Tag Archives: Peter Paul Rubens

inflation: just sequester it

…The worst possible consequence of inflation has always been its corrosion of political institutions. Every monarchy in the sixteenth century except the English went bankrupt. War, grandiose ambitions, and civil and religious strife played their part, and acquired extra force … Continue reading

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soul of spanish painting: truth comes first

Spanish painting. All the qualities are found in one form or another: the extravagance, the earthiness, the harshness, the illusion and disillusion, the gay and grotesque. The themes are God and Man, nature getting a bare look in. And of … Continue reading

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bruegel: sober philosophy

In a more extreme sense than most great painters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder exists at two levels. At the popular one, his fantastic drolleries and his pictures of rollicking peasants are taken at face value and bought as popular commodity … Continue reading

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bruegel: keeping identity with nature

For Pieter Bruegel the Elder, man is faulty, he is potentially noble, and that his existence is legitimized by his position as an integral but not central unit of the cosmos- although not within such arbitrarily neat compartments. Rejecting the … Continue reading

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young darwin: denial of the fittest

…Darwin himself was a lover of nature, a collector and sportsman, before he was a man of science. He grew up with the tastes of an English provincial gentleman at a time whn hunting, shooting, and the breeding of horses … Continue reading

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purgatory joan : rehab for the maid in heaven

Joan of Arc had a string of minor successes culminating in a marvelous victory at Patay, where the French allegedly lost three men to 3,000 for the English. This seemingly miraculous event, as well as the liberation of Orleans, was … Continue reading

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poor “cohort”

“Cohort” means a body of soldiers: a battalion or a regiment, something like that. A pure Latin word, it has been in English for hundreds of years. In Milton’s Paradise Lost God sends the archangel Michael down to expel Adam … Continue reading

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houses of the holies: global idol

Idol worship; its always been the bane of monotheism and the source of a persistent if seemingly losing conflict. The issue always arises, or placed at the cross-hairs, particularly this year with the movement for a moment of silence for … Continue reading

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heretics and art: unorthodox conceptions

We seem to be living in the age of the heretic. The orthodox Church of heresy.Is the new heresy to accept that there are many rules? Is it a heresy to swim with the tide? Are those “rebels” really actually … Continue reading

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stubborn affiliations

The nude’s stubborn affiliation with tradition can create embarrassing situations at a time when art is stubbornly anti-traditional. Of course, some of it depends on what you mean by tradition. Until modern art kicked tradition in the jewels, you could … Continue reading

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