Magdalena 7 comments

26 Jun 2006 @ 14:33, by Nigella Wraye PreRaphaelite Dreams The paintings of this movement have always remained singularly unattractive to my appreciation until learning the following. One of the main inspirations behind the PreRaphaelite Movement was a newly acquired awareness amongst artists and intellectuals on the periphery of the Catholic Emancipation Act (of Parliament). This itself spurred by the famous Oxford Group dissenters from Protentantism in the wake of a new freedom wave declared on Catholicism in England. The artist considered to be the most sublime of all the Renaissance artists is Raphael, who unfortunately lived a relatively short life. It is now known that many of Raphaels paintings uses as subject matter, Mary Magdalene, often denoted by the colour orange, green and or red of the chemise, or dress on the bodice part of attire and drapery. Attending one such exhibition of paintings at the National Gallery a couple of years ago was a most heart lifting experience. The extent of beauty in each drawing, etching and painting is simply breathtaking. Raphael must have nursed a fascination with Mary Magdalene, and intellectual circles in Italy must have all hummed and buzzed with the newly found realisations of that time of her friendship with Our Lord, and subsequent escape with family to Provence, and a generation later to England at Glastonbury, where the family line continued to show itself in the Arthurian legends as Sir Galahad renowned for his prayer ability, spiritual experiences, and other worldliness. In the recent debate on the Da Vinci code, authors most knowledgeable have not been quoted, one wonders why? Personally, I do believe completely in Mary Magdalene as close friend of Jesus, and mother of children: Can see why a following sprouted in Provence with her arrival, and can see why this would have created a confusion with the Virgin Mary. The church strongly denies this, to use the same link as used in Jazzolog, Its a Girl fame, I refer to it again here, being the chief inspiration for this log. [link] The second link below is about the womem members of the PreRaphaelite movement. It makies extremely interesting reading, and carries notions both of a real struggle and wish these ladies pursued to a new intellectual line. This line seems permanently to remain a secret. The strength of the movement, to judge from the depth and strength of their art, is not matched at all with the few histories made on this group, namely that it was simply another art movement, albeit the first so called Avant Garde one. [link] Quote: "" As so often in the history of PreRaphaelitism, it is William Michael Rossetti who provides the ultimate verdict. 'All the artists whom I best knew and valued deplored her death as a real loss to art', he wrote in 1906; 'they had looked upon her as the leading hope for painting in the hands of a woman'.(44) Yet had William Michael consulted his sister, another ambivalent PreRaphaelite, he might have seen that his apparently handsome conclusion was still inadequate. What Joanna Mary Boyce's life and work attest to most vividly is the struggle for social mobility and intellectual independence that must come before art, if art is to shape culture in the way that PreRaphaelitism is commonly allowed to have done. This struggle dogged the female artist in the orbit of PreRaphaelitism's challenge; and, when male PreRaphaelites are praised as iconoclasts, trend-setters or free-thinkers, it should be remembered by what comparative privilege they attained such positions. . . . . . " This article carries a palpable mystery woven between the words although accidental of course. My first introduction to things Mary Magdalen in High Art (apart from that through the Church at Easter each year), and, most importantly after learning about the Black Maria legends in Provence, through the work of Le Corbusier and his links with the Cathars in the Pyrennes, was while visiting an important historical house from Elizabethan times, in which Queen Elizabeth I lived as a child, in the sixteenth century. In this house were two things connecting the previously collected research above. One was a family tree **chart showing the holy blood line (from Jesus) descending down through time to Queen Elizabeth and the other was a collection of medium sized portraits of Mary Magdalene perhaps 6 or 8 in all. Each one of these portraits, showed a different aspect of prayer or adoration or modesty or self containment in the full Renaissance style at a time shortly AFTER Raphael himself. ((** Family Tree charts showing descendency from the Holy family were very much the vogue for at least 1,000 years, mattered in the survival stakes, and are all related to the Magdelen myth)). The point which struck me was the fascination that this artist obviously held for Mary M. Catholics are only ever shown pictures of Mary mother of Jesus, so it was with total wonder not only to see so many of Mary Magdalen but also that they were so very beautiful too, and almost completely unknown. (More mystery). I also believe that Leonardo Da Vinci who was simply a more prolific genius in the art of painting than Raphael, had the capability and talent to show a 13 year old St John in the Last Supper painting without giving rise to doubts that he had actually painted a fully grown woman, if that is what he had intended. Un doubtedly the person next to Jesus in this painting looks like a women, demurely looking down, (ie away from the artists gaze, or photographer) because the most important person and people are Jesus and his disciples. If it were a young boy, he would not need to look submissively but be casting his eyes about like any of the other men disciples. As he was to be the most divine of authors for Jesus, he more rightly could have been seen looking in admiration directly at Jesus without crossing boundaries of acceptable behaviour of the times. I believe this subject matter represents the depths of the PreRaphaelite movement and the suggestions in their haunting paintings. The sudden interest that must have been accorded Women in this time as is shown continously in the painting of this known style to my interpretation. However, a real contradiction of sorts does come out of both the works and histories written in the links supplied, especially as the Rossetti faction is described as being the Spiritual one, which would be the opposite of Mary Magdalen, who is very much the material counterpart to the truly spiritual Virgin Mary. More than anything else in the civilisation in our Western world, this myth surrounding Magdalen actually underpins the fundamentals of Christianity, by showing what it is NOT based on, ie normal intelligent woman, but rather the regular myths of Virgin Mary and Jesus. This does not detract in any way from the myth of Magdalen. As with the opposites of Materialism and Spirit say, the Magdalen myth is as important in the whole Christian tale as that of Virgin Mary, in that it is its very opposite in manifestation and this is the very point of BOTH. This is the continous and infinite Mystery which, I am sure, endures and enthralls, and will continue to do as long as Christianity survives. One last entry on the artists themselves, is an extract from Wikipedia: The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations: 1.To have genuine ideas to express; 2.To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them; 3.To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; 4.And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues. These principles are deliberately undogmatic, since the Brotherhood wished to emphasise the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and method of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Nevertheless, they were particularly fascinated by Medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to clash with the realism promoted by the stress on independent observation of nature. In its early stages the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that the two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided in two directions. The realist side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism. In their attempts to revive the brilliance of colour found in Quattrocento art, Hunt and Millais developed a technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. In this way they hoped that their colours would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity. This emphasis of brilliance of colour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists such as Reynolds, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect which the Pre-Raphaelies despised. [edit] Public controversies The first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite work came in 1849. Both Millais' "Isabella" (1848–1849) and Holman Hunt's "Rienzi" (1848–1849) were exhibited at the Royal Academy and Rossetti’s "Girlhood of Mary Virgin" was shown at the Free Exhibition on Hyde Park Corner. As agreed all members of the Brotherhood signed works with their name and "PRB". Between January and April 1850 the group published a literary magazine called The Germ. William Rossetti edited the magazine, which published poetry by the Rossettis, Woolner and Collinson, together with essays on art and literature by associates of the Brotherhood, such as Coventry Patmore. As the short runtime implies, the magazine did not manage to achieve a sustained momentum. (Daly 1989) "Christ In the House of His Parents", by John Everett Millais, 1850. .........................======================================================== Herein begins this thread . . . NW, June 2006

