Baroque Art: a codex on glory and madness

 Our ideals and often our practices are glorious and maniacal, as were the ideals and practices of those who went before us, so long ago.

See Glory and Madness

Nicholas Poussin, whom I met doing this series of blogs, is a classically oriented, cerebral painter, usually of idyllic, unemotional scenes.  A monograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art has him as an inspiration for Jean-Jacque David, Paul Cezanne', and Pablo Picasso.

Poussin's Death of Germanicus. . .

might have inspired David's awful Death of Socrates.

Poussin's Rape of at the Sabine Women

could have inspired David's revolutionary Intervention of he Sabine Women.

Picasso is easy.  The Poussin self-portrait:

. . . the El Greco Portrait of an Artist. . .

to Picasso's version.

Cezanne is hard, and I don't think I can get it because I'm not a colorist, but I'll try.

Poussin's The Triumph of Neptune. . .

and Cezanne's The Bathers, perhaps.

Poussin's "most Baroque" painting, and my excuse for this Codex, is the Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, which shows a Roman soldier pulling the saint's intestine out of his body and winding  it on a windlass.

The painting is kept in a Vatican museum and the Vatican won't exhibit a copy,

Commercial artists have made the color vidid and perhaps more than Poussin would have made then.  Do you prefer a vivid red and a pale sky

. . . or a vivid sky and muted reds?

Hundreds of artists offer a version of  the Martyrdom os St. Erasmus, by Poussin and earlier painters, are  on he Web.  The paintings are, one supposed, popular with Christians or Sadists oar Christian Sadists, who want to display it in their homes.

An earlier Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (the Flemish painter Dirk Bouts, before 1466)

has  acquired a following.

Do you prefer chic indirect lighting. . .

 or glorious sunlight, for cocktails?

A dutch cartoon from about 1460

A detail of a painting by the Dutch Henricus Satrapitanus 1516

The my mind's eye I see

Poussin's Martyrdom of St. Erasmus hanging on the wall of a dining chamber deep within the Vatican, to which only prelates of highest rank and most refined taste are ever invited, there to share with their Pope, the former Nazi youth, a meal of Spaghetti swerved in an exquisite Marinara Sauce . . . .

Well, perhaps I do the prelates a disservice.  Indeed, I would do them a disservice if only I had the power to do one.

You killed him! 

You killed him!   

In your god damn Brooks Brothers suit, 

You Son of a Bitch.

                  Alan Ginsberg, Howl.  Clerical robes will serve just as well as a suit of good English cloth.

The history and legend of the Church of the martyrdom of St. Erasmus is both glorious and mad.  Per Wikipedia, the saint was

     beaten around the head, 

      beaten with leaden mauls until his veins broke 

      thrown into a pit of snakes and worms, and

      boiling oil and sulfur were poured on him.

At this point God electrocuted all his torturers.

Then he was

     thrown in another pit, but an angel came and slew all the vipers and worms.

Then he was 

     put into a pan seething with rosin, pitch, brimstone, lead, and oil, which was poured into his mouth

     a searing hot cloak and metal coat were tried on him.    An angel eventually carried him away to safety


Then he was  
     enclosed in a barrel full of protruding spikes, and the barrel was rolled down a hill. But an angel healed him.
Then 
     his teeth were plucked out of his head with iron pincers


Then
      they roasted him upon a gridiron
      and so forth.
 Finally (and this is what the paintings are about),
      his stomach was slit open and his intestines wound around a windlass. 

There is no record of his having been water boarded, for which I suppose we should all be thankful.

if you think of the 16th and 17th Centuries as the bad old days and believe we have "improved",  and wish to see what the Pol Pot did to Cambodians, visit a Greek site, Metal on Metal.  A sample, by Van Nath, a Cambodian artist who survived a Pol Pot concentration camp:

And yes, water boarding is torture, you heartless monsters in our own government.

We -- you and I  and all the rest of those who call ourselves , so carelessly, "Americans" -- cause lots of suffering in the world: flesh burned from bodies, babies suffocated, mauling, mutilations, blasted to smithereens; and so do those who wish us in the West ill; and so do those who are indifferent to us altogether (we are innocent of the suffering of Uighurs, for example).

But unless scenes of  torture were painted by a 17th Century Master, we don't display them on the walls of our homes or public buildings (except Fine Art Museums and, presumably, Catholic Sadists' homes); at least we don't display them for evangelical purposes.

No.  We have the decency to hide images of torture away on the Web, where only some one billion school-aged children may view them and download them, and share them with sniggering friends (do young'ns still snigger?  I expect they are too sophisticated for that ) causing . . . Well, we'll find out what it causes.  All we have to do is wait for the future to happen.  I hope exposure is better than the secrecy I grew up with.

 In the meanwhile, to view some of  the images, you'll have do your own search; or visit my "adult" blog -- easily available to five-year-olds --:  The Burning Font, now under construction.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

                                 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Baroque Art: Velasquez and El Greco's dangerous poratraits

Velasquez and El Greco chose a dangerous way to earn a living.

Velasquez painted Pope Innocent X, said to e the ugliest man in Rome and not at all innocent . . .

. . . and the resulting image is presentable.  The pope is said to have commented that the painting "is quite lifelike."  Home free.

El Greco had the more difficult assignment.  He was assigned to paint the Grand Inquisitor, the most powerful man in Spain in the 17th Century, a man who held the unchecked power of life and death over every person under his sway.

Simply entitled A Cardinal. 

Is this the way you would chose to portray the man who, with a gesture, could insure your most horrible death?  The clenched left hand does it for me. I would not have painted a clenched left hand.   The Metropolitan Museum's description is more explicit and should be read if you would understand this painting.  

I think The Cardinal is the greatest of all portraits, except perhaps Picasso's of Gertrude Stein:

But I confess a prejudice:  I like Miss Stein and wish I could have been her friend.

The following painting

is not a portrait at all, but a painting I like a lot, and so did Miss Stein.

My take:  a man made more ruthlessly dangerous by fear.

Monty Python has a skit of the Spanish Inquisition, which is as funny as usual, if you can forget history.  Somehow horrible history is much with us these days -- perhaps most days --, and still the skit raises a chuckle.  Enjoy!

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Google -- with whom I plan to enter into a civil union when Abe and I become unionized, so much do I love it -- amazes me once again.

Here is the text of the chapter from Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov entitled The Grand Inquisitor.  I had a lingering doubt about religious faith before I read this chapter; I had none after.  Read it, and be forewarned:  Ivan's objection to a belief in god is unanswerable by any I have posed the issue to.  

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Robert Choate was a familiar at Miss Stein's home in Paris.  He wrote The Eater of Darkness.  I believed that I was the only person in the world to have read The Eater of Darkens, a funny and curious book.  I am delighted to find -- google is pleased to present to me -- a current review devoted to forgotten literature, of The Eater of Darkness.   The review treats the book with the respect it is due.  Good for you, Robert Choate!  Good for you, Reviewer.