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In Search of Form: The Sculpture of Henry Moore

Dec 11, 2024 / terry / No comments

Henry Moore (1898-1986), one of the greatest sculptors of the 20^th Century, created striking three-dimensional forms using many different techniques – carving, casting, modelling – and many different materials – stone, bronze, iron, wood, concrete, polystyrene. In the words of Herbert Read (1965, p 259)

He is a maker of images – or, as I prefer to call them because they have material existence – of icons, and he is impelled to make these icons by his sense of the forms that are vital to the life of mankind.

Each of Moore’s works was derived from nature, but Moore simplified and abstracted the experience to provide an emotional understanding rather than a sensory representation This essay comments on the nature of form and considers some of Moore’s works.

Category: Art, Painting, Philosophy, Photography, Sculpture / Tags: Adel Rock, Allegoryof the Cave, Aristotle, Art Gallery of Ontario, Barbara Hepworth, Four Causes, Geoffrey Farmer, Oval with Points, Plato, Reclining Figures, Standing Figure: Knife Edge, Theory of Forms

The Moissac Portal: Masterpiece of Romanesque Sculpture

Nov 27, 2024 / terry / No comments

In the 9^th and 10^th Centuries CE, Europe began to awaken from the has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Imposing churches were erected and many of these were decorated with sculptures. This new style of art and architecture, thought to be derived from that of the Roman Empire, has been called “Romanesque.” The sculpture from this time is full of a tremendous vitality and marked by a rich imagination. Some of the most impressive examples adorn the portal of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre in Moissac in southwestern France.

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Language, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Abbaye Saint Pierre de Moissac, Ansquitil, Apocalypse, Apostle Paul, Bosom of Abraham, Christ in Majesty, Dives and Lazarus, Durand de Bredon, Flight to Egypt, Gospels, Jeremiah, John of Patmos, Moissac, Monastery, Revelation, Romanesque, Twenty-four Elders, Tympanum

History, Myth and Fiction

Jan 1, 2024 / terry / 2 comments

This post describes some of the events that occurred in Ronda, a town in southern Spain, during the summer of 1936. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Anarchists quickly took control of the town, and murdered many supporters of the Nationalist cause. Two months later, advancing Nationalist forces captured Ronda, and drove most of its people from their homes. Those that refused to leave suffered bloody reprisals. These events quickly became mythic rather than historic. In one story, the Anarchists had murdered the town’s Falangists by having them beaten to death in the town’s plaza and then thrown into the canyon that cuts through the center of the town. Ernest Hemingway recounted this version in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, most historians now agree that this never happened.

Category: Architecture, Ethics, Film, History, Photography, Poetry, Politics, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Ernest Hemingway, Falangists, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hugh Thomas, John Donne, Nationalists, Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Republican, Ronda, Second Spanish Republic, Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Holocaust

Madness and Poetry

Dec 13, 2023 / terry / No comments

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was one of the most important American poets of the mid-20^th-Century. He was famous both for his contribution to poetry and for his recurrent attacks of mania. This post reviews his life, comments on some of his poems, and considers the relations between creativity and mood disorders. Madness sometimes goes hand-in-hand with poetry:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
(Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V, 1, 5-9)

Category: Art, Photography, Poetry, Psychiatry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Bipolar Disease, Conscientious Objector, Lubeck, Manic-Depressive Psychosis, March on the Pentagon, Nantucket, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Strategic Bombing, World War II

Zeno of Elea

Aug 12, 2023 / terry / No comments

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who lived in the 5^th Century BCE. He described a set of paradoxes to prove that space and time are continuous and cannot be divided into discrete parts. The most famous of these are the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, which purportedly shows that Achilles could never catch up with the much slower Tortoise, and the Paradox of the Arrow, which shows that an arrow in flight is always stationary.

Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Sculpture / Tags: Algebra, Archilles and the Tortoise, Arrow Paradox, Arthur Eddington, Calculus, Entropy, Gravity, Infinite Series, Le Cimetiere Marin, Ludwig Boltzmann, Paul Valery, Rudolf Clausius, Time and Space, Velia, Zeno of Elea

Apostola Apostolorum

Dec 9, 2022 / terry / 3 comments

Apostola apostolorum

In the gospels of the Christian New Testament, Mary Magdalene was the first person to recognize the risen Christ. He told her to tell the disciples the news of his resurrection, thus honoring her as the “apostle to the apostles.” In the Gnostic Gospels she appears as a visionary disciple of Jesus. In the centuries after her life, her story was conflated with that of the sinful woman who anointed the feet of Jesus at a feast in the house of Simon, and Mary thus became a model of repentance. This posting discusses these and other ways in which we conceive of Mary Magdalene.

Category: Art, Painting, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Da Vinci Code, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fra Angelico, Gnostic Gopels, Holy Grail, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary Magdalene, Noli me tangere, Titian

The Divine Feminine

Aug 15, 2022 / terry / No comments

All the major religions of the present world are androcentric in nature and misogynistic in practice. The following are some typical injunctions in the Christian scriptures:

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.
And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church. (I Corinthians 14: 34-35)

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. (1 Timothy 2: 11-12)

These rulings are in spite of (or perhaps because of) women being more attentive to religious teachings, and participating more often in religious services than men (Pew Research Foundation, 2016). The two passages nevertheless serve a purpose – they provide clear evidence that the New Testament does not always represent the word of God.

The androcentricity of organized religion differs completely from prehistoric religious beliefs, wherein God was more likely female than male (Stone, 1978). Over recent centuries, however, female aspects of the godhead have become more and more recognized. This posting briefly considers some of the manifestations of the divine feminine, and mentions what might be involved in a feminist theology.

Category: Art, Literature, Music, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Buddhism, Christianity, Eternal Feminine, Feminist Theology, Goethe's Faust, Gounod, Hinduism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Mahler, Primordial Mother, Sophia, Theosophy, Venus Figurines, Virgin Mary, Wisdom

Searching for the Dao

Jul 1, 2022 / terry / No comments

This post presents some ideas about the Dào (“Way”) as described in the Dàodéjīng (“Book of the Way and its Virtue”), that legend claims was composed by Lǎozī in the 5^th Century BCE. The Dào cannot be explained in words. But that has never stopped anyone from writing about it.

Category: Art, History, Language, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Ancient China, Chinese Calligraphy, Chinese Painting, Daodejing, Daoism, Lao Tzu, Laozi, Ni Zan, Tao Te Ching, virtue

Marcus Aurelius

Apr 26, 2022 / terry / No comments

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) is one of the most famous of the Roman Emperors. Some of his renown is related to the many representations of the Emperor that have persisted to the present day: the Aurelian Column documenting the Marcomannic Wars he waged on the Northern frontiers of the Empire; the bas-reliefs that were initially mounted on a triumphal arch in Rome, and later preserved when the arch was destroyed; and the equestrian statue that, from the Renaissance, was displayed in Rome’s Piazza de Campidoglio on a pedestal designed by Michelangelo. Most of Marcus’ fame, however, derives from the book that he wrote during the many years when he campaigned against the Germanic Tribes who threatened to cross the Danube and invade the Empire. This book, which has come to be known as the Meditations, presents a philosophy that derives from Greek Stoicism: to live each day as if it were one’s last, to act in accord with nature, not to become upset by whatever happens, and to help others as best one can.

Category: Art, Ethics, History, Literature, Philosophy, Sculpture / Tags: Antonine Plague, Aurelian Column, Commodus, Equestrian statue, logos, Marcomannic Wars, Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Pius Antoninus, Roman Empire, Stoicism, Zeno

Michelangelo: The Late Pietàs

Mar 4, 2022 / terry / 3 comments

Toward the end of his life, Michelangelo (1475-1564) attempted to sculpt a marble representation of the Pietà – the moment when Christ’s lifeless body is taken from the cross and held by his mother. In this endeavour he was returning to the subject of the sculpture that first brought him fame – the Rome Pietà of 1499. The ageing sculptor was unable to complete his task. One of his efforts – the Florentine Pietà of – he broke into pieces in 1555. A second attempt – the Rondanini Pietà – was still unfinished when he died in 1564. Both sculptures have an intense emotional power.

Category: Art, Photography, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Deposition, Entombment, Florentine Pieta, Michelangelo, Non Finito, Poetry, Rondanini Pieta

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