Michelangelo as a Baroque Poet

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 182-192
Author(s):  
Robert J. Clements
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

Michelangelo Buonarroti's influence upon baroque sculpture is now widely recognised by historians. Ever since that morning in 1506 when he and the Sangalli, father and son, watched the white Pentelic marble of the Laokoön emerge from the farmland of Felice de Freddis near the Baths of Titus, Michelangelo's restless mind found authority in antiquity for a revision of his aesthetic canons. In this agonising group Michelangelo found justification for moving beyond the symmetry, restraint, and proportione divina of the Donatellian mode of sculpture, the static scientism of Da Vinci's painting, and the Vitruvian rules of architecture—even though he paid lip service to those rules and even recited them to popes. Whereas Michelangelo did not acknowledge this influence in writing, or apparently in speaking, his contorted and anguished Haman (1511–12) on the spandrel of the Sistine Vault was an admission of the influence of this Rhodian group —just as El Greco's newly-restored Laokoön in Washington acknowledges it as the one work of art which initiated European baroque. Moreover, the anguishes of the Vatican Laokoön and the expressions thereof were to parallel those tensions—visible even in his death mask—of Michelangelo's own soul and to leave an imprint upon his poetry. Laokoön, it should be remembered in view of his impact upon European baroque, was a militant, ritualistic priest.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-430
Author(s):  
Maja Tabea Jerrentrup

Abstract The art of bodypainting that is fairly unknown to a wider public turns the body into a canvas - it is a frequently used phrase in the field of bodypainting that illustrates the challenge it faces: it uses a three-dimensional surface and has to cope with its irregularities, but also with the model’s abilities and characteristics. This paper looks at individuals who are turned into art by bodypainting. Although body painting can be very challenging for them - they have to expose their bodies and to stand still for a long time while getting transformed - models report that they enjoy both the process and the result, even if they are not confident about their own bodies. Among the reasons there are physical aspects like the sensual enjoyment, but also the feeling of being part of something artistic. This is enhanced and preserved through double staging - becoming a threedimentional work of art and then being staged for photography or film clips. This process gives the model the chance to experience their own body in a detached way. On the one hand, bodypainting closely relates to the body and on the other hand, it can help to over-come the body.


Problemos ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 163-173
Author(s):  
Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė

Straipsnyje aptariamas tiesos ir meno kūrinio santykis B. Croce’s ir H. G. Gadamerio filosofijoje. Lyginami Croce’s estetikos ir Gadamerio meno filosofijos principai, analizuojami panašumai ir skirtumai. Croce akcentuoja meno autonomiją ir subjektyvųjį intuityviojo pažinimo lygmenį, jo estetikoje per meno kūrinį patiriamas intuityvusis tiesos matmuo, tačiau esama ir universalumą suponuojančių meno patirties aspektų. Gadameris meno kūrinio supratimo analize siekia pagrįsti hermeneutikos universalumą – tiesa čia priešinama metodologijai ir suvokiama kaip supratimo įvykis. Straipsnyje grindžiama tezė, kad Croce’s estetikoje tiesos ir meno kūrinio santykis analogiškas Gadamerio hermeneutikoje aptariamam tiesos ir meno kūrinio santykiui.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: meno kūrinys, tiesa, intuityvusis pažinimas, ekspresija, hermeneutika.  The Relationship Between Truth and the Work of Art: B. Croce and H. G. GadamerVaiva Daraškevičiūtė SummaryThe article analyzes the relationship between truth and the work of art in Benedetto Croce’s aesthetics and Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophy of art. It compares the main principles of art in their philosophies, showing their similarities and differences. The approaches of these two thinkers are compared by presenting their concepts of truth, the art work and art experience. Croce considers art as an autonomic, subjective cognition. Nevertheless, the universal dimension of art experience is especially important in his aesthetics as well. Gadamer, for his part, uses the reflection of the experience of the art work as the foundation of a hermeneutic universality. The truth in this case is described as contrasting with methodology and is taken to be an event of understanding. The article concludes that the relationship between truth and the art work which we find in Croce’s aesthetics is analogous to the one that lies in Gadamer’s philosophy of art.Keywords: Truth, Art work, Hermeneutics, Intuition, Experience.t: 115%;"> 


