Category Archive: ART
The Last Supper
"the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.'
Milan, 1999, 28 MAY Leonardo’s The Last Supper was restored this day to public view after 22 years of restoration, roughly 501 years after the great artist completed it. You can clamber over the crowds and see this acme of Renaissance fusion (christian myth and enlightenment art) at Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan, a scene recounted in the books Matthew and John, where Jesus, looking serene after a tasty lunch, gives all the apostles indigestion with his infamous accusation. Leonardo (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was not only a polymorphous genius, he was also reputedly quite crafty. All the…
Continue Reading →Dürer Was Weird & Wonderful
Albrecht Dürer was born on 21 May (1471) and we have written of his work and life before, in “I Shall Freeze After the Sun” so let us gaze at his weird and wonderful works, such as the uncanny, post-modern Adoration of the Magi, and one of his strange, ambivalent self-portraits: He didn’t stay long (who did then?) and now he lies here in Nuremburg:
Continue Reading →Theatre of the World
The map-maker, by Rubens
May 20, 1570: cartographer Abraham Ortelius published the world’s first known atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (or “Theatre of the World”). There had been maps before of course, and bundles of maps, but only Ortelius thought to bundle them all in a logically-ordered compendium, paving the way for all atlases to come, till the time of Google. There is nothing lovelier than a good map. They are art. And there is no better way to study the development of geography, and indeed the course of geopolitics, than look over a few centuries’ worth of them. Ortelius pushed back the territories known as Here…
Continue Reading →The Fine Arts Party
A Fine Arts Party (Pieter de Hooch)
It being Friday 13th, The Varnished Culture will break from its traditional disdain of party-politics and weigh-in to the current imbroglio. There’s a federal election in Australia set for 2 July 2016, when we will have to watch the skies (it being World UFO Day as well). Recently, P suggested, innocently, that only a terrorist could enthusiastically, seriously, cast a vote for the Greens. Whereupon my two very reasonable and intelligent interlocutors informed me that they would be likely to vote for the Greens. (I am certain they are not terrorists). So ended my brief role as a pundit. Be that as it…
Continue Reading →Salvador, Feliz cumpleaños! 11 May
(photo of Dali, 1939 by Carl Van Vechten)
Salvador Dali was born today, 11 May, 112 years ago. We write about him in Avida Dollars. For now, let’s gaze upon one of his crazy, mixed-up dreams, rendered as ever with his unerring, golden touch, in Museum Ludwig, Cologne:
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