Just a thought
Perpetuity is defined as a state of continuing forever – isn’t that wonderful?
I have missed my blog – more anon –
I have a fondness for words with repeated soft aspirants that make them satisfying to pronounce (favourite is ‘aspidistra’). ‘Titian’s Sisyphus’ is not only wonderful to say, it’s incredibly wonderful to look at, which, as an art historian, makes me doubly happy.
The Sisyphus was painted as part of a series of four works, depicting the labours of the damned (sometimes called the Furies) made for Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands and sister to Emperor Charles V. The works were intended as a warning to those who tried to defy the Emperor in his struggles against the Protestants. Sisyphus hung in the company of similarly Herculean images of Tityus, Tantalus, and Ixion, and is the only one of the series to survive the Alcazar fire of 1734.
Sisyphus was a king of Corinth but because he was a trickster and deceiver of the gods he was condemned by Pluto to spend eternity pushing a boulder uphill. The point was that he would be kept occupied and unable to escape his fate, and that his task would never be completed.
It is this last point that makes Sisyphus so poignantly appropriate to artistic striving. Like Durer’s Melancholic angel (a symbol I keep circling), Sisyphus engages in an struggle to complete an impossible task. I wonder if that’s why Titian’s rendering of his taut gigantism is so lovingly precise and yet so achingly beautiful in its range of fleshly tone and flickering brushwork. In his deathless struggle Sisyphus is as alive as Titian’s art could make him – a metaphor, in Titian’s troubled times, for what art might accomplish. In it’s Counter-Reformation idealization, the figure of Sisyphus ranks among the saints of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement – all of them made of a solid but uncertain beauty, trapped in eternities of doubt –
The Sisyphus is now in the Prado –
melancholy (n.) 
c.1300, “condition characterized by sullenness, gloom, irritability,” from Old French melancolie “black bile, ill disposition, anger, annoyance” (13c.), from Late Latin melancholia, from Greek melankholia “sadness,” literally (excess of) “black bile,” from melas(genitive melanos) “black” (see melanin) + khole “bile” (see Chloe). Medieval physiology attributed depression to excess of “black bile,” a secretion of the spleen and one of the body’s four “humors.”
I can’t say I’ve noticed any pronounced overproduction of black bile (unless that’s what gives you acid reflux) but I have found myself, most curiously, suffering a rather acute post-sabbatical funk best defined by ‘melancholy.’ By which I mean not sadness exactly, not hopelessness nor loss of interest, but an underlying sort of pewter-gray hue to days spent trying to reconnect with my job. I sift through emails and find myself NOT bristling at bureaucracy, nor particularly fraught about schedules, modules, the latest teaching technology or the intricacies of departmental border wars –
Might I be (gasp?) content? Is contentment silver-hued and amorphous – a cloud of cotton batting, blocking out the world? Victor Hugo evidently wrote that ‘melancholy is the happiness of being sad’, which might mean it is the inevitable and ineffable by-product of some accomplishment, the completion of which leaves one sadly happy – or happily sad – passing through from one state to another. Melancholia is not sadness but stasis, a kind of ebb – like Durer’s angel in the famous print – not falling – fallen, but still possessed of wings.
As Susan Sontag wrote, “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
Or, to invert Stevie Smith, ‘Not drowning, but waving’ –
melancholy (n.) c.1300, “condition characterized by sullenness, gloom, irritability,” from Old French melancolie “black bile, ill disposition, anger, annoyance” (13c.), from Late Latin melancholia, from Greek melankholia “sadness,” literally (excess of) “black bile,” from melas(genitive melanos) “black” (see melanin) + khole “bile” (see Chloe). Medieval physiology attributed depression to excess of “black bile,” a secretion of the spleen and one of the body’s four “humors.”
I can’t say I’ve noticed any pronounced overproduction of black bile (unless that’s what gives you acid reflux) but I have found myself, most curiously, suffering a rather acute post-sabbatical funk best defined by ‘melancholy.’ By which I mean not sadness exactly, not hopelessness nor loss of interest, but an underlying sort of pewter-gray hue to days spent trying to reconnect with my job. I sift through emails and find myself NOT bristling at bureaucracy, nor particularly fraught about schedules, modules, the latest teaching technology or the intricacies of departmental border wars –
Might I be (gasp?) content? Is contentment silver-hued and amorphous – a cloud of cotton batting, blocking out the world? Victor Hugo evidently wrote that ‘melancholy is the happiness of being sad’, which might mean it is the inevitable and ineffable by-product of some accomplishment, the completion of which leaves one sadly happy – or happily sad – passing through from one state to another. Melancholia is not sadness but stasis, a kind of ebb – like Durer’s angel in the famous print – not falling – fallen, but still possessed of wings.
