Monday, January 26, 2009

The Sardine, Revisited

I'm enamored with this Goya. And, I'm fairly busy today.



"One of his most important canvases [Actually the painting is on wood panel. -Erik], the Burial of the Sardine, represents Ash Wednesday, the obsequies of carnival... He engraved a world turned upside-down, in other words, the Saturnalia; the donkey, the he-goat, the monkey, the cat, the bat, the crippled, the mad, the hanged, the man skeleton, men-chickens, men sawn in two, flagellants, the tribunals of the Inquisition, nightmares, flying men and bulls, brigands, rapes, tortures, the stake, murders, executions, abandoned children, human sacrifice, cannibals; foetuses, gnomes, giants and dwarfs, sorcerers, devils, spectres, the fates; prostitution, prisons, famine, shipwreck, fire, plague. Is this Spain? What other Spaniard has painted it? Yet who has touched with equal sureness upon the blind monsters of age-old depths, the symbols buried for thousands of years beneath our memory? Once the tapestries were finished, the portraits and the religious scenes put aside, he did not paint ten spectacles that do not belong to a troubled world, from prostitution to torture." (Page 133, from Andre Malraux's Saturn: An Essay on Goya, Phaidon Publishers, 1957)
A cadre of mendoucheous twatwaffles , and our newly-minted Fearless Leader.

Heh.

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