Intro to Faust.

The Trouvelot astronomical images end today, and tomorrow, we’ll start with Harry Clarke, a prolific and incredibly talented stained glass artist and illustrator. Clarke died very young, age 41, but left an amazing amount of work, and most of the books he illustrated are still in print today. Clarke had a habit of incorporating self-portraits into most all of his work, including his stained glass work:

Left: Photograph of Clarke in the posture of crucifixion. Right: Detail, Crucifixion (1920).

All of Clarke’s illustrations are amazingly beautiful, even when they depict the macabre. In 1914, a decade before he would illustrate Goethe’s Faust, Clarke depicted himself as an absinthe drinking Mephistopheles:

Mephisto (1914), Clarke’s self-portrait as an absinthe drinking Mephistopheles.

Clarke’s The Last Hour of the Night (1922), the frontispiece for Dublin of the Future, the prize-winning design for an urban planning competition staged in 1914 (but not published until 1922 because of the intervening violence and devastation).

It took me a while to decide on doing Clarke’s illustrations, simply because it would make for a very long series, but they are all exquisite. So, we’ll start with Faust, then move on to the illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, then on to Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. We’ll be traveling with Harry Clarke for a bit over three months.

Most of the posts will have more than one image – opening pages will be together, as will decoratives, and beginning and chapter ends.

Renaissance Superheroes.

These amazing photos rocked my world, and there are so many of them! These are not paintings, they are photographs. From Vintage News:

The project named  Super Flemish by Goldberger has created a series of photographs that portray ultimate pop culture characters of the caliber of Spiderman, Yoda or even villains such as Darth Vader, in a Flemish treatment. The photos largely resemble 16-th century paintings, and it has taken Sacha two years to complete the ambitious project. A team of twelve people has put efforts in making the flawless makeup, hair and special effects that can be noticed on the photographs.

“A lot of the job was done before and during the shoot. Pierrick and Sebastian, my digital retouchers, helped me to get the precision and the perfection I was looking for in this series,” says Sacha. “All of it was incredible; it was like a dream come true.”

“When you see the Hulk in front of you and you, ask him to look romantic, it’s crazy. The Joker was also very impressive. He endured three hours of make-up and started to act like Heath Ledger in the movie, The Dark Knight,”  adds the French photographer.

And from Sacha Goldberger’s site:

What if Superman was born in the sixteenth century?
And what if the Hulk was a Duke?
How might Van Eyck have portrayed Snow White?

Sacha’s discovery of these characters, which goes back to childhood, gave birth to a desire
to re-appropriate them, to take them back to a time forming the cornerstone of modern western art. Sacha wants to confront these icons of American culture with contemporary painters of the Flemish school. The collection demonstrates the use of 17 century techniques counterpointing light and shadow to illustrate nobility and fragility of the super powerful of all times. It also invites you to celebrate the heroes of your childhood. These characters have become icons to reveal their humanity: tired of having to save the world without respite, promised to a destiny of endless immortality, forever trapped in their character.
The superheroes often live their lives cloaked in anonymity. These portraits give them a chance to « fix » their narcissism denied. By the temporal disturbance they produce, these images allow us to discover, under the patina of time, an unexpected melancholy of those who are to be invincible.

As science fiction meets history of art, time meets an inexhaustible desire for mythology which is within each of us.

Oh, go have a wander and look at all of them! Super Flemish and Sacha Goldberger’s main page, and Flemish in the Stars (Renaissance Star Wars).  Look at everything! And thanks to PZ for yet another timesink, I really needed another one. (Just a pinch of sarcasm there…)

SpooOOooky Art.

Illustration from Spectropia, or, surprising spectral illusions showing ghosts everywhere and of any colour by J. H. Brown (1864) (via Wikimedia).

The 1864 Spectropia used optical illusions to manifest ghosts in Victorian homes, and was designed to attack the quackery of Spiritualism. You can read and see more here.

“Hallowe’en morning” (John O. Winsch, 1914) (via Special Collections Department, Postcard Collection, Enoch Pratt Free Library).

Look, witches were into biofuel! :D Hyperallergic has a host of entertaining vintage Halloween Cards.

On the more serious side, today marks the opening of a new exhibition of Cornell University’s Witchcraft Collection:

Image from the Cornell University Witchcraft Collection (courtesy Cornell University Library).

You can read and see much more at Hyperallergic. It’s the largest witchcraft collection in North America, and will run through August of 2018.

Medieval Werewolves.

Medieval werewolves were a popular subject, but they were quite different from the slavering, unreasoning beasts of later depictions. Werewolves weren’t necessarily bad, and retained the ability to reason. Even the transformation was different.

One way of man-to-wolf transformation is to wear a wolfskin – this is most common in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, where the wolf-man is frequently referred to in skin-related terms, echoing the tradition of berserkr and úlfheðnar, battle-frenzied warriors wearing nothing but bear/wolf skin. Gerald of Wales (1146 – 1223) also reports a priest encountering a werewolf couple while travelling across the region of Ossory in Ireland. When the priest refused to perform last rites for the dying she-wolf, fearing that she might be some Devil ’s trick, the man-wolf ‘unzips ’ the wolfskin to reveal an old woman underneath, as if it were just a coat. The difference in transformative mode results in a difference in emphasis: when the wolf comes out of the man, it is as if the wolf – the wolf is the essence. In the medieval portrayal, on the other hand, even though in some cases the wolfskin/form does bring out the beast within, the man is only wrapped,hidden, but never destroyed, and the werewolf is more like a riddle, waiting to be solved.

In Jim C. Hines’s Princess series, I loved that the character of Red Hood was this form of werewolf – the inside of her red cape was a wolfskin. If she flipped it so the wolfskin was on the outside, she transformed.

Medieval werewolves got along just fine in knightly and courtly sense.

‘Be a wolf, have the understanding of … a man!’

The quote above is from Arthur and Gorlagon, [English starts on page 24] one of the four Arthurian Romances written in Latin. In the story, King Gorlagon is turned into a wolf by his treacherous wife. She could have gotten away with the crime, had she not made the mistake of enhancing ‘the understanding of a man ’ instead of  ‘the understanding of a wolf ’. A most unlikely mistake, and most unfortunate on the wife’s part, but it brings another major difference between modern and medieval werewolves: the medieval ones are rarely savage monsters; instead, they can be surprisingly intelligent, rational, and well-behaved. Melion, Bisclavret, and Gorlagon find no difficulty in mingling with the king ’s knights and courtiers – Gorlagon even sits on the horse and waits on the king’s table ‘with his forepaws erect ’. Granted, courtesy does not make werewolves mild and friendly creatures, but even when they perform some deeds of violence, that violence is well justified. Take Bisclavret for example: the wolf inflicts great harm upon his wife and her lover, but the action is read as revenge, thus confirming, rather than forfeiting the wolf ’s humanity.

Werewolf (1512).Lucas Cranach the Elder .Gotha,Herzogliches Museum (Landesmuseum).

Other differences were transformation triggers; Medieval werewolves were not ruled by the full moon. Bisclavret transformed at will, with no regard to the moon. There were two tales which did take a lunar trigger into account:

The only example of a full moon transformation is found in Otia Imperialia or ‘Recreation for an Emperor’, a speculum written by Gervase of Tilbury (1150 – 1220) for Otto IV (1175 –1218).  Gervase reports men turning into wolves ‘according to the cycles of the moon’. He gives two examples:The first, is a certain Pons de Chapteuil, a knight-turned-vagabond that becomes mad while ‘wandering alone like a wild beast … deranged by extreme fear’. Despite Gervase’s earlier mention of the moon, Pons de Chapteuil’s transformation is primarily a physical manifestation of his social identity and emotion. The other werewolf is Chaucevaire, who does transform under lunar influence, but does so only when there is a new moon, the opposite to a traditional full moon transformation. The connection between the werewolf and the moon the etymology of the Latin word moon, luna, which is associated with lunatics. Their loss of human reason dehumanizes them, rendering them figurative beasts, which, as the previous point shows, apparently is not the case with most werewolves.

In the Discworld Watch books, Terry Pratchett compromised with his primary werewolf character, Delphine Angua von Uberwald, who could transform at will, but was subject to an irresistible trigger at the full moon. Medieval werewolves also didn’t have an appearance which was distinct from natural wolves. They might have been a bit larger, but that was all, so there was no easy way to distinguish a werewolf.

I can’t help thinking that Aargh, the English Wolf would have considered them all with disdain.

From Medievalists, an article by Minji Su, Current DPhil student at Oxford university, researching on werewolves in medieval Icelandic literature.