As Susan Sontag wrote, “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
Or, to invert Stevie Smith, Not drowning, but waving’ –
diorama (n.) 
1823 as a type of picture-viewing device, from French diorama (1822), from Greek di- “through” (see dia-) + orama “that which is seen, a sight” (see panorama). Meaning “small-scale replica of a scene, etc.” is from 1902.
Most of us are familiar with the notion of ‘diorama’ in the context of museum displays; those occasionally hokey miniature reproductions of historical events, much like the ones that come to life in the film Night at the Museum. Some people are less familiar with the notion of the diorama as a picture-viewing device, invented in Paris by Louis Daguerre (for whom the Daguerreotype, an early form of photograph, is named) and introduced to the public in 1822.
The diorama was presented in a purpose-built theatre in which the audience was seated on a kind of large turntable that could be turned from one large panorama to the other. The large stage area – 24 feet wide by 21 feet high – was used to hang a series of painted, layered linen scenes, overlaid in a long, truncated tunnel and left transparent in certain areas, Sunlight was then redirected, through the use of apertures and mirrors, screens, shutters and coloured blinds, and these light effects would cause the painted landscapes to shift and shimmer and change, in shows that lasted about ten to fifteen minutes. These spontaneous shifts of effect were considered miraculous imitations of nature, conjured magically before the eyes of an astonished audience. Water would appear to dance in fountains, storms, rainbows, moonlight and starlight were all accompanied by soundscapes of music and mimicry, creating immersive magical environments.
It has often occurred to me that Courbet’s famous Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory (1855), which hangs in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, shimmers in its expansive background with the effects of a diorama, deepening the conceit of the painted landscape on his canvas, These intimating layers of imitation engage in a reiterative dialectic between his doctrine of Realism and the conjuring tricks that the painting of realism requires, doubling back on the wry oxymoron of his title. As Picasso put it, “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth” and perhaps we apprehend Realism more fully when it is filtered through the truth of our imaginations.
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tragedy (n.) late 14c., “play or other serious literary work with an unhappy ending,” from Old French tragedie (14c.), from Latin tragedia “a tragedy,” from Greek tragodia “a dramatic poem or play in formal language and having an unhappy resolution,” apparently literally “goat song,” from tragos “goat” + oide “song.” The connection may be via satyric drama, from which tragedy later developed, in which actors or singers were dressed in goatskins to represent satyrs. But many other theories have been made (including “singer who competes for a goat as a prize”), and even the “goat” connection is at times questioned. Meaning “any unhappy event, disaster” is from c.1500. – from the Online Etymology Dictionary
‘Tragedy’ originated in Greek theatre as the enactment of unhappy events which provoked audience ‘catharsis’ – literally, ‘cleansing’, ‘purgation’ – the ability to rid ourselves of pity or fear through witnessing the sufferings of others – a concept originating in Aristotle’s Poetics. In a classical sense it’s used to define creative empathy.
I am increasingly averse to the overuse of the word ‘tragedy’ in contemporary media, who apply it to everything from the accidental to the criminal – although I’m well aware that it has been used in this sense since the sixteenth century, when it became more generally applied to any events disastrous or fatal.
All sad endings are not, however, ‘tragedies’ in the classical sense – to release responsibility for the preventable to some sense of fatalistic human failing seems to me childish and dangerous in our confused and confusing world.
ash, ashen, cinereal, clouded, dappled, dingy dove, drab dusky, dusty, grey, heather,iron, lead, leaden, livid, mousy, neutral, oyster, pearly, peppery, powder, sere, shaded,silvered, silvery, slate, smoky, somber, stone
The first thing to be said here is that ‘grey’ is the English spelling which we Canadians favour – whereas ‘gray’ is the Americanization of same, a transmutation linked to liberty, one imagines.
