Bacchus appears frozen in mid-air, blasted from his seat – but is this the result of love or is there a more down-to-earth explanation? (Credit: National Gallery)
The BBC has conjured up a gem, detailing entertaining info about flatulence from such renowned entities as Titian and Shakespeare, info yours truly never knew about even though being an English major back in the Cretaceous and an artist who knows a smidgen about art while practicing it for nearly 60 years. Read the piece, humorous to a fault. :)
The work, inspired by a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, depicts the instant Bacchus’s boisterous posse happens upon a heartbroken Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos, and has long been cherished for its sensuous portrayal of ‘the way in which the world seems to come to a stop at the moment when people fall for each other,’ as the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon has described it.
Smack dab in the centre of his canvas, Titian has carefully, if curiously, positioned a caper flower, whose ivory petals and radiant bristle of exploding stamens are rendered with meticulous botanical detail. Follow the trajectory of the caper's strangely overextended pistil and it catches in its stigma’s crosshairs the floating crotch of Bacchus, who, blasted from his seat, is frozen forever in mid-air, in what is surely among the most ungainly poses in all of art history.
Enter stage left, Othello :)
Famously fond of flatulence himself, Shakespeare couldn’t resist squeezing potty puns into his plays. Hanging in the air behind the phrase ‘thereby hangs a tail’, from Othello, for example, is the lingering whiff of broken wind. Rather than crude blemishes that besmirch his plays’ achievement, however, such coarse scents attest to Shakespeare’s full range of observation, his depth of sensitivity to every clench and contour of being here. They show that, in capturing all of life, Shakespeare holds nothing back (or in) and that his works embrace all of human experience – the serious and the silly, the melodious and discordant, the fragrant and the foul.
In the centre, a caper flower, which is a natural remedy for flatulence, is coupled with a satyr, a figure also associated with the condition (Credit: National Gallery)
Read the BBC piece in its entirety to learn about art, life and reality at it's most primal level. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment