While the painting is currently identified in the Museum as “The Birth of Venus” (based on the identification by the man who was the spy), the argument is that it is actually the marriage of Poseidon (left) and Amphitrite (center). And the symbolic significance of depicting this:
“The marriage and journey of Neptune and Amphitrite across the sea,” writes art historian Troy Thomas, “symbolize the transition from this life to the next.” Poussin painted a celebration of marriage that also expresses, he continues, the “fragility of human existence and, with death, immortality and eternal joy.”
I once told an art historian friend of mine that Van Gogh was my favorite and she told me I was very brave. To go with this, I provide a link to Louis McNeice’s poem Star-Gazer (it is still in copyright, so I think pasting it in would be a no-no).
New Frescoes have been unearthed in Pompeii that are gorgeous and well-preserved. They depict myths centering around the Trojan War. You can read about them in the NYTimes and The Guardian (each with different photos. I liked this observation shared in The Guardian:
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, said the mythological figures had the explicit function of entertaining guests and providing talking points during feasts.
“The mythological couples provided ideas for conversations about the past, and life, only seemingly of a merely romantic nature,” he said. “In reality, they refer to the relationship between the individual and fate: Cassandra who can see the future but no one believes her, Apollo who sides with the Trojans against the Greek invaders, but being a god, cannot ensure victory, Helen and Paris who, despite their politically incorrect love affair, are the cause of the war, or perhaps merely a pretext.”
He added: “People would meet to dine after sunset; the flickering light of the lamps had the effect of making the images appear to move, especially after a few glasses of good Campanian wine.”
I was grading a bunch of quizzes on Ovid’s telling of the Icarus and Daedalus myth. One line that came up often in the discussion portion was puer Icarus… ignarus sua se tractare pericla “The boy Icarus, naively handling his own doom…” Just as I finished, “Superman” by Five for Fighting came on:
The opening lyrics just resonated with Icarus:
I can’t stand to fly I’m not that naive
I could see the spirit of Icarus singing this lament. As the song went on, the singer declares
I wish that I could cry Fall upon my knees Find a way to lie ‘Bout a home I’ll never see
Poor Icarus (and his father) were in exile, trying to escape back home when they tried their luck to the fatal (to Icarus) wings. Icarus had, like Superman, been too young to remember his homeland and would never get to return to it. The lament fits Icarus well.
I, of course, can’t leave Icarus without pointing out Bruegel’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus based on Ovid’s account. See if you have spot Icarus.
You can just see his legs poking out of the water below the ship in the bottom right corner. In Ovid, all the figures in this painting were entranced by Icarus’ flight and fall, wondering if he were a god (but of course, he’s “only a man in a silly” pair of wax-adhered wings). In Bruegel, they couldn’t care less. As W.H. Auden captured it in Musee des Beaux Arts:
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude did amazing art installations (or as Wikipedia puts it, large-scale site-specific environmental installations). I took the photo below at their Gates installation in Central Park. I thought a dreary month (and February always seems dreary) deserved a bit of bright color.
I used to work with a glass archaeologist. I remember when I first saw some pieces of Roman glass. I was blown away (so to speak) by the iridescence of their surfaces.
I was more than a little disappointed to learn that the iridescence was not intentional nor an effect created by Roman artisanship. Instead, it’s the result of corrosion. But a recent study and article makes me realize how cool that corrosive effect is. As the article says,
Nature is the ultimate nanofabricator.
The study examines a fragment nick-named the “wow glass” (not pictured here).
As the article explains, colors in this (and other Roman glass and some organic occurrences such as butterfly-wings and beetle-shells)
don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured.
And this has implications for materials science and practical applications. The whole article over at Ars Technica is a fascinating read that I’d highly recommend.
Whether it’s folks who find themselves in a bit of a misunderstanding or someone engaged in something more intentionally nefarious, why don’t people learn that the cover up is usually worse than the original mistake or crime? Think of Martha Stewart and the SEC. Or Trump and the National Archives. And now the Cleveland Museum of Art. They’ve had a beautiful (albeit headless) Roman bronze statue since the 1980’s which has now been seized as part of a criminal investigation into looted and smuggled antiquities. Perhaps the Cleveland Museum were unwitting participants in this. Perhaps it is understandable that they dismissed Turkey’s claims about the statue as Turkey couldn’t provide evidence. However, this part of the NYTimes article (link will get you past the paywall for the next 30 days) caught my eye.
Turkey’s claim on the statue hinged in part on persuading investigators that the statue in fact depicted Marcus Aurelius, because the stone plinth where they say it had stood is inscribed with that emperor’s name.
The Cleveland museum’s website had until recently described the statue as “The Emperor as Philosopher, probably Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161-180),” adding that the item had originated from “Turkey, Bubon(?) (in Lycia), Roman, late 2nd Century.” They also wrote in an accompanying description that the statue “likely represents Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor known for his philhellenism and Stoic writings.” (Aurelius wrote “Meditations,” a classic work on Stoic philosophy.)
But several weeks ago, the museum removed the earlier references to Turkey and Aurelius and changed the website to read: “Draped Male Figure, c. 150 BCE-200 CE,” adding, “Roman or possibly Greek Hellenistic.” It also altered the language of its accompanying description to read “without a head, inscription, or other attributes, the identity of the figure represented remains unknown.”
One of my favorite receptions of The Odyssey is Romare Bearden’s collage series. If you are unfamiliar with Bearden, he was a mid-20th century African-American artist. He had played around with The Iliad earlier in print form (late 1940’s-early 1950’s). In his Odyssey series, he not only draws in Homer, but also the influences of Matisse and other artists such as Robert S. Duncan (a 19th cent. African-American landscape painter) and his Land of the Lotus Eaters. Below are two great videos on this series from a Smithsonian touring exhibition of them.
Romare Bearden Black Odyssey (15 min.)
Wallach Art Gallery Visit with Robert O’Meally and Diedra Harris-Kelley
Also very worth a note is the anthology of poetry inspired by Bearden’s Odyssey series.
Ramblings 
