Author: ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

https://www.instagram.com/wolvesofgray This blog is a refugee and a survivor of the Great Tumblr Inquisition of December 17th, 2018. I am gay artist, who received training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now, a retired high-end fine art framer living in Maryland, USA. My interests and studies in life run a wide gamut from art to history and from the scientific to the esoteric. I have been building this blog of images and texts for the last eight years. My wish is that my posts pique the interest of viewers and encourage them to experience more.

The Ludovisi Gaul

The Ludovisi Gaul (Galatian Suicide), 2nd Century BC, Palazzo Altemps, National Museum of Rome

The Ludovisi Gaul is a Roman copy of the bronze Hellenisic original that was made to celebrate Attalus I’s victory over the Gauls in central Anatolia, now modern Turkey. This Roman copy appeared in the Ludovisi inventory in 1623 so it is assumed that it was found in the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi in Rome slightly before that. The sculpture is now in the Palazzo Altemps, part of the National Museum of Rome. The Romans used it to clarify their victory over the Gauls in Gaul, now modern day France.

“The first thing notable on this statue is the beautiful head of the man. His facial features, including his eyebrows eyes, nose, cheek, jaw, mouth, lips and chin, are in perfect Hellenistic proportions, despite the fact that he is not Hellenistic at all, but Gallic. There are added features on the statue to specify this ethnic, non-Hellenistic, identity. The clearest feature is the moustache. Hellenistic and Roman people were seldom depicted with moustaches, as Alexander the Great introduced the custom of smooth shaving.

His mud-caked hair (typical Gallic), however, appears to be the tousled hair of a satyr, a woodland creature depicted as having the pointed ears, legs, and short horns of a goat and a fondness for unrestrained revelry. He is therefore a threat to the civilized order of which Pergamon considered itself the centre.

The only  piece of clothing he is wearing is a cape. This cape, hanging all the way till his lower back, appears to be waving under influence of the wind. The fact that it is worn around his neck also suggests that he is not Hellenistic but Gallic, as Hellenists often wore togas which are worn with the aid of a fibula.

Next is one of the more important features of the statue, the sword piercing through the man’s chest; an attempt to kill himself. He holds his sword firmly in his right hand, see-able in the tension of all his arm muscles. The sword itself is short, and the other features of it suggest that it is a Gladius, a Roman sword.”  – Matin man Nieuwkoop, Leiden University, Faculty of Archeology, 2012

Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico, “The Red Tower”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Guggenheim Collection, Venice

De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are characterized by haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin-like hybrid figures.

In the paintings of his metaphysical period, de Chirico developed a repertoire of motifs—empty arcades, towers, elongated shadows, mannequins, and trains among others—that he arranged to create “images of forlornness and emptiness” that paradoxically also convey a feeling of “power and freedom”.

According to author Sanford Schwartz, de Chirico—whose father was a railroad engineer—painted images that suggest “the way you take in buildings and vistas from the perspective of a train window. His towers, walls, and plazas seem to flash by, and you are made to feel the power that comes from seeing things that way: you feel you know them more intimately than the people do who live with them day by day.”

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director, claimed to be influenced by de Chirico. Some comparison can be made to the long takes in Antonioni’s films from the 1960s, in which the camera continues to linger on desolate cityscapes populated by a few distant figures, or none at all, in the absence of the film’s protagonists.

Calendar: January 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of January

Climbing Walls

Author and storyteller Charles Perrault was born in Paris, France on January 12, 1628. He was one of the first writers in European literature who turned his eyes to folklore, laying the foundation for the literary genre of fairy tales .

In 1695, when he was 67, Perrault decided to dedicate himself to his children. In 1697 he published “Tales and Stories from the Past with Morals”, subtitled  “Tales of Mother Goose”. These tales, based on French popular tradition, were very popular in sophisticated court circles. Its publication made him suddenly very widely known and he is credited as the founder of the modern fairy tale genre. Naturally, his work reflects awareness of earlier fairy tales written in the salons, most notably by  Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, the Baroness d’Aulnoy, who coined the phrase “fairy tale” and wrote tales as early as 1690.

Some of his popular stories, particularly “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty”, are still commonly told similar to the way Perrault had written them, while others have been revised over the years. For example, some versions of “Sleeping Beauty” published today are based partially on a Brothers Grimm tale, “Little Briar Rose”, a modified version of the Perrault story. However,  the version done by Disney is quite true to the original Perrault tale.

Perrault had written “Little Red Riding Hood” as a warning to readers about men who were trying to prey on young girls who were walking through the forest. He provided the following comment about the lesson provided by the story:  “I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!”  In his story, the girl gets into bed with the wolf and is devoured. There is no happy ending.

He published his collection under the name of his last son, Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt, probably fearful of criticism from those who favored the classical style of writing as opposed to the new modern writing style common under Louis XIV . In the tales, he used images from around him, such as the Chateau Usse for “The Sleeping Beauty”, and the Marquis of the Chateau de’Oiron as the model for the Marquis de Carabas in “Puss in Boots”. He ornamented his folktale subject matter with details, asides and subtext drawn from the world of fashion.