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.

Parmigianino

Parmigianino, “Vision of Saint Jerome”, Details, Oil on Canvas, 1525- 1527

The Vision of Saint Jerome is a painting by the Italian Mannerist artist Parmigianino, executed in 1526–1527. It is now in the National Gallery, London, United Kingdom.

The work was commissioned on 3 January 1526 in Rome, by Maria Bufalini, wife of Antonio Caccialupi, to decorate the family chapel in the church of San Salvatore in Lauro. The contract mentioned “Francesco Mazola de Parma” and one “Pietro” with the same name, perhaps Parmigianino’s uncle Piero Ilario Mazzola.

According to late Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari, Parmigianino was working to this painting during the Sack of Rome, and he had to stop when the city was ravaged by the imperial troops. He was able to escape paying a ransom, while his uncle remained in Rome, being able to hide the painting in the refectory of Santa Maria della Pace.

Francisque Joseph Duret

Francisque Joseph Duret, “Chactas Meditating on Atala’s Tomb”, Cast Bronze, 1836, 135 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France

The Romantic sculptor Francisque Duret, born in 1804, presented the model of his “Chactas Meditating on the Grave of Atala” at the Paris Salon of 1836. Several reduced-size bronzes of the sculpture were cast by the Delafontaine foundry after 1848. Duret based this work on Atala, the famous novel published in 1801 by François-René de Chateaubriand, and on Girodet’s iconic painting “The Entombment of Atala”, painted in 1808 and now on exhibit at the Louvre.

This sentimental and edifying tale tells the story of Chactas, an Indian of the Natchez tribe in Louisiana, returning to the grave of his sweetheart, Atala. The Indian girl, recently converted to Christianity, chose to poison herself, despite her love, rather than break her vow of chastity. Seated on an ivy-covered rock, a symbol of remembrance and fidelity, this athlete in mourning represents the so-called “savage” on the path to redemption, for Chactas will be converted in his turn. This moralizing story, according to Emmanuelle Héran, should be understood in the historical context of  the July Monarchy, which viewed religion as a force for order and social stability

Only the exotic accessories identify this “Hercules of the wilderness:”:  the plaited hair, the earring and necklace… Although the nudity suggests “primitive” man, there is undoubtedly a suggestion of the classical era, for there existed few depictions of the American Indian at that time: Chactas became a pioneering image of the Indian in the Western imagination. The new collective psyche that emerged from the turmoil of the Revolution praised sensitivity and depicted man confronting the mystery of his fate, turning away from the heroes of classical antiquity.

Pordenone

Pordenone, “Pilate Judges Christ”, Detail, Fresco,1520, The Cathedral of Cremona, Italy

Pordenone, Il Pordenone in Italian, is the byname of Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis (c. 1484–1539), an Italian Mannerist painter, loosely of the Venetian school. Vasari, his main biographer, wrongly identifies him as Giovanni Antonio Licinio. He painted in several cities in northern Italy “with speed, vigor, and deliberate coarseness of expression and execution—intended to shock”.

He appears to have visited Rome, and learnt from its High Renaissance masterpieces, but lacked a good training in anatomical drawing. Like Polidoro da Caravaggio, he was one of the artists often commissioned to paint the exteriors of buildings; of such work at most a shadow survives after centuries of weather. Michelangelo is said to have approved of one palace facade in 1527; it is now only known from a preparatory drawing.

Much of his work was lost when the Doge’s Palace in Venice was largely destroyed by fires in 1574 and 1577. A number of fresco cycles survive, for example part of one at Cremona Cathedral, where his Passion scenes have a violence hardly repeated until Goya. Another cycle was at the Scuola Grande della Carità in Venice, now the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the main art museum, where he worked with the young Tintoretto.

His life was as energetic and restless as his art; he married three times, and was accused in court of hiring criminals to kill his brother to avoid sharing their inheritance. He perhaps had some influence on later works by Titian and more clearly on Tintoretto, who to some extent took over his position as the leading painter of large mural commissions in Venice. Titian and Pordenone were rivals in his last decade and gossip even claimed that his death was suspicious.

John Williams: “You Must Remember What You Are”

Photographer Unknown, (Food for the Mind)

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.”

― John Williams, Stoner

 

Dean Koontz: “The Appearance of Ordinariness”

Photographer Unknown, (The Appearance of Ordinariness)

“Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.”

—Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

Juan Gris

Juan Gris, “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth”, Oil on Canvas, 1915, Private Collection

Juan Gris was born in Madrid. He later studied engineering at Madrid’s School of Arts and Sciences. There, from 1902 to 1904, he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Moreno Carbonero. It was in 1905 that José Victoriano González adopted the more distinctive name Juan Gris.

In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. He submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L’assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris.

Gris began to paint seriously in 1910 (when he gave up working as a satirical cartoonist), developing at this time a personal Cubist style. In A Life of Picasso, John Richardson writes that Jean Metzinger’s 1911 work, Le goûter (Tea Time), persuaded Juan Gris of the importance of mathematics in painting. Gris exhibited for the first time at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants (a painting entitled Hommage à Pablo Picasso).

Paolo Tredich

Three Oil Paintings by Paolo Terdich

“The water works represent my last project, an extreme challenge which combines the message I tried to transmit in my portraits and figures and the technical complications to render the movement, the transparencies and the light reflections of water and the fragmentation effects of bodies under water. These works are unusual and modern paintings, of the complex realization, with the subjects that crush the crystal of the water in decomposed glares that they decompose the bodies underwater”. – Paolo Terdich

Born in Piacenza (Italy), Paolo Terdich has travelled widely and has lived in various countries, including U.K., Netherlands, Egypt, and Nigeria. He has had the opportunity to experience diverse cultures and, hence, to develop and refine his art. He has presented his work at various personal exhibitions worldwide and at some renowned art fairs. The solo exhibitions in Abuja (Nigeria – 2010) at the Italian Embassy and at the “Istituto Italiano di Cultura” in Cairo (Egypt – 2000) are two example of events organized by the Italian Institutions, to show his works worldwide. He has also won numerous international prizes (e.g. he was among the winners of the ”VII Biennale Internazionale di Roma” and finalists in the prestigious “Premio Arte 2008”).

Curled Tongue

Photographer Unknown, (Curled Tongue), Selfie

“I resisted the temptation to turn around and stick out my tongue in derision at Beliquose. After all, there was no telling when or if we should meet again, and I certainly did not need him saying, ‘Ah yes, Poe, the fellow whose trespasses i could have forgiven in their entirety… except for the tongue thing. Yes, for that, you must surely die.”

― Peter David, The Woad to Wuin