The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel on the previous page is a fantastic painting. Would love to have that hanging on my wall.
I read Metamorphoses earlier this year so I probably won't read it again at the moment. But I do remember being very fond of Narcissus' story as well as Orpheus and Eurydice's. It's effect on art I really love. It's inspired some fantastic paintings.
I just read the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Book 4 and I guess this is where Shakespeare got some of his material for Romeo and Juliet.
Yes, it is also the play used within A Midsummer Night's Dream as well of course.
At the moment I think the worst behaving Gods are either Diana or Juno, but I'm on the lookout for others. Perhaps that is just a male perspective.Originally Posted by qimissung
Diana gets the honor of being on the list for her behavior to Callisto (Book 2) and to Actaeon (Book 3). In the case of Actaeon, he sort of gets what he deserves. He is out hunting with his friends and then Diana turns him into the prey they are after. He gets a taste of what it is like to be hunted, but Diana's punishment of him was uncalled for.
Did Juno have any children with Jove?
I am struck by the metamorphoses of the narrative. How the tales begin and end and transform into new tales seamlessly though there is not much continuity among the tales. Form becomes content, content form as in the great works by Joyce and Beckett.
stlukesguild wrote:
SLG, I think you mean Thomas Rowlandson. I am sure I know which painting you are talking about!!!(And you don't want to know how the British satirist, John Rowlandson, imagined a "new Pygmalion")
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
Yes... Thomas Rowlandson... and if you have Googled his name in concert with "Pygmalion" I'm certain you have gotten an eyeful.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
I did. Got the eyeful.
But after reading the Pygmalion story in Book 10, I think Rowlandson's image is rather accurate of what Ovid described. Rowlandson was just a bit more explicit.
Initially Venus turned the Propoetides into prostitutes because they refused to recognize her as a goddess. After they "could blush no more", she turned them into statues. Then Pygmalion, disgusted with the prostitutes, refused to marry but instead carved a statue of a girl out of ivory with which he fell in love. At the festival of Venus he asked Venus to give him a wife like his statue and when he got home he found the statue was alive.
So this circle of metamorphoses completed itself.
I am reading (listening to) Book 10 now. Pygmalion just kissed the statue and I stopped the iPhone for a coffee break. I think I should go back to it as the above post shows that it is going to get more 'interesting' if Rowlandson's painting is anything to go by!!!
I have changed my avatar in anticipation of Galatea's tale in Bk XIII.
I remember I read a book by Christoph Ransmayr back in 1998, it was called The Last World. I was much impressed by the magic realism in this story where a character is shown searching for 'Naso' in a landscape populated with characters from Metamorphoses. Very, very clever book. Do read it if you find it somewhere.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
A bit of hyperbole on my part, I guess, lol. I've just finished Book II, and on reviewing the stories I'd read, there were so many about his atrocities-but can we compare? Humans were just playthings to them.
According to Wikipedia, the Hera entry, her children with Zeus were Ares, Hebe, Eris, and Eileithyia. I looked at the entry for Juno but it didn't seem to have anything about her children.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its' own reason for existing." ~ Albert Einstein
"Remember, no matter where you go, there you are." Buckaroo Bonzai "Some people say I done alright for a girl." Melanie Safka
Pygmalion has always troubled me since it seems to obvious a proof of art as objectifying subject, as well as male obsession with wanting to construct a partner dominated by their own obsessions. The dismissal of women as unworthy seems troubling in a modern context. I am away from my computer and books right now, but if we are going to discuss this, I would raise the question as to what does this episode signify about art and by extension, ideals and idolatry.
I agree. For the most part these Gods are all awful. So I guess I'm on the look out for a God (or Goddess) that I sort of like.
After skipping ahead and reading about Venus and Pygmalion, I'm tempted to like Venus although she does seem a little demanding. I wonder why the Propoetides got her so angry? And why would they not acknowledge her as a Goddess?
Pygmalion has always troubled me since it seems to obvious a proof of art as objectifying subject, as well as male obsession with wanting to construct a partner dominated by their own obsessions. The dismissal of women as unworthy seems troubling in a modern context. I am away from my computer and books right now, but if we are going to discuss this, I would raise the question as to what does this episode signify about art and by extension, ideals and idolatry.
JBI... no need to prove your PC credentials. We all know you learned your Feminist criticism well. Now perhaps you might try to think for yourself. Tell me how art can possibly avoid "objectifying" any subject matter. Especially in visual art, the artist responds to the subject... the nude, the landscape, the pear on the table... in abstract visual terms: relationships of forms, values, line, color, proportions, etc... The artist looks and responds to what he or she sees. Many artists focus obsessively upon a single subject matter (landscape, nudes, still life, etc...). This is as true of female artists as it is of male artists. Certainly, there are artists who are capable of suggesting the unique individual. Rembrandt immediately comes to mind. But just as rich character development is not common or necessary to all good writing, so it is with visual art. Sometimes the focus is primarily upon the visual splendor. Obviously, any artist is aware of the fact that certain subjects are more "loaded" than others... that they cannot help but suggest certain emotional responses. Half a decade ago, Sir Kenneth Clark, as conservative a critic as he was, argued against artistic Puritanism, and declared that there was no way to avoid the erotic content in the nude. Would you suggest that artist should deny biology and their desire? Is the subject inappropriate?