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Stephen Adam Schwartz

In his text on the ‘Exposition Universelle 1855’, Baudelaire upholds what he calls ‘cosmopolitisme’ as the antidote to the constraining influence of universalizing principles of taste that are meant to define beauty for all times and places. Baudelaire’s view is that such aesthetic systems close off the possibility of beauty, which, he maintains must contain an element of novelty. Accordingly, the proper attitude for the viewer (or reader or spectator) to take before a work of art is one that remains always open to novelty and to the ‘universal vitality’ out of which it springs. This attitude is the cosmopolitan one. Yet Baudelaire characterizes this attitude in ways that seem fundamentally incompatible if not diametrically opposed. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism as described in this text seems to involve the slow, lived apprenticeship in the values, ways of life, and criteria of judgement of those in other places, the better to be able to appreciate the beauty of the objects produced in them. On the other, he speaks of the appropriate attitude toward an aesthetic object — indeed toward any object that presents itself to our senses — as one resulting solely from the spectator’s exertions on his or her own mind and will, exertions by which the spectator refrains from imposing criteria of judgement upon the putative aesthetic object in order, instead, to derive one’s criteria from it. While the text on the ‘Exposition’ provides the reader with no way of resolving this contradiction, Baudelaire’s remarks on fashion in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863) provide a dialectical resolution.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-417
Author(s):  
Elias Polizoes

This article offers a reading of the “Conclusioni provvisorie,” the last section of Eugenio Montale's La bufera e altro. It takes its lead from notion of Classicism outlined by T.S. Eliot in his 1923 review of Ulysses and argues that the recourse Montale makes to Dante in particular, and to Christian symbolism in general, is structurally akin to the parallel James Joyce draws between Homer's Odyssey and the world of the early 1920s. In Eliot's view, it is by invoking the coherence of ancient myth that a writer can lend shape and significance to the chaos of the modernity. In Montale's case, however, rather than work to organize the chaotic present according to the idealized image of form and order Classicism promises, the structural use the poet makes of Christianity serves a demythologizing function. On the one hand, it exposes how Classicism is unable to marshal the chaos of the present beyond transforming it into a work of art; on the other, it shows that ideas of order are in fact allegories of the kind elaborated by Walter Benjamin, that is to say, provisional, makeshift, and ultimately empty.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-82
Author(s):  
Yasintus T. Runesi

In his path of thinking, particularly from the 1930s onwards, Martin Heidegger firmly believed that Sein reveals itself, when human being, whom he termed as Dasein, awakened from his blindness of common sense and struggle for grasps his own authenticity. In this paper I examine Heidegger’s destruction of the work of art as a site of strife between art and politics in his text, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Heidegger’s position is complex: on the one hand, he acknowledges that Sein is a phenomenon beyond our horizon of understanding, Sein is all about not something particular; on the other hand, he insists that Sein’s presence through art inscribed in a certain particular identity, especially German volks. In response, I argue that the identification of Sein with a particular identity such as German volks, offers the truth that the politics itself is forged and instituted in and as work of art. Some conclusions will be drawn concerning the importance of the small dimension of Heidegger’s thought on art in contemporary politics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
Jagor Bučan

The creative derivatives phrase has in itself two terms: creativity (lat. creatus - having been created) and derivation (lat. derivatio - derivation, departure). Creativity presupposes the realisation of the new, the non-existent. Derivation, on the other hand, means transition, formation or arrangement. A derivative is what is derived or comes from something else (like gasoline which is a petroleum derivative). Creative derivations would therefore be processes in which a new is derived from the existing; procedures of rearranging the existing, conversion (transitioning) from one system to another. There are two basic requirements that are necessary for the realisation of these and such actions: an adequate poetic means and a common denominator of two or more phenomena, i.e. two or more systems that are brought into contact. We define the poetic means here in Jakobson's terms as the axis of combination (syntagm) and the axis of selection (paradigm). The paper systematises the poetic possibilities of artistic modeling, which is based on the template of already existing works of art. Different versions of the approach to modern and postmodern practice of taking over the already existing form and content aspects of a work of art are briefly explained and described. When choosing examples, the author adheres to the principle of representativeness instead of compendial comprehensiveness. The outcome of the paper should be twofold. On the one hand, the aim is to get to know and understand the poetics of taking over, which is one of the preconditions for aesthetic pleasure and cognitive insight when encountering works of art of that provenance. On the other hand, the work should be useful to students in their own creative work. The poetic means exhibited in it should facilitate a creative approach to the inexhaustible source of tradition.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-255
Author(s):  
John Pynchon

