Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog, page 36

The Castle of the Carpathians

I was finally able to present my Patrons with a digitised, free version of one of the most underrated and yet more significant works by Jules Verne: The Castle of the Carpathians.

Published five years before Bram Stoker consigned Transylvania to the public’s imagination as a land of undead creatures, Verne wrote this science fiction novel blending elements of Gothic you rarely see in his work. It doesn’t have many of the signature elements of his more famous works: the narrative is scattered amongst different and non-remarkable characters, the mystery isn’t built from the start, and the development feels a little rushed. Its importance however cannot be understated: The Castle of the Carpathians in fact explores a timeless theme – the clash between reason and blind faith in the face of the unknown – though it cannot be overlooked that it does that by indulging in racist tropes, particularly against Jewish and Romani people.

Proceed with caution.

The Magician and Other Folktales

Last week I got another rejection and I wanted to give my Patrons one of the classical Gothic books I’m annotating but it isn’t ready yet, so we’ll settle for another bunch of folktales collected by Grazia Deledda and translated by yours truly. Whom, as we’ve established on threads, is Gothic enough.

The first tale, “The Magician”, tells of a couple who’s cursed by a local magician not to have any children. The husband accepts to perform a rite to lift the curse and… it doesn’t go well.

The second one is titled “More Magic Spells,” but we might retitle it “The Holy Oil.” It tells the story of how a beautiful maiden requests a young sexton to aid her in stealing some holy oil from a church so that… well, that’s a spoiler. You’ll have to read it.

The third tale features a shepherd who’s visited by a ghostly lady in his dreams. A murder in Church, a buried treasure and the devil are involved.

Enjoy!

#MermaidMonday: Eurynome

Eurynome was an Ancient Greek deity traditionally connected with water, whose cult has been discovered near the confluence of the Neda and the Lymax rivers, down in Peloponnesus. She’s called an Oceanid by Pausanias, and her representation resembles a mermaid.
Though Robert Graves offers us a charming theory and sees Eurynome as a lunar goddess and a Pelasgian mother goddess, there’s no substantiated proof that she held such a status.

Today on my Patreon we take a look at what Homer, Hesiod and Pausanias write about her.

#ChthonicThursday: Nun-gal

Nun-gal, literally the Great Princess, was a Sumerian goddess of prisons, mercy and the underworld, worshipped in the Third Dynasty of Ur (Neo-Sumerian Empire, from 2112 to 2004 BC) in cities such as Nippur, Lagash, Umma, Susa, and Ur itself.

Today on my Patreon, we take a look at her and at how she’s described in the hymn “Nungal in the Ekur”, which is the primary source of information about this goddess.

 

#MermaidMonday: the Mermaid of Warsaw

The Capital City of Warsaw in Polonia sits on the River Vistula, and it’s perhaps unsurprising to see a mermaid on its coat of arms. What catches the attention is that this mermaid is brandishing a blade and carrying a shield, and her story is indeed worth telling. You can read her story, and a focus on two of the possible sources for the emblem, today on the Patreon.

Pablo Picasso depicted the protecting mermaid on a mural in Obrońców Street: it’s the picture in the header.

Bellini’s Lamentation

The Diocesano Museum in Milan is one of the most interesting realities on the territory, both for its permanent collection and for its habit of organizing temporary exhibitions around one single piece, usually borrowed from a prestigious museum in another city. The depth you require when your exhibition only revolves around one painting always makes it for a very interesting visit with detailed, in-depth explorations. I gave you one example last year with the special exhibition around Beato Angelico’s Childhood of Christ (post 1 here and post 2 here).

This time the focus rests on the Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Giovanni Bellini, coming all the way from the Musei Vaticani, in the context of the whole Pesaro Altarpiece from which it was extracted. Exhibited as part of a pathway through lent and towards Easter (the museum is a religious institution after all), it becomes a broader exploration on grief and suffering through the contribution of four modern artists.

Giovanni Bellini’s Madonnas and Dead Christs

A man constantly in meditation, always striving to evoke the ancient, understand the new and experiment with them both, he was everything they said he was a Byzantine and Gothic artist first, influenced by Andrea Mantegna and Paduan art then, following in the footsteps of Piero della Francesca and Antonello da Messina, and finally even of Giorgione; and yet, he was always himself: warm blood, wholehearted spirit, in full and deep harmony with humanity -the traces of humanity in history and the mantle of nature.
(Roberto Longhi, 1946)

Born in Venice around 1430, Giovanni Bellini was likely the second or third son of the renowned Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini, and he received his artistic training primarily from his father, alongside his elder brother Gentile. The Bellini workshop was a hub for aspiring artists, and Giovanni likely collaborated with other young talents on various projects.

