Impure stone and the threat to decency: marble tints and veins

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-151
Author(s):  
Monika Wagner
Keyword(s):  
White Marble ◽  
Norbert Elias ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Marble Sculptures ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Ancient Polychromy ◽  
White Material ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
The Ideal

According to the classical tradition, marble sculptures were to be made of ‘pure’ white material. This remained an aesthetic ideal even after archaeological findings had revealed evidence of ancient polychromy. This article argues that tinting as well as natural staining on marble figures in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not only aesthetically but also morally reprehensible, because they violated the ideal of homo clausus. This term, coined by the sociologist Norbert Elias, conceptualizes a subject that imposes ‘self-restraint’ to control its physical body and its emotions. Perfect control was seen embodied in the ancient images of the gods, which were assumed to have been made of immaculate white marble. Any colouring, whether of natural origin or deliberately produced, seemed to contaminate this concept. My investigation is focused on the historical justifications for John Gibson’s scandalous Tinted Venus, and figures of veined marble rejected in France on similar grounds in the late eighteenth century, such as Christoph-Gabriel Allegrain’s Venus and Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Frileuse. I examine how the coloured veins and tints of the stone gained semantic qualities in female figures, where a blush or a vein seemed to reveal emotions and desires and thus infringe the ideal.

scholarly journals Between the Ideal and Artistic Practice. On Research into Ancient Sculptural Polychromy

CLARA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amalie Skovmøller
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
White Marble ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Marble Sculptures ◽  
History Of ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Ideal

Antiquity is often synonymous with white marble. Such are the general expectations when visitors enter 21st century museum galleries hosting ancient sculpture. Yet, ancient marble sculptures have never been actually white. They were originally fully painted or otherwise coloured, and today they pose as controlled ruins build by decades of restorations, de-restorations and preservation manifested as encrusted layers and patina. As such they express the modern ideal, meaning ideas of aesthetics developed by 19th and 20th century museums. They do not reflect the ancient artistic practice or the ideas of aesthetics that once guided the ancient craftspeople. The experimental reconstructions -meaning painted copies of authentic sculptures- are therefore often met with suspicion and sometimes frustration, because they explore the artistic practice above the ideal. Unlike the ancient originals, the painted copies are not in any way visually authentic, but fully polychrome, and layers of paint are often applied in thick, opaque layers, thus failing to meet the ideas of aesthetics on behalf of the modern viewer. While the reconstructions serve as seminal research tools in the academic exploration and experimentation with colours on white marble sculptures, they have no precedents in the history of art. This article will therefore explore how reviews of these experimental reconstructions echoes ideas of aesthetics originating from the 19th century, and how a lack of confronting these ideas ultimately empowers the reconstructions with the potential to impose a much-needed material diversity to 21st century classical sculpture galleries.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: EAST AND WEST STUDIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 02 (09) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
Aziza Komilovna Akhmedova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
The Ideal

The article analyzes the results of the research on the representation of the aesthetic ideal through the image of the ideal hero in two national literatures. For research purposes, attention was paid to highlighting the category of the ideal hero as an expression of the author's aesthetic views. In Sinclair Lewis’s “Arrowsmith” and Pirimkul Kodirov's “The Three Roots”, the protagonists artistically reflect the authors' views on truth, virtue, and beauty. In these novels, professional ethics is described as a high noble value. The scientific novelty of the research work includes the following: in the evolution of western and eastern poetic thought, in the context of the novel genre, the skill, common and distinctive aspects of the creation of an ideal hero were revealed by synthesis of effective methods in world science with literary criteria in the history of eastern and western literary studies, in the example of Sinclair Lewis and Pirimkul Kodirov.

Prologue

Beyond Reason ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karol Berger
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Late Works

The music-dramatic core of the book is framed by sections designed to place Wagner’s late works within the context of the political and ethical ideas of his time. The Prologue offers a genealogy of the principal worldviews available to Wagner and his contemporaries and shows how they related to one another. The options I describe are of diverse age, some with roots going as far back as the antiquity (the Judeo-Christian religious outlook), some characteristic of the modern age (the Enlightenment), some arising even more recently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the main currents of the Counter-Enlightenment that proceed under the banners of History, Nation, and Will). Deposited at different times, they all actively shaped the landscape in which Wagner found himself and left traces on his music dramas.

