AncienTrails

The Louvre Show Toured

Samhain                            Waning Dark Moon

Bullets fly from sea to shining sea, at  Ft. Hood, the largest military installation in the U.S., and Orlando, capitol of fantasy kingdoms and faux life of all kinds, single shooters rampaging, shooting people at random.  It makes me wonder what the incidence of similar acts is in China and India.  They have populations large enough to generate statistically infrequent acts.  Are we just nuts or are others more like us than gets reported?

The temperature and humidity controlled rooms at the MIA opened today and admitted my group of home schoolers from the Buffalo area.  It was my first tour of the Louvre exhibition, starting at the giant single pour of Barye’s Lion and Serpent, then walking a few feet to Boucher’s overly rich confection, Rinaldo and Armida.  The Lion and Serpent was “intense, terrifying, big, detailed, larger than life.”  We all marveled at the skill necessary to craft and then execute the creation in bronze of such a large and complex work.  At Boucher I borrowed David Fortney’s line that this was Boucher’s resume for the French Academy.  You want leopard skin?  I can do that.  Curving architecture in perspective?  I can do that.  Flesh tones?  Check.  Water?  Yep.  Drapery.  See, right here.

When we learned connoisseurship, our group hit on the delicacy of the fabric, the ability to see a body through the folds and the taut fabric on the left knee to identify the better of the two Aphrodites.  At Eros we examined the torso and head found in the 18th century, noted its re-restoration and thought about the sculpture’s changing fate over the last four centuries.  We looked at the Vermeer and the de La Tour, both fine works by artists who mastered their idiosyncratic approaches.

In the final gallery we only ended up with time for two pieces, the Ill-Humored man by Messerschmidt and Pandemonium by John Martin.  The group scrunched their faces and said they felt intense.  One young girl thought the face looked exaggerated.  Others thought he might have a sinus headache.  Messerschmidt’s struggle with the spirit of proportion and the strange, but compelling manner in which he chose to fight it, makes for authentic and strangely modern art; art made in fact at the end of the 18th century.

At Pandemonium we saw the perspective as key with Satan’s legions rising from the molten fire tiny against the great bulk of the palace for all demons.   John Martin made a living out of the fantastic and the terrifying, the sublime in Edmund Burke’s formulation.  Along the way he illustrated an edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  The scene from Paradise Lost he paints on this large canvas is the time after Satan and his followers have lost their battle in heaven, fallen into the molten underground, and now consider whether to regroup and attack again the battlements of heaven.