Upon his father’s death in 1470, Giovanni and Gentile took over the family workshop, receiving numerous commissions together: their most notable collaboration was for the Scuola di San Marco, contributing to a vast narrative cycle depicting the story of Noah’s Ark and the Deluge, but Giovanni’s first solo work of note is generally considered a series of Madonnas with the Child, particularly the so-called Greek Madonna currently preserved at the Brera Art Gallery here in Milan.

The Greek Madonna

Giovanni’s early paintings, characterized by sharp details and a focus on perspective, displayed the influence of his father and contemporaries like Andrea Mantegna. They also didn’t shun away from other influences that were very strong in Venice, such as the iconic Byzantine style and the Flemish influence.
During the decade following his father’s death, Giovanni quickly established himself as a leading figure in the Venetian Renaissance. He developed a more personal style, emphasizing soft figures and harmonious compositions, in the wake of Giorgione and Titian’s revolutionary approach to painting. His use of landscape backgrounds became increasingly sophisticated, adding depth and atmosphere to his religious and mythological paintings.
These are all elements that we can find in the Lamentation.

If the landscape is the main character in compositions such as the Transfiguration from the Museo Correr and the Agony in the Garden from the National Gallery, the Madonna Davis comes closer to what we’ll observe in the Pesaro altarpiece, with a set of frames used as a painting inside the painting.

Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child (Madonna Davis)

Bellini revisited the themes of Madonna with Child and Christ’s suffering multiple times throughout his career, infusing each rendition with unique gestures, expressions, and arrangements. He introduced variations such as angels or mourners and made significant changes to the iconography with the intention of immersing the viewer in Christ’s suffering.

Starting from the 1960s, Bellini focused more intensely on this theme, originally conceived for private devotional use but later incorporated into Venetian polyptychs. He adapted scenes to a more intimate setting, as exemplified by works like the Dead Christ at the Poldi Pezzoli and the Dead Christ supported by the Madonna and St. John at the Accademia Carrara. These paintings exude profound dramatic tension, blending Mantegna’s austere forms with a poignant portrayal of human suffering.

[image error] Dead Christ supported by the Madonna and St. John

The culmination of this initial series of depictions is seen in the famous Pietà from Brera, distinguished by its unconventional horizontal format and meticulously crafted composition, which highlights the equilibrium between the substantial presence of the figures, the surrounding landscape, and the portrayal of deeply human and intense sorrow. Mary holds her face close to his dead son’s as if to catch one hint of breath, and John turns his face away to hide his sorrow as if the sight is too much for him to bear.
Hands and landscape also play an important part, with Mary’s bony fingers supporting Christ’s deadweight arm, and a curved road that we can see above her shoulder.

[image error]

Another masterpiece of the genre is the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the Uffizi, in which numerous characters are arranged around Christ and express their grief with a variety of expressions and attitudes, revealing Bellini’s ability to renew the iconography to tell a human story of hope and suffering.

Bellini’s quest for painting deep personal feelings in religious scenes of great solemnity reaches its zenith with his preferred subjects, the Pietà and the Madonna and Child.
An encounter with Antonello da Messina during his visit to Venice, between 1474 and 1476, proved to be pivotal for Bellini’s research and development: Antonello could boast a more proficient use of the oil painting technique, a method which allowed for compositions that were more vivid and gentle at the same time and that Bellini already admired in the works of the Flemish masters. He created the remarkable Pesaro Altarpiece in those years of experimentation.

The Pesaro Altarpiece

Created for the main altar of the church of San Francesco in Pesaro, possibly commissioned by the local friars, the Altarpiece is one of Bellini’s masterpieces because of its intricate composition and quality.
Painted in Venice around the mid-1570s, this work is groundbreaking from its structure, as the wooden panel is crafted without the use of nails or metal joints, to facilitate its disassembly and reassembly when transported to Pesaro from the lagoon.
The central panel portrays the Coronation of the Virgin surrounded by Saints Paul, Peter, Jerome, and Francis, while the predella recounts episodes from their lives. Additional figures of saints are depicted on the pillars, enhancing the richness of the composition.

The Coronation of the Virgin: the central portion of the altarpiece:

In this central scene, Bellini achieves a newfound solemn grandeur of descriptive naturalism, with figures almost life-size, and a geometric organization of space that reeks Reinassance because of the perspective of the floor, the architectural elements of the throne structure and the geometry of choice for the pedestal.
What’s really original in this work, if compared to Bellini’s earlier polyptychs, is the abandonment of traditional compartmentalization and the choice to assemble the figures in a unified spatial composition. To complement this bold choice, the throne has a window framing the landscape in a “painting within the painting”, featuring a distant hilltop citadel that scholars argue might be the Rocca di Gradara. The scenario is a theological reference to heavenly Jerusalem or to the Turris Eburnea, a symbol of purity coming from Solomon’s Song of Songs later associated with Mary by the 1587 Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The installation in Milan decides to render credit to the composition by hanging a scaled reproduction of the whole altarpiece and, next to a video with some details, a set of three frames hanging from the ceiling at different heights and different distances: one for the general marble frame separating the Coronation from the Lamentaion, one for the marble structure of the throne and a last one for the window inside the frame, and the landscape it highlights.