Old school Feminists art critics took the New Puritan stance that you seem to advocate, dismissing the nude as sexist or even misogynistic. Intriguingly, many Modernist art theorists (including Marinetti and Adolf Loos) sought to banish the female nude along with any other hints of the "feminine" (images of domesticity, motherhood, bourgeois lifestyle, decoration, color, etc...) because these images inspired strong emotional responses (love, desire, lust) as opposed to a rigorous intellectual response. In other words, such art inspired those aspects of the male mind that cannot be controlled by reason and as such they were to be feared. They undermined the illusion of male control through reason and rigorous thought. Contemporary Feminist art critics (such as Wendy Steiner) have taken a reverse stance, calling for a return to the female element in art. She, among others, recognized that art is intended as an expression of the artist's feeling, thoughts, and experiences. The notion that desire, lust, or simply the admiration for the beauty of the naked body (of either sex) is something that must be repressed and is somehow unworthy of art is absurd. Unfortunately, due to the increased training of artists in universities as opposed to art schools or ateliers, and the focus upon theory as opposed to time spent in the studio actually making art, we do find an endless array of university trained "artists" who lack both the formal and technical skills needed, as well as the ability to think for themselves... and to paint what they love and what they are passionate about as opposed to thinking how the schools taught them to think and making art about what the schools taught them was relevant.
Its not surprising that we get the near pornographic art of many artists today. Such is merely an iconoclastic response to the artificial limitations imposed on art by academia.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
meh, you misappropriate my response. My question was more toward the idea of art, and its purpose. Take Death in Venice, for example, or even Shakespeare's Sonnets, they all have the same idea. The real idea though, is Pygmalion is working from an imaginary ideal, rather than a realistic model, as well as a rejection of the real as inferior - to what extent could that be said of art, and what does that place art as?
I would argue it speaks a lot about Roman culture in general - Romans seem to be more idealistic than their Roman counterparts, but when applied to the text, and the culture of the text itself - namely, It is strange that the Gods do not recognize this as Hubris, or that they sanction it. By extension, iconography throughout the middle ages, as well as mythological and Religious work in the Renaissance also seem to follow a similar ideal of artist getting beyond the inferior reality of this world - Neoplatonic thought also delves deeply into this connections of the transcendent experience - my only problem is, in the end, the poem represents.
Last edited by JBI; 06-21-2011 at 07:32 PM.
Pygmalion is working from an imaginary ideal, rather than a realistic model, as well as a rejection of the real as inferior - to what extent could that be said of art, and what does that place art as?
This idealism is far more prevalent in earlier art. The Renaissance artists saw themselves as "creators"... as opposed to the later concept of art as a mirror held up to reality. Raphael, for example, stated: "In order to paint one "fair" one I should need to see several "fair" ones." Leonardo Da Vinci echoes him: "Be on the watch to take the best parts of many faces." The artist was to create an image of the ideal... the perfect world as it should be, not the world as it is. The Romantic, later, take quite a different stance as Byron exclaims:
I've seen more splendid women, ripe and real
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal.
With Romanticism, the emotional response to experience... to the real world... is the goal of art... not the creation of an ideal.
Oddly enough, Modernism swings back away from the "real". It is the abstraction... the formal invention created by the artist... not the subject matter that counts. A painting is, as one artist famously argued, just an organization of colors on a flat surface.
There's a telling bit of dialog involving Matisse:
Visitor: "That woman's arm is too long."
Matisse: "That is not a woman, sir, it's a painting."- Matisse
My favorite Modernist, Pierre Bonnard, never falls into the realm of the ideal. He always begins with a visual stimulus... the image etched on his brain of his mistress or his wife bathing. He may transform or transmute these... idealize them, if you will... but he always begins with the "real". But an artist like Picasso or Matisse may begin with concept and the images (whether they be of women or anything else) are essentially inventions... and a means to an end... a means to convey a given idea.
In other words... there is a clear difference between what Will Cotton is doing in this portrait:
in which the woman in not so much an individual human being... let alone a partner in the act of creation, but rather a means by which the artist might reach his intended end...
And this painting...
in which, for all the abstractions, the artist is responding to the very "real" woman who was sitting before him.
While I vastly prefer the Modigliani over the Cotton, this doesn't mean I question the value of art based upon the ideal... the artist's preconceived concept. Clearly, in a painting like this...
the nudes involved are a means to an end... not real, individual human beings. And yet this painting is far more iconic than the Modigliani.
There is also an obvious limitation in art rooted in the "real". If an artist might only paint a nude if "she/he" is a real individual whom he/she (the artist) knows, then the artist is quite limited to the rather mundane world of domestic existence. Where does that leave the heroic, fantastic, magical, unrealistic, supernatural, etc...?
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
In rereading the section about Pygmalion in search of Hubris, I think one might be able to find Hubris as the reason why Venus turned the Propoetides into statues. They didn't think they needed Venus enough to worship her as a goddess. That led to their downfall. That Pygmalion created a statue that was "more exquisite than a woman who was born could ever match" just added to the Propoetides punishment. I don't think there is anything more to it.
In reconsidering Rowlandson's image, it does look like there is a difference. In Ovid, Pygmalion is having sex with the statue when she wakes up. Pygmalion is on top. In Rowlandson's image, it looks like it is Pygmalion who is waking up under the girl.
I was walking under a mulberry tree where some of the fruit had ripened from white through pink to dark purple and was crushed underfoot on the cement. It reminded me of Pyramus and Thisbe (Book 4).
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