Peter Reynaers’ Post

Of course, Romantic landscape painters didn't depict only Middle Ages Gothic-style or ancient Greco-Roman ruins, especially the latter according to a Neoclassical fashion. Sometimes, they were attracted also by more exotic ones. For instance, at https://lnkd.in/dkgyBbWN we may have seen how the American Hudson River School artist Robert S. Duncanson depicted some remains of old Maya temples, then recently rediscovered in the Yucátan, Mexico. Here, let's consider the Italian-Swiss and tireless traveller Carlo Bossoli. Before travelling, he grew up at Odessa, in the Ukraine on the Black Sea, where his parents had emigrated from Lugano. No wonder, one of his colour print collections is titled «The Beautiful Scenery and Chief Places of Interest Throughout the Crimea, from Paintings by Carlo Bossoli» (London: Day & Son, 1854 and 1856). For a long time, those were contested lands of conquest. Not seldom, the various dominations left more or less imposing ruins. Below, from left to right and top to bottom, four relevant examples: “Remains of Ancient Chersonessos, near Sevastopol”, “Remains of the Genoese Forts of Ciufat-Kale”, “The Ruins of Chersonesus, Crimea”, “Ruins of the Genoese Fortress in Sudak.” The Chersonese – today Kherson, Ukraine – was a Greek colony, founded in the 6th century BCE, on the south-western coast of the Crimean peninsula. Part of the Russian Empire by the 19th cent., the region retained a Tatar or Turkish population, having been under Ottoman rule from the 15th to the 18th centuries. As to the medieval fortress in Sudak, it was part of the Genoese colonies in Crimea, in particular Caffa, modern Feodosia or Theodosia.

Especially Romantic landscape painters and illustrators strove to revitalize the ruins of Grecian temples in southern Italy, which they willingly depicted, to show how life goes on anyway by restoring a natural context, in these cases mostly pastoral or even idyllic. Actually, historical progress or regress don't seem to be problems for nature. Its evolution times are so long, as to appear immutable, at most cyclical and repetitive rhythms. What, by the way, already Greek philosophers intuited, distinguishing between historical and natural time, “chronos” and “aiòn.” Likely, this is what the extraordinary sequence of views below, oils on canvas by Danish Constantin Hansen, suggests us. From left to right, and top to bottom: “The Temple of Athena in Paestum” (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; 1838); “Shepherd Boy in the Temple, Paestum” (National Museum of Art, Oslo; 1854); “The Temple of Athena in Paestum”, once again (Ribe Kunstmuseum, Denmark; 1841); “The Temple of Ceres at Paestum” (Bruun Rasmussen auction, 2016, Copenhagen; 1875). Evidently, the “Temple of Athena” and that of “Ceres” are the same; the double denomination is due to archaeological circumstances. Reliably, the standing shepherd boy portrayed more than once at the centre of the scene is none other than a modern re-edition of the ever-young divine Aiòn, already allegorically personified as such by the ancient Heraclitus in one of his poetic fragments and by Hellenistic and Roman fresco painters or mosaicists. Later, these depictions didn't fail to influence the Christological figure of the Good Shepherd, and Hansen adds a mythical memory of the musician Orpheus too, at least in the last work shown here.

This lamassu was recently uncovered last year in Iraq in the ancient city known as Dur-Sharrukin (near present-day Khorsabad) in northern Iraq. It once guarded the palace of King Sargon II, whose rule began in 722 BCE. His 200-room palace was an expression of kingly dominance, however the site fell out of use when he died prematurely and his heir moved the capitol of the empire to Nineveh. In the 19th century, the lamassu were known to French archeologists on expeditions, but they were last excavated in 1992 by Iraqi scholars. After that, the lamassu were reburied for their own protection. The 2,700-year-old sculpture is symbolic of a time when the Assyrian empire dominated the region, including where the statue lies in modern day Iraq. It depicts a lamassu, which is a mythical guardian figure that possesses a human head on a bull or lion body. Some lamassu even feature a strange five-footed design, which gives the impression of standing from the front and striding from the side. In the past, pairs of these figures would guard monumental gates and doors leading into Assyrian palaces. The ancient Mesopotamian kings showed their power, both temporal and divine, by their massive building endeavors. However, many well-known examples of these statues are now in the hands of Western museums. Credits: My Modern Met

At https://lnkd.in/dJ8qu7xq, we may have enjoyed some pictorial or sculptural “Annunciations” with cat... Indeed, domestic cats have often been present in art history, since when ancient Egyptians even considered them sacred. Below, a few examples which can be significant. The top left image is a detail of an ancient Roman, Hellenistic and Pompeian mosaic, in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples: a cat attacking a chanterelle (before 79 CE). Indeed, cats became common in Rome quite late, but the Romans considered them proud and independent animals, so much so as to depict one of them at the feet of the statues of the goddess Libertas/Liberty. Far lesser refined, the detail of a floor mosaic in the medieval Romanesque Cathedral of Otranto, southern Italy, here in the bottom left image. Strangely, this fabulous cat wears a pair of boots, like the character of a popular folklore and later literary fairy-tale. On the right, once again the details of two Renaissance and Mannerist Annunciation paintings. Upper one, from an oil on canvas by the Italian Lorenzo Lotto (Recanati Civic Museum, central Italy; ca. 1534). Last but not least, from an oil on canvas attributed to the Italian Alessandro Vitali (National Gallery of the Marche, Urbino, central Italy; ca. 1603). In the former case, the kitten runs away terrified by the sudden appearance of an announcing angel, within the well-known evangelical scene. In the latter, the feline – likely, a she-cat – returns to be realistic, or rather becomes early modern. It's gazing at us, and the old scissors depicted nearby seem to remind how there is a deep gap between nature and culture. As well, between imagination and reality, which we are usefully but nostalgically driven to overcome. This is a disenchanted cost of modernity, from which unfortunately there is no turning back, without any risk of a general and contextual regression.