Why Andrew Fuller Matters

2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-172
Author(s):  
Michael A. G. Haykin
Keyword(s):  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
Particular Baptist ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Human Responsibility ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Andrew Fuller was the most influential Baptist theologian of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is often remembered for his friendship and support of William Carey, but he also needs to be remembered for his theology, known in his own day as ‘Fullerism’. It was formed by his rebuttal of the Hyper-Calvinism that dogged far too many Particular Baptist communities and is encapsulated in his treatise The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation. This controversy, which at its heart was about divine sovereignty and human responsibility, led to Fuller’s instructive involvement in other key conflicts of his day, namely, the debates with Socinianism, Deism, and Sandemanianism. Fuller’s importance as a pastor-theologian, though, is not limited to these controversies, but is also evident in a quintessential evangelical piety that is focused on the cross.

The Abominables

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Marco Pinfari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Rule Breaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Many ◽  
Reign Of Terror

This chapter explores the use of monster metaphors in framing “terrorist” actors since the French Revolution. While acknowledging that these metaphors effectively present the “terrorist” as an abject “other,” it argues that the main purpose of the use of monster imagery in framing “terrorists” is to highlight their unmanageability, which may be instrumental in securing popular backing for specific types of rule-breaking behavior in counterterrorism. It presents these arguments while reviewing examples drawn from the origins of modern terrorism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the gorgon Medusa, which appears for instance in relation to Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” and the many-headed hydra—one of the oldest metaphors for representing unruly behavior that proves unmanageable. It then introduces another type of unmanageable monster that would become particularly popular to frame terrorists—Frankenstein’s monster—and its use in the late nineteenth century to frame Irish nationalism.

The End and the Beginning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Wodziński
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
First World

This chapter asks what we know about the golden/classical period of Hasidism and when it ended. It demonstrates that long before the Holocaust, it was the First World War that brought a major crisis, from which Hasidism in the Old World never recovered. It discusses in turn the human and material losses suffered by the Hasidim, changes in the movement’s geography and their consequences, and ideological and political transformations Hasidism experienced after 1918. The chapter thus shows how the golden age of Hasidism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed from what emerged in the wake of the First World War and from what we know as Hasidism today. More generally, this chapter provides a model of the interrelation between the geopolitical, economic, or cultural context of the outside world and the ethos, doctrine, and cultural models of Hasidism.

Implementation of the aesthetic ideal in the “A Writer’s Diary” by F.M. Dostoevsky

Neophilology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 530-540
Author(s):  
Elena O. Sycheva ◽  
Anatoly А. Serebryakov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Domestic Literature ◽  
Ideal Person ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
The Ideal

The work is devoted to the study of F.M. Dostoevsky’s aesthetics, in particular, the writer’s aesthetic ideal. Following Kant, Hegel, and Schiller, the Russian writer considered the ideal in an anthropological aspect. The writer’s aesthetic ideal is a person who synthesizes the moral and spiritual in himself. The idea of moral beauty is expressed in the theoretical thought of the Russian writer. Harmony, comeliness serve only as an outer shell, when moral height appears as the aesthetic ideal of F.M. Dostoevsky. His works strive for this beauty and truth. Following the examples of “positive beauty” of world and domestic literature and art, F.M. Dostoevsky recreated in his works positively beautiful characters. The Russian writer speaks of the duality of beauty, the “two abysses” of the human soul: “Sodom” – low, sinful, connected with the beauty of the body, sensual, and “Madonna” – high, connected with spiritual beauty, a person can combine both. The writer’s aesthetic ideal is turned to spiritual beauty. Of particular interest is the “A Writer’s Diary” by F.M. Dostoevsky. It is in this work that the writer’s idea of the aesthetic ideal clearly expressed. The question of the ideal person is considered in the context of underground (afterlife) life in the story “Bobok” and above-ground space in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”. In these stories and journalistic texts framing them, the internal dynamics of the writer’s worldview position are revealed: from stating the corruption of the spirit and immortality of the soul (“Bobok”) to the tragic insight of the truth (“A Gentle Creature”) and the affirmation of the “living” image of truth (“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”). The story explicitly expresses the overcoming of such a painful contradiction between the individual and the general, between a positively beautiful person and society.

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