(via caravaggista)
One of my all time favorite Victorian Fancy Dress images.
Mrs Arthur Paget,
later Lady Paget
(d 1919)
née Mary (Minnie) Stevensas Cleopatra
For the Ball, Mrs Paget - as one of the three Cleopatras present - commissioned one of the most spectacular and certainly the most expensive costumes from Worth of Paris at a reputed cost of over $6,000. The train is of black crêpe de chine, embroidered with gold scarabs. The bodice, encrusted with gold and diamonds, is held up on the shoulders with straps of large emeralds and diamonds. The square headdress is made of cloth of gold with striped black and gold sphinx-like side pieces studded with diamonds, and encrusted with diamonds.
Crowning her is an ibis headdress, with outstretched wings of diamonds and sapphires. The remainder of the headdress is of uncut rubies and emeralds, all real stones from her own immense collection, surmounted by the jewelled crown of Egypt. She wears round her neck row upon row of necklaces of various gems, reaching to the waist, and a jewelled hem-length girdle. A small diamond asp nestling on her right shoulder give a hint of Cleopatra’s doom. The small Ottoman wedding coins attached to her wrist- and arm-bands are an anachronism.
With such riches, her closeness to the Prince of Wales and her extravagant literary salons, Mrs Paget had aroused the resentment of some other society ladies. However when she entered the Ball followed by a “negro servant” holding a fan of ostrich feathers over her head, other guests “gasped with wonder and astonishment.”
This image was made at the Ball, but not used in the Album which includes a portrait in costume by the photographer J Thomson of Grosvenor Street which captures Mrs Paget’s delicate waist more clearly as well showing to better effect the gold scarab motif on her train.
This is so stunning! And timely — we were discussing the late nineteenth-century tradition of costumed portraiture in my Orientalism seminar just yesterday. :)
Jonathan Jones on why this new Van Gogh book is not important. And a reminder that if you think theories like these "shatter art history," then you don't know what art history does.
…[T]he truly misleading thing here is the idea that it makes much difference to how we see Van Gogh. I am not disputing the fascination of his biography, but it is much, much more than a dramatic series of violent incidents.
Amen. I’ve been hearing a lot about this story over the last few days and struggling to put my reaction into words (well, words more eloquent than “so what?”), but I think Jones has summed it up pretty succinctly.
“So once again I am obliged to speak to you about yourself. I must do my best to demonstrate to you your own value. What you ask for is truly stupid. People are making fun of you; pleasantries set you on edge; no one does you justice, etc., etc. Do you think you’re the first to be placed in this position? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? And did people make fun of them? They did not die of it. And so as not to make you feel too proud of yourself, I shall add that these men were exemplary, each in his own genre, and in a world which was very rich, while you, you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art.”
Baudelaire, consoling Édouard Manet after the reception of his Olympia in the 1865 Paris Salon. (Quoted in T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers.)
This made me LOL so hard. I’m going to have to remember to read this the next time I let criticism get me down. (Also hilarious: Baudelaire later talks about seeking an eyewitness account of Manet’s pictures. “I wanted the personal impression of Monsieur Chorner, at least insofar as a Belgian can be considered a person.”)
GÉRARD, François
Madame Récamier
1805
Oil on canvas, 255 x 145 cm
Musée Carnavalet, Paris
Had to reblog because I just turned in a paper on this painting last week! (It was a comparison with David’s portrait of Madame Récamier.) I’m always amused when stuff I’m studying pops up on Tumblr.
I think my favorite part is that the note in his hand seems to implicate R2-D2. (At least, it does when I squint…)
An art history map.
Hey, what do you know! This is sort of what my brain feels like after my first day as an Art History grad student.
“A good painter has two chief objects to paint — man and the intention of his soul; the former is easy, the latter hard, because he has to represent it by the attitudes and movements of the limbs.”
Leonardo da Vinci (via porziuncola)
Lux Nova
“Lux nova,” or new light, was a term coined by the Abbé Suger of Saint-Denis in the mid-12th century to describe the effect created by light filtering in through stained glass windows.
Stained glass wasn’t a new technology, but it was new to medieval churches. It had only recently been made possible by architectural innovations like the flying buttress, which offered support for the rising ceiling heights of later Gothic churches without necessitating the thick walls and tiny window openings of the Romanesque and early Gothic churches that came before.
For Suger, the windows weren’t just decorations. “Light was both subject and goal, the more light the greater. Medieval theories of light originated in a spiritualized world view and a philosophy whose sources were metaphysical in their history and their application.” (Source)
The photos above are from the Münster in Ulm, Germany, not from Saint-Denis, but I think they capture the full effect Suger was talking about. I’m not a religious person, but whenever I visit Gothic cathedrals in Europe, it’s easy to see why building these cathedrals moved so many people to religious fervor in the past.
