a conjurer of cosmic ideas........

 

     It is also true that having spent his formative years among the stonecutters of Settignano, Michelangelo had a feel for the material rare among artists and a respect for the laborers who actually did the backbreaking work of quarrying the stone.  He was able to spot minute imperfections that would ruin the finished work, and to judge the density and consistency of the crystalline structure that would determine how the chisel would bite into the stone.  Though Michelangelo did more than any other artist before him to lift the profession above the humble status of the artisan, he understood that such a leap into the stratosphere could not be launched without a firm grounding in craftsmanship.  He was something of a paradox, a conjurer of cosmic ideas who fussed over the slightest details of his trade, knowing that only the most perfect forms were adequate vessels to contain the vastness of his imagination.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A  Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo           Pieta            1498-99

a metaphysical quest...............

 

Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.

     But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping.  Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest.  This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will.  This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization.  In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look.  If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble.  Do you do this too. . . ."  Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature.  The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo        David        1501-04       

a free hand................

 

     In this petulant note—written in haste by an old man whose crankiness was exacerbated by a recent attack of kidney stones—we can sense the frustration that came from a lifetime spent battling those who viewed his profession with contempt.  In the face of the skeptics and scoffers, Michelangelo promoted a new conception of the artist, one in which the crass demands of commerce and the demeaning associations of manual labor have been sloughed off to reveal a creature as yet ill-defined but still thoroughly magnificent. . . .

     Michelangelo's determination to chart a new course embroiled him in endless quarrels as his claim of superiority clashed with his employers' own considerable egos.  While patrons tended to regard him and his colleagues as, at best, highly trained professionals tasked with carrying out their vision, Michelangelo insisted on an unprecedented degree of freedom to pursue his own vision, on his own terms.  Cardinal Cervini (soon to be elected Pope Marcellus II), in charge of overseeing the rebuilding of St. Peter's, was one of many who discovered how difficult it was to control the headstrong artist.  When he asked Michelangelo to inform him of his plans, the artist snapped; "I am not obligated, nor do I intend to be obliged to say either to your highness or to any other person what I am bound or desirous to do."  Even when his relationship with a patron was one of mutual respect, Michelangelo chafed at any restrictions placed on his freedom.  "If Your Holiness wishes me to accomplish anything," he wrote to Pope Clement VII, "I beg you not to have authorities set over me in my own trade, but to have faith in me and give me a free hand.  Your Holiness will see what I shall accomplish and the account I shall give of myself."

Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo      Moses       c 1513-16     marble sculpture

It's an art......................

 

It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.

-Françoise Sagan, as quoted here

Monet......................

 

Claude Monet   1874   Sunset on the Seine    Oil on Canvas

The Art & Artists blog gifted us a 27-part series on the wondrous works of Claude Monet.  Do take advantage of it.

atmosphere...................

 

Claude Monet      +/-1863    Sunset over the Sea 

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the air and the light which vary continually. For me, it is only the, surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.

-Claude Monet

Abstract expressionism.........

 

Jasper Johns    1961      0 Through 9      oil on canvas

Art.............................

 

Art cannot be a monologue.

-Albert Camus

Norman Rockwelll      Connoisseur      Oil     1961-2

Almost seventy years ago.................

 

To create today is to create dangerously.   Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.  Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art.  The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.

-Albert Camus, from this 1957 lecture

the important provinces..............

 

Like so many people wedded to the nineteenth-century view of science, Dawkins overlooks the nineteenth-century reaction—which said, "Wait a minute: science is not the only way to pursue knowledge.  There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature and music.  And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion.  Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world?  Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?"

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

Getting a taste............................

 

.................................of Edward Hopper.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design. The term "life" as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

-Edward Hopper, from here (page 8)

The audacity of art..................

 

He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever.

-from this Sippican Cottage (an artist himself) post

bridging.....................

 

We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another, but they are bound by a common objective.  Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world.  Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise, and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

Debatable...............?

 

The standard of carving, of both the flesh and the draperies, is without precedent in human history, and it is not hard to imagine the astonishment and respect it produced among both cognoscenti and ordinary men and women alike.  The youth of the sculptor made him a wonder, and the acclaim given to the work was the beginning of Michelangelo's reputation as an artistic superman, larger than life—like some of his works—and endowed with godly qualities.

     Whether it benefits an artist to have this kind of reputation is debatable.

-Paul Johnson, The Renaissance: A Short History

Curating......................

 

..........................weird medieval art.

thanks

Let it go...............

 

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

-William James, The Principles of Psychology

pondering the future.......

 

Albert Robida         The Release of the Opera in the Year 2000       c. 1882, lithograph

Their every day will be caught in the wheels of mechanized society, to the point where I wonder how they will find the time to enjoy the most simple pleasures we had at our disposal: silence, calm, solitude.  Having never known them, they shall not be able to miss them.  As for me, I do—and I pity them.

-Albert Robida, from his short story "1965," written in 1920

The Intertunnel contains amazing things...........

The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest surviving work attributed to Michelangelo, painted by him in 1487 or 1488 when he was 12 or 13 years old. This is an intense painting, the kind of thing that would have resulted in Michelangelo’s parents visiting the principal’s office had the young man painted this in a contemporary 7th grade art class.

-Jason Kottke

Messages from the People Who Came Before.....

Good form........................

 

Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well, or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make.

-Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

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