scholarly journals Caravaggio’s cinematic painting: Fictionalising art and biography in the artist biopic

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keeley Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Direct Reference ◽  
Personal Identification ◽  
The Self ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Subjective Interpretation ◽  
Tableaux Vivants ◽  
Traditional Sense ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Explorations of the artist in the biopic genre are often formulaic in approach. The biographical narrative, modelled on the literary monograph, celebrates a public figure who overcomes challenges to rise to the top of their field. These films traditionally present the artist’s life and work as intrinsically involved with each other so that the artwork can only be explained through contextualising biographical knowledge. Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), in the vein of his highly personal, experimental filmmaking, is not a biopic in this traditional sense. Taking advantage of what little is known about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the Italian painter widely recognised as the first great artist of the Baroque period and a master of chiaroscuro, Jarman constructs a heavily fictional ‘biographical’ narrative. This narrative is built upon historical speculation, personal identification, and most significantly, his subjective interpretation and visualisation of the paintings themselves. A series of tableaux vivants, delicately postured, almost still, recreations of the paintings, provide the narrative impetus in Caravaggio. Many of these are situated as poses in preparation for Caravaggio's painting. These recreations are removed from their historical context, disregarding the artworks’ chronology and misplacing characters and events to construct a part-Jarman/part-Caravaggio profile – fictionalising both art and biography. This paper explores Jarman’s intricate appropriation of the art and biography of the artist in Caravaggio, and how this is implemented, and complicated, to serve his own narrative agenda. Developing André Bazin’s discussion about the adoption of one medium into another in ‘Painting and Cinema,’ I analyse the tableaux representing The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600), The Entombment of Christ (1602-03), and Death of the Virgin (1606). This analysis takes place on three levels: firstly, art-history ‘fidelity;’ secondly, the perversion of the self-portrait; and finally, with direct reference to Bazin’s essay, the editing of the art-image.

An Iskandarnāma of Nizami Produced for Ibrahim Sultan

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lâle Uluç
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Visual Data ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Basic Task ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This paper introduces a copy of the Iskandarnāma of Nizami dated 1435 and dedicated to the Timurid prince Ibrahim Sultan, grandson of the eponymous founder of the Timurid dynasty. It discusses the various features of the manuscript together with comparable examples from the same period, and also focuses on Abu al-Fath Ibrahim Sultan ibn Shah Rukh and his role as both a military leader and a patron of the arts during his tenure as the governor of the provinces of Fars, Kirman, and Luristan (1414–35). Utilizing the visual data together with the historical context of the period, this essay interprets one of the illustrations of the Iskandarnāma, hoping to fulfill what David Summers called “the most basic task of art history,” which he says “is to explain why works of art look the way they look.” The addition of this Iskandarnāma manuscript to the surviving corpus of works that can be connected to Ibrahim Sultan will provide a further insight into the important patronage of this Timurid prince.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Human Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Reflective Thought ◽  
The World

THIS BOOK EXPLORES some of the implications of and opportunities within the speculative turn in continental philosophy from the perspective of art history. Speculation? Besides its only legitimate domain today, that of finance, is this not a thing of the past, when metaphysicians were used to making unverifiable claims about the nature of God, the World and the Self? From Kant to Wittgenstein, critical philosophy has taught us to remain silent on that of which we cannot speak. Likewise, art history has come a long way in establishing itself as a positive human science independent from its metaphysical beginnings. In both cases, enlightened, self-critical and self-reflective thought has worked hard on closing the door to ontology, on reducing the Ideas of reason to ideology and on limiting the domain of knowledge to phenomenal objects. Speculation, it seems, has not been ...

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 661-670
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Socioeconomic Factors ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
A Site ◽  
Autobiographical Impulse

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic factors); continuity and discontinuity (how much of the new displaces the old in conversion?); nominal, incomplete, and “true” conversions; personal testimonies and narratives (the autobiographical impulse attests to the converted life); the role of gender; identity and the self; agency (are converts actors or are they being acted upon?); the mechanisms behind and the motivations for conversion; the body as a site of conversion; the role of music; conversion as event and process; coercive practices; and forms of communication in the converting process.

Philosophy, Past and Present

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Eleanor M. Godway
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Self ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Trust Theory ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject

John Macmurray's controversial thesis: “All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action and all meaningful action for the sake of friendship” is unpacked by explaining and illustrating what he means by the “personal.” He sees philosophy as a cultural phenomenon which expresses and responds to its historical context, and in turn affects how people think and behave. The Subject as Thinker, which has dominated modern philosophy, has led us to value knowledge for its own sake and trust theory over practice, needs to be replaced by the self as agent. The logic of the personal, in which the positive (e.g. action, love) is constituted and sustained by its negative (e.g. thinking, fear) arises out of personal relationship (“I-and-you”). Facing the problematic personhood may enable us to find meaning in relations with others, and face the future with hope.

scholarly journals MIKHAIL VRUBEL IN SEARCH OF THE “STYLISHLY BEAUTIFUL”. THE BIOGRAPHICAL ASPECT

Articult ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 56-67
Author(s):  
Olga S. Davydova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The Self ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Independent Existence

The article is a conceptual exploration of the life and creative path of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910) in the context of the individual characteristics of his personality. The relevance of this study is determined by the need to find new conceptual angles in the field of understanding the idealistic component of M.A. Vrubel's work, i.e. in the field of his iconographic poetics. The visual myth-making of the artist, who drew on authentic spiritual prototypes, defined the leading role of Vrubel not only in Russian Symbolism and Modernism, but also in Modernism as a whole. The linking of the biographical aspect with M.A. Vrubel's poetic thinking, examined through the prism of “pure art”, i.e. in the context of the idea of the legitimacy of the independent existence of the self-contained reality of the work, can give entirely new accents of understanding the deep origins and potential meanings of the artist's work at the present stage of development of art history.