The Lamentation

The last room is dedicated to the Lamentation itself, confiscated as war booty by French troops in 1797 and returned to Italy in 1816 only to be separated from the main work, currently in Pesaro where it belongs.
When observing the painting, you should remember that the actual altarpiece is over 6 meters high, and this makes for some artistical choices: the figures are compressed In a distinctly vertical framing, they are sculptural and foreshortened from the bottom up.

The deposed, exsanguinated Christ is seated on the tomb, his face ashen and his mouth half-closed, his legs wrapped in the white shroud. He is supported by Joseph of Arimathea, attired as a cardinal in red and white robes, whose face is half-hidden and whose beard seems to blend together with the visage of Christ. Joseph, acting as a backrest for the corpse, seems to be assisting the other two figures: Nicodemus, standing on the right, who holds in his hand the jar of balsams, and the kneeling Mary Magdalene, who’s gently anointing his wounds.

As one of the contemporary artists will remark in the closing section of the exhibition, the hands are one of the main characters in creating the emotional tension of a grief that’s expressed with composure.

“After this, Joseph of Arimathea, secretly a disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate if he could remove the body of Jesus. And Pilate permitted it. So he came and took his body. Nicodemus, the one who had first come to him at night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about one hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom.”
– John 19:38-40

Four Contemporary Artists

After the original painting, the return route of the exhibition takes you through four rooms hosting four modern artworks in some way inspired or related to Bellini’s Lamentation.
The four artists in the exhibition are:

LETIA Letizia Cariello;Andrea Mastrovito;Emma Ciceri, with a video installation holding the hands of her daughter;Francesco De Grandi, with a modern deposition. Francesco De Grandi’s work.LETIA

Possibly the strongest and most powerful piece among the four, the artist works on two themes: one geometrical, and one emotional.
As Bellini’s piece was the cymatium for the altarpiece, this modern artwork consists of two vertically arranged panels connected by hinges: the upper panel, with its pointed arch shape, tilts toward the viewer like Bellini’s figures tilt back in their perspective trick, and strings of red wool are intertwined in patterns, connected in rays, drawing figures and faces and flowers. Square-headed nails are fixed into the background, both connecting the red strings and sticking out raw, unprotected. But the central element, like the window inside a window in Bellini’s altarpiece, is a mirror with a hook, an icon evoking great violence, that’s impossible not to connect to the plight of young women throughout our poor, modern society.
Suspended from the hook is a braid from the artist’s own hair, connecting the iconography to that Magdalene who tended to Jesus’ wounds and was called a whore for her devotion.

Her installation establishes a stringent relationship between the experience of pain and rebirth.

Andrea Mastrovito

Mastrovito decides for a less personal and more political statement, choosing to work on a picture that was taken on 5 March 2022, at the beginning of the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine, when a wooden crucified Christ was removed from the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv, to be secured in a bunker. The photo was taken by Portuguese freelancer Andrés Luís Alves, and Mastrovito adds multiple layers to the photograph, with frottages from the covers of famous dystopian books and works such as No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, or George Orwell’s 1984.

 

#ChthonicThursday: Tuonetar

Tuonetar is the Queen of the Underworld in Finnish mythology, and I promised you we’d talk about her when we saw her daughter Kalma, who’s tasked to prevent the dead from escaping their tombs. She brews one kick-ass beer, and she’s today’s profile on my Patreon.

De Nittis: Painter of Modern Life

Giuseppe De Nittis is a greatly underrated painter. or at least he has been for quite some time, and he’s now considered one of the greatest Italian artists of the 19th century. One of the reasons that saw him shunned by intellectuals had to not so much with his technique but with his subjects, for when he didn’t paint the fashion of the Belle Epoque, he was courting verism.

The fourth son of a middle-class family, his childhood was marked by the political imprisonment of his father, who took his own life when Giuseppe was still a child. Growing up with his grandparents, he enrolled in the Naples Academy of Fine Arts and got himself expelled for rowdy behaviour two years later. A man after my own heart.

He approached the Macchiaioli current while In Florence in 1866 and moved to Paris in 1867.
Alongside Boldini, one of my favorites, De Nittis became among the foremost Italian artists in the French capital, holding his own voice among luminaries such as Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists. After a false start at the Salon, he gained great success in 1872 with his landscape scene A Road from Brindisi to Barletta (Una strada da Brindisi a Barletta).