In colonial America the outstanding members of the governing class who were acknowledged as physicians were the two John Winthrops, father and son. John Winthrop, Jr. (1606-1676), Governor of Connecticut, far surpassed his father in the extent of his medical activities. His medical advice was sought, usually by letter, by hundreds of people. Typical of the letters he received is the one below, sent to him by John Pynchon concerning his daughter's illness. I believe this is the first case report of dehydration in American medical literature and, to my knowledge, has never been published. Much Honored Sir- We are bold to crave your advice concerning our young daughter about or neere one yeare & three quarters old. God having pleased to visit her with Illness. She hath not bin welt these 3 or 4 days, but especially yesterday morning was taken with a greate looseness & vomiting which doth continue much & exceedingly weakens her. Shee is very restless & unquiet & sleepes litle & is exceding dry craving for drink: how the Lord may deale with her & us we know not, but desire in the use of meanes to submit to his good pleasure: desiring your helpfullness in what you conceive needfull. I comend you & your affaires to the guidance of God & humbly take leave to subscribe.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-289
Author(s):  
Adrian Daub

This article examines the musical, literary, and theatrical practice of a group of early German modernists — above all Richard Strauss and Frank Wedekind. All of them turn to dance, its unmediated physicality, and its erotic charge to articulate a response to Richard Wagner's theatrical project, specifically the concept of the total work of art. Although Wagner had included a few ballet numbers in his mature operas, he treated the form (and the number as such) as a threat to a specifically operatic plenitude of sensuous meaning—dance, he feared, threatened to dance music and drama right off the stage. I argue that this allowed certain post-Wagnerians to interrogate Wagner's aesthetic through the category of obscenity — the dancer who, by dint of her brute physicality, could disturb and misalign theatrical spectacle became an important figure in their art. After a planned collaboration on a number of ballets came to naught, Strauss and Wedekind each turned to their native media to stage and interrogate balletic forms: Strauss through the medium-scrambling Dance of the Seven Veils in Salomé, Wedekind by inserting his ballet drafts into a strange novella, Minehaha, Or on the Bodily Education of Young Girls. Strauss's collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which was to prove far more consequential and productive than the one with Wedekind, likewise began with an abortive ballet draft, and again came to reflect on dance's role in other media (opera and theater, in this case). Their reflections on the role of dance in operatic and theatrical spectacle find their expression in Elektra's final dance, which turns on its head the mysterious persuasiveness that Wagner had feared in dance and that Wedekind and Strauss had used to such effect in Salomé: a dance so expressive no one is moved by it.


Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hendrik Van Coller

It had already been stated that Siegfried Schmidt (in Hjort 1992) discerned four ‘roles’ within the Literary System, that of literary production, dissemination, reception and literary processing. According to this definition, T.T. Cloete, the well-known author and critic, had played all of these roles. In this second part of a two-part article the focus is on Cloete as a literary historian and in particular on his theoretical (methodological) perceptions pertaining to literary history. It is abundantly clear that in all of his different roles a historical awareness was always present. For Cloete the literary work of art was inbedded in a historical timeframe which imposed hermeneutical imperatives on the critic; on the other hand the literary work of art is present in the here and now and accessible to any skilled reader. One of the objectives of this study is to argue that there was thus an implied dichotomy in Cloete’s thinking on literary history. On the one hand there had been a relativistic view that positioned literary texts in the past, and on the other hand a normative view that implied that certain texts (due to inherent qualities like integration and complexity) could gain a certain permanence. In the last part of this article-true to the narrative approach, an implied confrontation with Cloete’s (methodological) views of literary history lead to a personal standpoint as a confrontation with the self (cf. Sools 2009:27). This explication of a personal view on the writing of a literary history (as an implied homage to Cloete) concluded the article.


1974 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore C. Campbell

Athanasius of Alexandria (298?–373) was a key figure in the in the life and theology of the fourth-century Church. In most of the contemporary controversies and events his force of personality made an indelible mark on developments and influenced their direction and movement to a remarkable degree. Although known most widely for his defense of the communion of being of the Son incarnate in Jesus with the Father, he was no less important in the incipient controversies concerning the divinity of the Holy Spirit. At a decisive hour of the Church's life, Athanasius not only secured her faith in the one Godhead of Father and Son; he delineated the lines upon which her pneumatological doctrine was to develop. With his characteristic single-mindedness, and by constant reiteration of certain propositions, Athanasius laid down the general lines of the future development of the doctrine, thus making the question of the divinity of the Holy Spirit as fundamental a part of the Church's consciousness as the doctrine of the Son's full divinity had become through his disputes with the Arians.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document