scholarly journals The History, Landscapes, Metaphors and Ghosts Around the Concept of Specificity

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Romo-González ◽  
Carlos Larralde ◽  
Abraham Puga-Olguín ◽  
Enrique Vargas-Madrazo
Keyword(s):  
Immune System ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Species Specificity ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Epistemological Problem ◽  
Theoretical Entity ◽  
Perceived Reality ◽  
The Individual

The confusion between objects/processes and the language which describes them, leads to theories of doubtful verisimilitude about reality, inappropriate in time and even false, which distance us from the knowledge of perceived reality. In biology there are many examples of this kind of epistemological problem. Here we examine those related with specificity: a theoretical entity of enormous importance for biology and science in general.  It sinks its roots beneath the evolutionary duality species-specificity, associated with the Linnean-Darwinist tradition that explains organized life in a discrete and hierarchical way.  It conceptualizes the individual as an isolated agent fighting for survival as the foundation of a warrior vision of the immune system.  Microorganisms are understood as inferior beings which should be eliminated in accordance with the self/not-self distinction. The use of these metaphors outside of historical context traces a map that guides the recognition of the Self and of the other according to the dialectic of Western biopolitics.

scholarly journals O is for Orientalism: the dynamics of the sexual tourist gaze in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud/Heading South (2005)

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Charlotte Hammond ◽  
Andrew McGregor
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sexual Tourism

This article explores the Orientalist dynamics of North/South sexual tourism in Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud/Heading South (2005). The narrative of the film is structured around the self-interested motivations of three white middle-aged bourgeois Western women who travel from North America to Haiti in the late 1970s in order to explore their sexuality in what they perceive as an island paradise, effectively exiling themselves from the codified social behavior expected of them in their homeland. The women avail themselves of the pleasures offered by young black Haitian men, often in exchange for money or goods, and fuel one-sided fantasies of romantic love with their local hosts, seemingly oblivious to the Orientalist nature of such an imbalance of social and economic power. The article explores the historical context of the political repression and violence of late-1970s Haiti under the Duvalier regime, as well as the manifestations of spatial politics represented in the film. In its Haitian setting, Vers le sud sheds light on a relatively unfamiliar cultural and social milieu for the Western/Northern audience, with the director keenly aware of the exoticism of the subject matter and the impossibility of the film to maintain its neutrality in a problematic engagement with the Orient/South. The article argues that the privileged position of the film’s protagonists is matched not only by Cantet’s directorial gaze, but also by the intellectual detachment of postcolonial scholars such as the article’s authors, who acknowledge that their engagement with the subject matter risks re-enacting the Orientalist dynamics they seek to expose.

scholarly journals Personal Identification, Normativity and Communication in the “Self - Other” System

Manuscript ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1867-1871
Author(s):  
Vladimir Sergeevich Erokhin ◽  
◽  
Natalya Viktorovna Erokhina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identification ◽  
The Self

scholarly journals ТЕХНОЛОГІЧНІ ПРОЦЕСИ У ВИГОТОВЛЕННІ ХУДОЖНІХ ВИРОБІВ З МЕТАЛУ: ІСТОРИЧНИЙ КОНТЕКСТ ТА ШЛЯХИ ВІДРОДЖЕННЯ

2021 ◽  
pp. 96-104
Author(s):  
A. В. Варивончик ◽  
І. С. Бондар ◽  
Б. М. Мазур ◽  
І. В. Швець
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Existing Problems ◽  
Applied Art ◽  
Methods And Techniques ◽  
Metal Products ◽  
Metal Processing

The aim of the work is to clarify the peculiarities of the development of Ukrainian art metal products in a historical context and to determine the ways of reviving artistic metalworking in the XXI century. Methodology. The research is based on culturological, historical and art history methods of analysis; applied historical-analytical, cultural-historical and the method of figurative-stylistic analysis of the means of artistic and decorative expressiveness of products. Results. The article examines the main stages in the development of technological processes in the execution of artistic metal products. The main techniques of artistic metal processing are analyzed: "lost wax", filigree, engraving, casting, forging, diffusion, electroplating, etc. The influence of external and internal factors in the development of artistic metal processing in Ukraine is studied. Identified the existing problems in the manufacture of art items from metal. Scientific novelty. The facts of the development of technologies for artistic metal processing in Ukraine are revealed and the ways of reviving the production of metal products as a type of decorative and applied art are determined. Practical significance. In the art of artistic metal processing, we highlight the issues of the revival and preservation of the industry in modern Ukraine through the study of technologies, traditions, the search for new forms, methods and techniques of working with materials.

The Flim-Flam Man

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. T. McKenna
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Subject

With the success of Hercules, Levine was often the subject of articles and profiles in the popular press. In addition to being profiled in publications such as Time, Life, and Esquire, he was lampooned as “Joe LeVenal” in the satirical Mad magazine. This chapter concentrates on Levine’s emergence as a public figure of note and the self-promotional tactics he used to achieve what was an unprecedented amount of fame for a film importer and promoter. The chapter also shows how Levine capitalized on the criticism he was subjected to in order to position himself in opposition to America’s cultural elites and how he was able to take advantage of being a divisive figure to keep his name in the press.

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