its Court was a frivolous, shallow imitation of Versailles, and its monarchy and government were even more rotten and more corrupt than those of France under Louis XVI. A young lieutenant of the Guards, Manuel Godoy, was made Prime Minister because he was the Queen’s favorite lover, and the King was a puppet in the hands of this Spanish Messalina. Public offices were openly sold to the highest bidder, and eighteen thousand priests drained the purse of the people and stifled their intellects. Art seemd dead and past the hope of revival till Goya came to Madrid.
Francisco José de Goya Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, that is to say, twelve years after Romney, and ten years before Raeburn. He was the son of a peasant in a village in Aragon, and legend relates that, like Giotto, he was found drawing sheep by an amateur who recognized the boy’s talent and sent him in his fourteenth year as pupil to a painter in Saragossa. There the boy grew up strong, handsome, wild, and passionate, continually involved in love affairs and quarrels. In one of the last, three men were left wounded and bleeding, and as a result of this midnight affray Goya had to leave the city hurriedly.
In 1766 he was in Madrid, and there his adventurous disposition soon got him into trouble. He was wounded in some love quarrel, placed under police supervision, and chafing at this restraint he escaped from the city with a band of bull-fighters and sailed to Italy. At the end of the sixties he was in Rome, where he appears to have been much more interested in the teeming life of the people than in antiquities of the city. Here again his amorousness got him into trouble, for it is said that one night he made his way into a nunnery, was nearly captured, and only escaped the gallows by a headlong flight from the city.
In 1771 he returned to Saragosa and found shelter in a monastery, where he seems to have reformed his manner of living, for four years later this scapegrace adventurer, the hero of a hundred fights, reappeared in Madrid as a respectable citizen, married to the sister of Bayen, a painter of good standing. Through his brother-in-law he got to know people of a better class, and he was finally introduced to the Court and permitted to paint the portrait of Charles III.
Goya’s pictures of this period reflect the manners of the Spanish Court, for pictures like ‘The Swing’ and ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ at Madrid are obviously imitations of Watteau and his school, as the Spanish Court imitated the artificiality of Versailles, only Goya, a cynic from his youth, does not give his figures the daintness of the Frenchmen.
With almost brutal realism he depicts the rouge on the women’s checks and the pencilling of their eyebrows, and seems to take a delight in unmasking their falseness and dissipation. While he was intelligent enough to perceive the rottenness of Spanish society, Goya was no moralist himself and lived the life of his time. Countless stories are told of his relations with women of high society, and Goya is said to have been the terror of all their husbands. In this connection one inevitably thinks of his famous double picture at Madrid, ‘The Maja Nude’ and ‘The Maja Clothed,’ the latter being an almost exact reproduction of the former with the garmets added, and these are so filmy, so expressive of the limbs underneath, that the second picture has justly been said to reveal a woman ‘naked in spite of her dress.’ The story runs that the lady was the Duchess of Alva, and that when the Duke desired to see Goya’s work, the painter hurriedly produced the clothed portrait and concealed the other.
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)
4
The life-story of Goya is as full of storm and stress as that of his unhappy country, which between 1788 and 1815 saw more misery and more changes of government than any other country in battle-scarred Europe. Under the rule of Charles IV and his depraved consort, Queen Maria Louisa, Spain was in a miseable condition; its Court was a frivolous, shallow imitation of Versailles, and its monarchy and government were even more rotten and more corrupt than those of France under Louis XVI. A young lieutenant of the Guards, Manuel Godoy, was made Prime Minister because he was the Queen’s favorite lover, and the King was a puppet in the hands of this Spanish Messalina. Public offices were openly sold to the highest bidder, and eighteen thousand priests drained the purse of the people and stifled their intellects. Art seemd dead and past the hope of revival till Goya came to Madrid.
Francisco José de Goya Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746, that is to say, twelve years after Romney, and ten years before Raeburn. He was the son of a peasant in a village in Aragon, and legend relates that, like Giotto, he was found drawing sheep by an amateur who recognized the boy’s talent and sent him in his fourteenth year as pupil to a painter in Saragossa. There the boy grew up strong, handsome, wild, and passionate, continually involved in love affairs and quarrels. In one of the last, three men were left wounded and bleeding, and as a result of this midnight affray Goya had to leave the city hurriedly.
In 1766 he was in Madrid, and there his adventurous disposition soon got him into trouble. He was wounded in some love quarrel, placed under police supervision, and chafing at this restraint he escaped from the city with a band of bull-fighters and sailed to Italy. At the end of the sixties he was in Rome, where he appears to have been much more interested in the teeming life of the people than in antiquities of the city. Here again his amorousness got him into trouble, for it is said that one night he made his way into a nunnery, was nearly captured, and only escaped the gallows by a headlong flight from the city.
In 1771 he returned to Saragosa and found shelter in a monastery, where he seems to have reformed his manner of living, for four years later this scapegrace adventurer, the hero of a hundred fights, reappeared in Madrid as a respectable citizen, married to the sister of Bayen, a painter of good standing. Through his brother-in-law he got to know people of a better class, and he was finally introduced to the Court and permitted to paint the portrait of Charles III.
Goya’s pictures of this period reflect the manners of the Spanish Court, for pictures like ‘The Swing’ and ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ at Madrid are obviously imitations of Watteau and his school, as the Spanish Court imitated the artificiality of Versailles, only Goya, a cynic from his youth, does not give his figures the daintness of the Frenchmen.
With almost brutal realism he depicts the rouge on the women’s checks and the pencilling of their eyebrows, and seems to take a delight in unmasking their falseness and dissipation. While he was intelligent enough to perceive the rottenness of Spanish society, Goya was no moralist himself and lived the life of his time. Countless stories are told of his relations with women of high society, and Goya is said to have been the terror of all their husbands. In this connection one inevitably thinks of his famous double picture at Madrid, ‘The Maja Nude’ and ‘The Maja Clothed,’ the latter being an almost exact reproduction of the former with the garmets added, and these are so filmy, so expressive of the limbs underneath, that the second picture has justly been said to reveal a woman ‘naked in spite of her dress.’ The story runs that the lady was the Duchess of Alva, and that when the Duke desired to see Goya’s work, the painter hurriedly produced the clothed portrait and concealed the other.
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)