{religion} – Page 25 – { feuilleton }

Babel details

The Tower of Babel (c. 1563) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Seeing as how I have a fetish for Towers of Babel I ought to have examined this one sooner, the copy at the Google Art Project being one which allows you to explore the surface of the picture in greater detail than the artist himself would have seen unless he was using a magnifying glass. I still find the Art Project interface awkward so the grabs here were taken from a massive jpeg at Wikipedia: 30,000 pixels across, or 243 MB, scaling up to around 1.84 GB in Photoshop which means it’ll make older machines grind in complaint.

The detail is astonishing even by Bruegel’s standards. I’d never realised before how much care is given to the individual actions of every single worker on the tower, however small. Bruegel’s close observation of the working habits of the people around him is here reflected in the myriad figures, all of whom are doing something purposeful. At this resolution you’re able to see that the workers have taken their wives and children up the tower with them—there’s the familiar line of washing hung out to dry—while various beasts of burden haul building materials up the spiral roadway. You could spend a long time exploring the details of the tower before even looking at the background where tiny boats are sailing the sea and the rivers, and more fortunate animals have been left to graze in fields.

Wikipedia has several more of these enormous images. It’s a shame there aren’t many more of Bruegel’s works available at this size, his other crowded paintings deserve equal scrutiny.

One of the builders on his lunch break.

A jug on a window sill.

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Decapitations

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1520–1540) by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

It doesn’t take much effort to refute the jeremiads of those who complain that popular culture is exclusively violent, all that’s usually required is to direct attention to Titus Andronicus or The Revenger’s Tragedy. Compared to the stage, the art world seems at first to be more circumspect, especially in the 19th century when the battles scenes of history painters sprawled across acres of canvas, all of them devoid of the physical trauma of warfare.

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1455–60) by Giovanni di Paolo.

There are exceptions, however, and the nearer you move to Shakespeare’s time the more examples you’ll find. Paintings produced in an age when violent street executions were still a common sight would have seemed less surprising to their intended audience than they do to our eyes. Several of the paintings here provide a useful contrast with the many sanitised depictions of John the Baptist’s severed head in the Salomé archive.

Medusa (c. 1590) by Caravaggio.

Of all the paintings of Medusa’s head the one by Caravaggio is the sole example with a gout of spurting blood. It’s also unusual for being painted on a convex panel intended to resemble the reflecting shield of the Gorgon’s killer, Perseus. Given the violent life of the artist the gore isn’t so surprising although the jet of red in his painting of Judith beheading Holofernes still seems shocking if you’ve never seen it before.

Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598–99) by Caravaggio.

The Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes may be the poor cousin to the more popular story of Salomé but depictions of the crucial event make an impression by being consistently gruesome. I suspect the reason is less to do with the story itself than with the success of Caravaggio’s paintings among cultured Europeans. The copying or imitation of celebrated works became a thriving industry in the days of the Grand Tour with the result that 17th- and 18th-century art is overburdened with variations on earlier paintings.

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Weekend links 140

Thanks to Callum for pointing the way to a beautiful set of playing cards designed by Picart le Doux.

• Of cigars and pedants by Houman Barekat, in which Vladimir Nabokov has a problem with Henry James. Tangentially related: Post-Punk’s Nabokov: Howard Devoto and Magazine, live from Berlin, 1980. (Given A Song From Under The Floorboards, and lines like “I could have been Raskolnikov / But mother nature ripped me off”, I’d say it’s more accurate to describe Devoto as Post-Punk’s Dostoyevsky.)

• “I was introduced to Kneale’s work like most kids: by a fifty-foot hologram of a psychic locust and a British colonel deliquesced by five million years of bad Martian energy.” In Keep Me in the Loop, You Dead Mechanism Dave Tompkins looks back at Nigel Kneale’s TV play The Stone Tape. I reported my own impressions at the end of October.

• At The Quietus this week, Carol Huston on Lord Horror: A History Of Savoy Publishing. Michael Butterworth is interviewed, and the piece includes some quotes from earlier interviews by yours truly.

As the Massachusetts minister Increase Mather explained in 1687, Christmas was observed on Dec. 25 not because “Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian” ones. So naturally, official suppression of Christmas was foundational to the godly colonies in New England.

Rachel N. Schnepper on the Puritan War on Christmas.

• Maxine Peake and the Eccentronic Research Council have a seasonal song for you. Take the title, Black ChristMass, as a warning. The group recently played live on The Culture Show.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog is currently hosting Alphabet Soup, an online exhibition by different artists each depicting the letters of the alphabet. Start here and click forward.

• Ornate Typography from the 19th Century featuring samples from the King George Tumblr. Related: Sheaff ephemera.

Saturn at Saturnalia. A Cassini image of the planet’s nightside.

• Kenneth Anger interviewed by P. Adams Sitney. A 53-minute tape recording from 1972.

• At The Outer Church: James Ginzburg of Emptyset posts a winter music mix.

• When Candy Darling met Salvador Dalí.

• The psychedelic secrets of Santa Claus.

• At Pinterest: Camp as…

• Saturn (1956) by Sun Ra | Permafrost (live, 1980) by Magazine | Uptown Apocalypse (1981) by B.E.F.

The art of Thomas Cole, 1801–1848

The Titan’s Goblet (1833).

Thomas Cole’s Titan’s Goblet isn’t featured at the Google Art Project, unfortunately, but the following paintings are, and all benefit from being able to explore their details. Cole’s colossal vessel predates Surrealism by a century, and is one of many paintings which always has me mentally labelling him as the American John Martin (1789–1854). Having thought of him for years as an American artist–not least because he founded the Hudson River School–it’s a surprise to learn he was born in Bolton, a town not far from Manchester, with his parents emigrating to the US when he was 17. John Martin also grew up in the north of England so there’s another similarity, although the more important comparison concerns their use of painting to convey the spectacularly vast and unreal scenes common to the imaginative side of Romantic art. The Titan’s Goblet is unusual in not having any particular symbolic or moral significance, unlike the pictures below, it’s Magritte-like in its careful depiction of the impossible. The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, on the other hand, could be exhibited beside Francis Danby’s The Deluge (1840) for a “before and after” effect. Like Martin, Cole enjoyed painting architecture of an exaggerated scale. The Architect’s Dream features an Egyptian temple of stupendous size, while the pyramid looming in the background is closer to William Hope Hodgson’s seven-mile-high Last Redoubt than any structure on the Nile plain.

Of equal interest are Cole’s two well-known series: The Course of Empire (1833–36) and The Voyage of Life (1842), both of which I’d love to see at Art Project size.

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1828).

The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge (1829).

The Architect’s Dream (1840).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Martin’s musical afterlife
• Albert Bierstadt in Yosemite
• Danby’s Deluge
• John Martin: Heaven & Hell
• Darkness visible
• Two American paintings
• The apocalyptic art of Francis Danby

Borobudur panoramas

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda.

Panoramas of Borobudur, the Buddhist monument in Magelang, Central Java, which lay undisturbed and overgrown for centuries until restoration began following the British occupation of the island in the 19th century. The bell-like structures are stupas, many of which contain statues of the Buddha in different symbolic postures. The entire monument is a complex three-dimensional map of the Buddhist cosmology: pilgrims ascend from the lowest level reading the bas-reliefs and visiting each Buddha in turn. Wikipedia has a detailed account of both the history of the monument and its meaning as a piece of religious architecture.

Photo by Ursula & David Molenda.

Photo by Lanang Lintang.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive