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Unknown Flemish Master - Head of Medusa (detail) (1600)

What we think of as acts of cruelty are in reality nothing of the kind. Someone from the Middle Ages would still find the whole style of our present-day life abhorrent, but cruel, horrifying and barbaric in a quite different way. Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of a suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage would inevitably in the midst of our civilisation. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all the sense of morality, security and innocence.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

#hermann hesse #steppenwolf #quote

Théodore Géricault The Raft of the Medusa 1818-1819

“Gericault was a negative visionary; for though his art was almost obsessively true to nature, it was true to a nature that had been magically transfigured, in his perceiving and rendering of it, for the worse. ‘I start to paint a woman,’ he once said, 'but it always ends up as a lion.’ More often, indeed it ended up as something a good deal less amiable than a lion - as a corpse, for example, or as a demon. His masterpiece, the prodigious Raft of the Medusa, was painted not from life but from dissolution and decay - from bits of cadavers supplied by medical students, from the emaciated torso and jaundiced face of a friend who was suffering from a disease of the liver. Even the waves on which the raft is floating, even the overarching sky are corpse-coloured. It is as though the entire universe had become a dissecting room.” Appendix VII, Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley

#Théodore Géricault #Aldous Huxley #art

aestheticgoddess

noten

Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992

excdus

Abuse of Power Comes As No Surprise

#jenny holzer

paintdeath

Wang Tzu-Ting - Untitled (2009)

#art

melancthapoetry

Vincent van Gogh self-portrait with pipe, 1886

#art

phemiec

"Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages… a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn’t be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God."

Umberto Eco, On The History Of Ugliness

#quote