The terms for grey (above) are all the ready synonyms I could find – none of which quite adequately describe the peculiar characteristics of grey/silver pigments that have come to us via the little-regarded but superlative painter Girolamo Savoldo. Savoldo, who died in 1548, came from Brescia and worked for most of his career in Venice, where he soaked up the vast vocabulary of colours known to his Venetian counterparts. Somehow, though, Savoldo transformed those colours, particularly the greys, through tricks of light and luminous textural bravura that would not be seen again until van Dyck reinvented grey in the Baroque period. Subtle silver transitions from pale lavender/purple/smoky slates to burning, white-marbled highlights. I give you two examples of Savoldo’s smouldering, shimmering, waterfalls of grey – the Magdalene, and the Angel and Tobias –
The most recent incarnation of Superman, the ubiquitous Man of Steel (which I confess I have not seen and, in all likelihood, will not see, because of a lifelong aversion to the ‘superhero’ genre – aside from the Saturday-morning cartoon Hercules) put me in mind of this motto – ‘nec spe nec metu’ – which is used in different contexts in the Renaissance. Specifically, Superman’s father, Jor-El, tells him that the ‘S’ on his chest; which generations of gullible Americans have interpreted as product placement for ‘Superman’ swag; is actually a symbol for ‘hope.’ One assumes that the clever author of the screenplay had to look no farther than the Latin ‘spes’ to make such a connection.
The phrase ‘nec spe nec metu’ probably has its origins in Stoicism, meaning ‘neither hope nor fear’ or, more pedantically ‘without hope, without fear’ (perhaps from ancient medicine and Silesio; perhaps adapted from general Roman orations) – implying a kind of resigned equilibrium and forbearance. In a more courtly context, it might have been adopted and adapted in the form of a maxim to remind knights and crusaders that absolute fearlessness does not require hope (only the fearful resort to ‘hope’).
In the sixteenth century in Italy, the famous collector and art patron Isabella d’Este, of Mantua, adopted the phrase ‘nec spe nec metu’ as one of her various ‘imprese’, personal signs, sometimes combining word and image, used as assertions of identity and character – intimately connected to emblem art. Her secretary for a time, Mario Equicola, wrote a little booklet with this title. The phrase itself is slightly more obscure than her adoption of the ‘XXVII’ symbol, Latin numerals for ’27’ which, when pronounced in Italian, reads ‘ventisette’ and thus has an oblique onomatopoeic morphological relationship to the phrase ‘vinti siete’ which means, roughly, ‘you have won’ – although ‘you’ is in the plural form and therefore could infer not victory, but rather ‘I am vanquished’ – but I digress. The ‘nec spe nec metu’ appears among the ornaments of her private spaces in Mantua.
One wonders how such concepts might have resonated with the painter Caravaggio, whose flamboyant civil, personal and professional disobedience in his Roman years seem far removed from the lofty ideals of Stoicism or knighthood. But evidently he and his band of Roman ‘bravi’ (essentially gang members) adopted this phrase as their call-to-arms. It intrigues me because the most logical place for Caravaggio to have picked up this motto was in Mantua, perhaps during those ‘lost’ years between the time he left Milan and appeared in Rome.
In the lawlessness of Rome around 1600, perhaps he saw grim personal fortitude as the only means by which the true artist could survive. Here’s a detail of his Beheading of John the Baptist in Malta, in which he scrawled his signature in the blood of the saint – a dramatic footnote to a fascinating life –
“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” – Dante
It takes considerable painterly imagination to approach the wings of angels. That angels even HAVE wings is a matter of theological debate; the Bible gives variable reports – cherubim, seraphim, wingless messengers, wings with eyes and hands – and the wonderful passage in Ezekiel “The sound of the wings of the cherubim could be heard as far away as the outer court…”. I wonder what Fra Angelico heard as he worked, with his assistants, on the astonishing frescoes throughout the monastery of San Marco in Florence? Did he hear musical wings alighting in the inner courtyard, where the orange trees are? What sorts of apparitions graced his waking dreams that he was so able to imagine angels’ wings? He must have watched – as all painters charged with such solemn avian agendas must have watched – the flights of birds above the courtyard – did their wings thrum in chorus like the battering, beating wings of Ezekiel’s angels?
For Fra Angelico, an angel’s wing is a careful geometry and a fearful symmetry – a progression from the arched gold of the shoulder expanse through degrees of softest blue to reds and lilac purples to darker porphyries and ending in deep-dyed indigo tips – where did such colours come from? Hovering angels like messenger peacocks, seen through a painter’s eye and hand – here is Gabriel, angel of the Annunciation, from the monastery of San Marco –
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Near Depth Experience 