[< Back] [New Civilization News]

Category: Religion 

26 Jun 2006 @ 17:38 by nraye : Confused?
So was I.

A look at the painting above, shows red chemise and even more, a hand holding the famous Phial, or jar, supposedly the Holy Grail: the painting has to be Mary Magdalene. It cannot be an allusion to anyone else. So, if as all the official historians of the Pre-Raphaelites suggest in the small extracts I have shown suggest, this painting is in complete contradiction to what the historians collectively allude. That the PreRaphaelistes sought a purer form of Christianity and painting of medieval form in relation to Virgin Mary, to judge by the first picture exhibited by Rosetti and confirmed above.

So I believe that what I read on that one occasion that the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired by Mary Magdalen and all she represented in the truth of our western christian church is correct. And what is shown in the extracts submitted here is wrong.  

Of course, wouldn't you know, I love the Pre-Raphaelites...even if we guys often find ourselves thus in the paintings~~~



The Accolade (1901) by Edmund Leighton

***********

Have to laugh with this! I think Edmund Leighton was made a Lord for his work, and although have visited his unsusual late Victorian house in Kensington, which has an Arabian Fountain room with pool, INside the house, complete with carved wooden trellis shutters on the windows and a profusion of dark blue glazed decorative tiles throughout, one senses this represents the fullest and complete and therefore the final point of Victorian Art Genre possibilities.

Whilst the detail is of quality, the whole is not UP lifting in any way. A characteristic of the Gothic which translates automatically into the ROMANTIC (as opposed the the Classical) in art terms is that there is a telluric, emergence from the earth, sensation to it.

Each individual will have their favourites in the Art world, and it is reassuring to be reminded of such healthy differences abounding!!!
 

---

Your Name:
Your URL:	(or email)
Subject:
Comment:
	For verification, please type the word you see on the left: