#ariosto

[diana-andraste]

Gustave Doré's 1878 illustration Ruggiero Fights the Sea Monster that Threatens Angelica, from Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso 

Engraving

x x <- Original Italian and English translation

[hercorrupterofwords]

some bradamante ideas from when I was reading the orlando furioso

[meisterdrucke]

Ruggiero rides a creature that shouldn't exist. In Gustave Doré's illustration for *Orlando Furioso*, the armored knight flies through the sky on a hippogriff- a legendary creature with the wings of an eagle and the body of a horse. Doré paints the impossible with such conviction that it feels almost real. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com

[a-book-of-creatures]

Monsters in Astolfo’s path.

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Orlando Furioso.

[classic-female-nude-paintings]

Count her fingers. Both hands clasped together near the edge of that terracotta surface - every one accounted for with the anatomical precision of an obsessive. Ingres didn't paint hands. He engineered them. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's "Angelique" is a puzzle dressed as a nude. The subject comes from Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" - Angelica chained to a rock, awaiting a sea monster. But Ingres strips the story almost bare. No monster, no hero. Just a woman, a hint of a shackle at her feet, and that impossible S-curve running from her ankles to her outstretched wrists. Follow it and you'll notice her spine bends in ways vertebrae politely decline. The torso is elongated by at least one lumbar vertebra that doesn't exist. He did the same to the Grande Odalisque and dared anyone to complain. Light from the left sculpts her front and left side while the right dissolves into shadow against warm stone. Her body becomes a sundial - the shadow tells you exactly where Ingres wanted your eye to travel. The kind of image that rewards the person who stands too close and asks too many questions. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com

[art-mirrors-art]

The photo shows one of the moments of 'interaction' with - well - an interactive installation called Mirror, Mirror, created by Kokoschka Revival, an Italian art collective (mainly these are Ana Shametaj and Andrea Giomi, joined by a changing number of other collaborators).

In essence, the system records the movements of a viewer and then reenacts them, with the help of AI, in the movements of a digital avatar, making it all look like a magical hallucinating mirror.

The only trick is that it is not one and the same avatar, but a carousel of fourteen digital 'twins', representing - very loosely - different characters from Orlando Furioso, the famous epic poem by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto:

For a brief moment you can imagine yourself as one of the poem's fantastic creatures - some of them quite phantasmagorical:

The installation was designed as part of Palazzo di Atlante - which I understand was some kind of performance - itself part of Museo Furioso, which apparently an exhibition held at the so-called Rocca Ariostesca, or Ariosto's Castle, in the tiny Italian town of Castelnuovo di Garfagnana (Oh, those Italians - even their 'explanations' need their own meta-explanations to be understood).

Curiously (or perhaps indicatively) the AI programming for this 'mirror' was done not by Kokoschka Revival, but by the Amsterdam-based studio 42-LAB. Judging from the videos - you can watch a few moments here - they were still using a fairly early AI tools, and the quality of these 'reflections' is rather poor. But for this particular subject that may be not a bug but a useful feature.

[girlruggiero]

Funniest text-to-footnotes ratio ever

[rossodimarte]

Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Astolfo and the ogre Caligorante, 1771