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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2018 1:30:02 GMT -8
Great literature can be a good way of gaining an insight into art. For instance, Rodin's monumental sculpture The Gates of Hell (1880-90) is a complex work that becomes more comprehensible when you realise the artist's source material was Dante's Divine Comedy. Similarly, it helps to know Ophelia (1851), a painting by Millais, was inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet. The same applies to the art world, an opaque place that is occasionally illuminated by a gifted writer such as Tom Wolfe. But it takes a wordsmith of quite exceptional talent to produce a book to help us understand the truly baffling vagaries of today's art market. Fortunately there is such a writer. His name is Roger Hargreaves, and the book in question is his 1972 miniature masterpiece Mr Topsy-Turvy. Soon, Artemisia was making her way as an artist in the roughhouse that was 17th Century Rome. She produced her first known work - Susanna and the Elders - when she was about 16. A year later, she was raped by an acquaintance of her father's called Agostino Tassi, the result of which was a trial that saw Tassi convicted, but only after Artemisia had endured torture to prove she was telling the truth. She left for Florence shortly afterwards. It was while in Florence she painted the National Gallery picture, in which she presents herself as the Christian martyr Saint Catherine, another woman who had endured torture at the hands of men. She faces us in a three-quarter pose with an inscrutable expression on her face. Her left hand rests on a broken wooden wheel (Catherine Wheel) inset with metal spikes, an implement that was intended to torture and kill her. Her right hand, which holds the martyr's palm, is held to her chest.  www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46626762# |
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