Sunday, September 09, 2012
Saturday, September 08, 2012
Friday, September 07, 2012
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Monday, September 03, 2012
Arnold Böcklin, In the Play of the Waves [Im Spiel der Wellen] (1883)
In 1899, when the craze for Arnold Böcklin’s work was in full swing, the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt (the brother of Böcklin’s Berlin dealer Fritz Gurlitt) wrote that the German public regarded this painting as “one of the greatest achievements of our century.”
When it was painted in 1883, art critics had been less sure. Enthusiasm for the painting had grown, however, by the time of its showing at the Third Munich International in 1888.
Offering his interpretation of the work, Ferdinand Avenarius of Der Kunstwart declared that the worried mermaid being pursued by the laughing triton personified the ocean itself and the natural forces of water and sky.
Actually, a rather ordinary episode in the artist’s life appears to have provided the immediate inspiration for this composition. Böcklin had been swimming in Italy with the family of Anton Dohrn, the zoologist who commissioned Hans von Marées’s Oarsmen. Dohrn dove into the waves, swam some distance underwater, and suddenly resurfaced near the women in the bathing party. The ladies’ surprise caught Böcklin’s fancy, and he decided to portray a similar scene drawn from the world of mythical underwater creatures.
His compostion thrusts the viewer into the rising and falling waves, which are shown without the slightest hint of land in the distance. Dohrn’s features can actually be seen in the face of the triton, whose freely expressed and ribald intentions make this the most playful of Böcklin’s works.
In the early years of the twentieth-century, when overzealous members of the moral purity movement were subject to ridicule and denouncement, In the Play of the Waves offered ample basis for caricature – moral zealots, complete with fig leaves, were shown swimming into the frame of the painting in order to arrest the mermaids.
Sunday, September 02, 2012
The Storm on the Sea Galilee (1633)
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is a painting from 1633 by the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn that was in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Boston, Massachusetts, United States, prior to being stolen on March 18, 1990.
The painting depicts the miracle of Jesus calming the waves on the Sea of Galilee, as depicted in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.
It is Rembrandt's only seascape.
It is widely believed, because of the fourteen people in the boat, that Rembrandt painted himself in the boat along with the twelve disciples and Jesus.
The crewmember looking out toward the viewer of the painting has been suggested as being a self-portrait of Rembrandt.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
The Codex Gigas
The Codex Gigas is the largest extant medieval manuscript in the world.
It is also known as the Devil's Bible because of a large illustration of the devil on the inside and the legend surrounding its creation. It is thought to have been created in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia (modern Czech Republic).
It contains the Vulgate Bible as well as many historical documents all written in Latin. During the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the entire collection was taken by the Swedish army as plunder, and now it is preserved at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, though it is not normally on display.
About half of the Codex consists of the entire Latin Bible in the Vulgate version, except for the books of Acts and Revelation, which are from a pre-Vulgate version.
They are in the order Genesis-Ruth; Isaiah-Daniel; Hosea-Malachi; Job; Samuel and Kings; Psalms-Song of Solomon; Wisdom of Solomon; Wisdom of Jesus; Esdras; Tobit; Judith; Esther; and Maccabees. Between the Testaments are Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews and De bello iudaico, as well as Isidore of Seville's encyclopedia Etymologiae and medical works of Hippocrates, Theophilus, Philaretus, and Constantinus. Following a blank page, the New Testament commences with Matthew-Acts, James-Revelation, and Romans-Hebrews. Following the picture of the devil, Cosmas of Prague's Chronicle of Bohemia, a list of brothers in the Podlažice monastery, and a calendar with necrologium, magic formulae and other local records round out the codex.
The entire document is written in Latin, in addition, it contains Hebrew, Greek, and Slavic alphabets (Cyrillic and Glagolitic).
Legend has it the codex was created by a monk who sold his soul to the devil.
The manuscript includes illuminations in red, blue, yellow, green and gold. Capital letters are elaborately illuminated, frequently across the entire page. The codex has a unified look as the nature of the writing is unchanged throughout, showing no signs of age, disease or mood on the part of the scribe. This may have led to the belief that the whole book was written in a very short time (see Legend). But scientists are starting to believe and research the theory that it took over 20 years to complete.
Folio 290 recto, otherwise empty, includes a unique picture of the devil, about 50 cm tall. Several pages before this are written on a blackening parchment and have a very gloomy character, somewhat different from the rest of the codex. The reason for the different coloring is that when parchment is exposed to light it "tans", as parchment is made from animal skins, so over the centuries the pages that were exposed will have a darker color to them. Directly opposite the devil is a full picture of the kingdom of heaven, juxtaposing the "good versus evil," in contrast with the picture of the devil.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Thursday, August 02, 2012
James Bond 50° Anniversary : Entertainment Weekly
Within the pages of this week’s magazine you’ll find a gallery of rare, behind-the-scenes photographs annotated by longtime Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, a guide to all 22 official James Bond movies, a round-up of Bond’s greatest gadgets, a map revealing every place 007 has visited on planet earth (and elsewhere), an interview with George Lazenby, and an opening essay by 007 nut Ben Svetkey. Enjoy.
'Vertigo' Replaces 'Citizen Kane' On Sight & Sound Greatest Of All Time List
Sight & Sound, the most vaunted publication devoted to all things movies, have drafted their once-a-decade list that determines what is the Greatest Movie Of All Time, and Orson Welles has to move over for another helmer fond of the buffet table.
Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" has replaced "Citizen Kane" on top of the list, sending shockwaves through the movie community, with riots taking place in multiplexes around the country. Okay, not really, but it does knock Welles off his longstanding peg at the top, nearly 50 years, placing him in the #2 slot.
It has been a long, slow climb for the movie up the list, first appearing in 1982 at #7 before growing in esteem as the years passed by.
At the time of its release, critics were largely indifferent to the movie, but it has since gone on.
At the time of its release, critics were largely indifferent to the movie, but it has since gone on.
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
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