I haven’t been keeping up with my usual blogging schedule! Last week I was getting ready for an out-of-town weekend (visiting friends in Detroit) and now I’m facing several short-term deadlines at work. I should be able to find more time for writing next week!
Image: Francis Davis Millet, Reading the Story of Oenone (detail), Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo by Tinsel Creation.
I remember the first time I saw Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1500-1505), or rather a reproduction of this (in)famous painting: I was a college freshman, and it was printed as a full-color fold-out in my Janson’s History of Art. Like most people who are familiar with this enigmatic masterwork, I still love it and I still don’t understand it. I don’t think the historians of Renaissance art have figured it out yet, either.
Alexander McQueen’s final collection (2010) included a dress printed with details of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and his Temptation of St. Anthony. (There was also a matching handbag.) And the house of Carven has recently copycatted this idea.
Even if you weren’t able to scoop up one of McQueen’s Bosch dresses or bags (hah!), there are ways to incorporate bits of this enigmatic work into your own look…
I was doing some research at the New York Public Library’s main reference branch yesterday, and when I left the library and crossed the street, I spotted this mural. It’s painted on a pair of doors off to the side of the Andaz Fifth Avenue, a hotel that I’d never really noticed before.
The painting is signed by artist Aimee Cavazzi. I looked her up when I got home and learned that she is “artist in residence” at the Andaz. She painted this work just a few weeks ago, and she says,
“I would take the train in the spring time and early summer as a young teenager and felt, just as the picture depicts, inspired, overwhelmed and in awe of the immensity and intensity of the city.”
I know what she means, and I’m glad I still feel the same way in New York sometimes: energized, happily astonished, percolating with ideas, drawing inspiration from my surroundings.
You can see some photos of Cavazzi (and her students!) at work on the mural here.
Image: photo by Tinsel Creation.
From the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid: a classical marble statue of the goddess Venus. It is a Roman copy of a Greek original, and it dates to 150 B.C. A seventeenth-century artist added the perfume bottle under the goddess’s right hand, giving the statue its nickname of “Venus del Pomo.”
You can read more about this work of art on the Prado’s website, here.
Wishing you a magical holiday!
Image: Illustration by Helen Dryden for VOGUE, December 1920.
TINSEL CREATION 