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Memorialising the sovereign: Use of allegory in the reign of Louis XIV

By on May 13, 2023 in Baroque art, History of ideas, Paragone | 0 comments

As we saw in a previous article, the prologue of Baroque French operas provided a suitable format for celebrating the sovereign and perpetuating its glory. The effectiveness of this form of power representation relied on visual spectacle to support the narrative of the king’s exploits. In the long term, however, as a performing art, opera’s potential to praise the king’s government and contribute to his subjects’ collective memory was limited compared with the visual arts, epic poetry, or architecture.  All arts were thus evaluated in terms of their ability to glorify the king and generate an enduring image of his acts of government. In practice, the aim was to reconcile two difficult-to-harmonise requirements. On the one hand, the pretension of artists and thinkers close to the king was to exalt the dimension of his politico-military enterprises, for which no...

Staging of the Paragone debate within a French Baroque opera.

By on Mar 18, 2023 in History of ideas, Music, Painting, Paragone, Poetry | 2 comments

At the end of the XVIth century, a group of Florentine writers and musicians gathered under the auspices of Count Bardi to recover the ancient splendour of classical Greek drama. They specifically sought to integrate verse into a new musical style based on recitative, combining speech and song into musical cadences. Bardi and his friends may not have been fully aware of it, but they were inventing opera. Exactly one century later, another son of Florence would ironically be called upon to lay the foundations of quintessentially French opera. It was the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, born in 1632 as Giovanni Battista Lulli, who, in collaboration with the playwright Philippe Quinault, created the template for all subsequent tragédies lyriques, as this form of musical theatre was named, until the arrival of Jean Philippe Rameau in 1733. The new musical genre born with the opera Cadmus et...

The parallel between the arts & the birth of art criticism

By on Jun 19, 2021 in History of ideas, Mimesis, Painting, Paragone, Philosophy, Poetry | 0 comments

E spesso ne la fronte il cor si legge. Petrarca   In our previous article, we introduced the Paragone, also known as the parallel between the arts, by comparing painting and sculpture in the Renaissance. This essay will illuminate the rich critical tradition that explored the relationship between literature and the visual arts and revisit some of their Renaissance referents.  Through the Paragone controversy, intellectuals sought to establish common links between the various arts and crafts by focusing on their specific means and purposes. In doing so, thinkers would often refer to the precept ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”), first coined by Horatio to exemplify the similarities between poetry and painting but later used in academic circles to explore the existence of equivalent connections between the other arts. This claim suggested that in all...

The Paragone debate – Painting and Sculpture in the Renaissance

By on Mar 9, 2021 in History of ideas, Painting, Philosophy, Sculpture | 0 comments

«Ut pictura poesis: erit si proprius stes Te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes»   Let the poem be like a picture: there are those who captivate you more when you are closer and those who captivate you when you are further away. Horace, Ars Poetica   In the Renaissance, the comparison of arts -known as the so-called Paragone- constituted an important tool for socio-cultural valorisation and inclusion within the liberal disciplines (Fig. 1), which included grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy (the quadrivium). The most important of these comparisons, known as ut pictura poesis, first appeared in Horace’s Ars Poetica and aimed at analysing which art was more suitable for imitating nature: painting or poetry. Scholars would use Horace’s argument to establish a hierarchy among artistic disciplines. In doing...

The myth of Prometheus and the origin of human creativity

By on Aug 1, 2020 in Philosophy | 0 comments

« J’entrai dans un atelier où je vis des ouvriers qui modelaient en glaise un animal énorme de la forme d’un lama, mais qui paraissait devoir être muni de grandes ailes. Ce monstre était comme traversé d’un jet de feu qui l’animait peu à peu, de sorte qu’il se tordait, pénétré par mille filets pourprés, formant les veines et les artères et fécondant pour ainsi dire l’inerte matière, qui se revêtait d’une végétation instantanée d’appendices fibreux d’ailerons et de touffes laineuses. Je m’arrêtai à contempler ce chef-d’œuvre, où l’on semblait avoir surpris les secrets de la création divine. “C’est que nous avons ici, me dit-on, le feu primitif qui anima les premiers êtres… Jadis il s’élançait jusqu’à la surface de la terre, mais les sources se sont taries.» (1) Gérard de Nerval, Aurelia   In Hesiod’s Theogony, we learn of the great schism between man and the gods, which has...

A neurocentric world?

By on May 6, 2018 in science communication | 0 comments

Neuro happiness & neuro diets Steven Pinker once prophesied that there would never be a “Decade of the pancreas”. As the silent witness of bile’s passage, one of the four humours in medieval times, its heyday had probably passed long ago. By then, a new patronage was furtively on the way. When the US Congress launched the “Decade of the Brain” initiative, neuroscience stormed the marquees and stole the show in the 1990s. Why was brain research on the spotlight? Fast-paced research combined with an increasing awareness of how devastating and costly brain diseases are for our society.  As the organ of emotion, perception, and memory, the brain’s impairment has immediate and palpable consequences on our life quality. Two decades later, the expansion of neurobiology is sending unexpected ripples into dietary recommendations and self-help books. Neuro-centric explanations might come...

Notes on Alberto Giacometti

By on Jan 28, 2018 in Sculpture | 0 comments

…It was on the second day in the month of Adar in the year 5340 of Creation (A.D. 1580) that the momentous event took place. At four in the morning, the three made their way out of the city to the river Moldau. There, on the clay bank of the river, they moulded the figure of a man three ells in length. They fashioned for him, hands and feet and a head, and drew his features in clear human relief…                                                                                                             The Golem of Prague, Rabbi Yehuda Loew The slender silhouettes created by Alberto Giacometti are a compelling recreation of a primitive cosmogony and perhaps an interrogation of our place within its realms. The totemic figures seem to emanate from the seminal magma as if lava outpourings had instantly chilled at the contact with air. These golems are thus trapped in various...

Bosch on LSD

By on Jun 25, 2017 in Painting | 0 comments

Hofmann’s bad trip   Inadvertent of its consequences, Albert Hofmann, a chemist working for the Sandoz Laboratories (now Novartis), meticulously wrote these lines in his journal: 4/19/43 16:20: 0.5 cc of 1/2 pro mil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = 0.25 mg tartrate. Taken diluted with about ten cc water. Tasteless. 17:00: Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh. Supplement of 4/21: Home by bicycle. From 18:00- ca.20:00 most severe crisis. (See special report) Here the notes on his laboratory book abruptly stop. The detached tone of his writing, so typical in scientific reports where the first person is usually self-effaced, would soon morph into prophetic. His inner self would also dissolve in the process, but this time not in the wake of fighting vanity or pursuing objectivity. He had been able to write...