Tag Archives: Erwin Panofsky

bruegel: too busy for the cosmic rhythm

…The only concept of the nature of things that seems never to have occurred to Bruegel is our objective scientific one by which the cosmos becomes something physically explicable, and hence godless. As for Bruegel’s god, his religious affiliation can … Continue reading

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bruegel: cripple creek

At the popular level, Bruegel’s fantastic drolleries are taken at face value. A curious and delightful painter. At his true level, when these obvious charms are recognized as nothing but a pictorial skin, Bruegel is discoverable  as an extraordinarily complex … Continue reading

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bruegel: human foibles

…A sober philosophy of man’s place in nature… Bruegel’s recognition of human foibles never reduced him to bitterness, or at least never to any discernible in his group. From the mass of it we can deduce that he regarded misanthropy … Continue reading

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malraux: not stung to austere ecstasy

Andre Malraux and his Metamorphosis of the Gods. Maybe more not what he said, but how it was delivered…. …What made Andre Malraux’s La Metamorphose an especially haunting work is not originality in the usual sense. Some of Malraux’s seemingly … Continue reading

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malraux: venus as rival of the virgin

The end of feudalism, the waning of intense religious fervor,  and the beginning of the bourgeois values and cycles of consumerism changed everything. Andre Malraux and his Metamorphosis of the Gods. Its not hard to follow the slippery slope from … Continue reading

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berenson: such a deal

The whole thing was a scandal. Authenticating Old Master art, inflating the price, actig for the buyer and making commission as a seller. But there behavior probably reflected the same values and mannerisms of the wealthy industrial class they were … Continue reading

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haywain: pulling at straws of pessimism

The Haywain by Hieronymus Bosch is almost as complex as the Garden of Earthly Delights. It carries a similar message; that of desperate pessimism. Even in the darkest of the Christian books of the Bible Hell exists for the damned, … Continue reading

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flight of the earthly delights: path to the bonfire

Life in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s greatest painting, often called The Garden of Earthly Delights, is unencumbered by conscience, clothing, or cognizance of any higher goal than pleasure. There has been no more enigmatic painter than Bosch, with … Continue reading

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swallowing man and myth: presence of the green truth

The infiltration of Andelysian luxuriance into Roman severity marks nature’s triumph in Nicolas Poussin’s ultimate works of 1658-1664. As action had once been reduced to immobility, so now it is absorbed by nature’s serenity. Time is swallowed by space, history … Continue reading

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poussin: transposing the poets’s world

Just as it abstracts the figures in the foreground, Nicolas Poussin’s geometry opens up nature in the background. The narrow dramatic stage now gives way to a landscape so vast that, it appears it  would take more than a day … Continue reading

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