Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Another take on study abroad

From Stuff White people like...

Innocents Abroad


There is an amazing hypertext of Innocents Abroad that has illustrations, sales materials, maps, the transcript of Twain's lectures, etc. etc. Click the image to the left to get the illus. page. Click here to get the homepage.

Monday, March 3, 2008

A thin line between life and art

"In truth, allowing for the difference of costume, and if a lion's skin could have been substituted for his modern Talma, and a rustic pipe for his stick, Donatello might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously softened into flesh and blood." -pg. 8

Sunday, March 2, 2008


Some first generation American landscape painters--Thomas Cole was a major American interpeter of Italy as well as the founder of the "Hudson River School"

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

American neo-classical sculptures at NY Met

Link to Essay and Images at the Met

or paste this if it fails...

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ambl/hd_ambl.htm

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Raphael, addendum


Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and La Fornarina (1814)

Raphael

Portrait of a Young Woman (La Fornarina), 1520
Image from the Galleria Barberini website

"Remember that Raphael's genius wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce hi miracles so well, it will assuredly consume you like a flame." (334)


Restored Image of La Fornarina from the Frick Gallery 2004
*note the detail of the background as compared to the image above
"And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or recieve any of his Virgins as Heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing, for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini palace, and feeling how sensual the artist must have been, to paint such a brazen trollop of his own accord, and lovingly!" (337)



"Some fine morning, I shall come to the Pinacotheca of the Vatican... and what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael's picture of the Madonna di Foligno!" (334)

"We see Cherubs, by Raphael, whose baby-innocence could only have been nursed in Paradise; Angels, by Raphael, as innocent as they, but whose serene intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things Madonnas, by Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve, implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a light which he never could have imagined, except by raising his own eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward." (338)

We will explain these quotations from The Marble Faun and how the paintings were received at the time.

-Brian and Catherine