A road from Brindisi to Barletta

His second success in 1874 would complement this one with the second of his favorite subjects: Parisian ladies. The painting was titled Such cold! (Che freddo!), and it’s a vibrant scene with mood, movement, the weather, and the ladies are represented with such grace that it’s unsurprising this earned him the title of “peintre des Parisiennes”, painter of Parisian women.

Such cold!

His fame was consecrated during the 1874 exhibition, held in the studio of the photographer Nadar and commonly referred to as the birth of Impressionism.
He exhibited five canvases: Landscapes near the Bois (Paesaggi presso il Bois), meaning the Bois de Boulogne; Moonrise (Levar di luna); Vesuvius Countryside (Campagna del Vesuvio); Study of a Woman (Studio di donna); Road in Italy (Strada in Italia).
The same year he moved to London.

The exhibition in Milan mostly focuses on the relationship between his origin and his stay at the European capitals.

The French painters and De Nittis, who always felt profoundly Parisian by adoption, have addressed the same themes, including the landscape, the portrait and the representation of modern life that De Nittis was able to capture along the streets of the two metropolises he frequented, at the time great European art capitals: Paris and London. He was able to represent, together with the two metropolises, in an extraordinary en plein air technique, the privileged places of the mythology of modernity.

I wasn’t able to take a good look at how the exhibition is structured, for it takes place in very small rooms and the introductory area was crammed with a group of elderly, very noisy and very nosy people.
In talking about it, I’ll divide it into the groups I was able to grasp, following the places De Nittis visited and painted, and starting from Italt.

Italy: falling in love with the Vesuvius

As I was saying, Giuseppe De Nittis arrived in Naples in 1860 to enroll in the local Institute of Fine Arts, despite the initial objections from his family. The constraints of the academic environment made him fall out of love with the institute after three years, and he pursued his education independently with Marco De Gregorio and Federico Rossano. The painters gave birth to the artistic movement known as the Resìna School, named after the place where they were staying, soon after they were joined by the Tuscan Adriano Cecioni, who introduced them to the Macchiaioli current. They were later joined by various artists such as Raffaele Belliazzi, Alceste Campriani, Edoardo Dalbono, and Antonino Leto.

The goal of the group was to immerse themselves in nature and recover an essential, participatory vision of landscape without the intellectual superstructures that were being predicated in the academy: a deep communion with the natural environment was needed, according to them and other painters of this period, in order to paint truthfully.
This is the period that saw the birth of canvases such as Appuntamento nel bosco di Portici (A Date in the woods of Portici), L’Ofantino, which is a river, and La piana dell’Ofanto (The Ofanto Plane). Elements such as the clear light, vast skies, earthy roads and limed walls would remain forever on the painter’s palette, even when painting the fashionable horse races in Paris.

“What a beautiful time! With so much freedom, so much free air, so many endless races! And the sea, the great sky and the vast horizons! Far away the islands of Ischia and Procida; Sorrento and Castellammare in a rosy fog that, little by little, was dissolved by the sun. And a scent of wild mint and orange groves.”

De Nittis came back to these places ten years later, in November 1870, after leaving Paris because of the Franco-Prussian war and the unrest of the Commune, He spent long periods devoting himself to landscape studies, particularly by traveling daily to the slopes of Vesuvius. The fatigue or danger of the journey only fueled his fascination with the harsh landscape and unforgiving mountain.

The result is a numerous series of small studies entitled Sulle pendici del Vesuvio (On the slopes of Vesuvius) and Sulle falde del Vesuvio (On the slopes of Vesuvius), usually displayed side by side at the amazing Gallery of Modern Art here in Milan, and displayed in the same way here at the exhibition.
The small paintings are extraordinary for their composition, their cut, their technique and their color, to the point of being labeled as one of the most original outcomes of nineteenth-century Vedutism.
Vittorio Pica, an Italian writer and art critic from the late XIX / early XX century, compared these works with the visions of Mount Fuji by Ando Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai.

As Monet would do with his Cathedrals twenty years later, De Nittis captures the mountain in different light conditions, investigating in real life how light affects its contours, crevasses, ridges, and sparse vegetation. Close-up views are paired with rigorous simplification, in which the rare human figure is usually absorbed by the environment.

De Nittis also finds himself at the right place in the right time (a sentence you can only utter if you’re a painter or a naturalist) when the Vesuvius erupts on April 26, 1872. The results are two works: Pioggia di cenere (Rain of Ashes) and L’eruzione del Vesuvio (The Eruotpion of Vesuvius). The traumatic event destroyed towns he had known and loved during his youth, including Resina and Portici.

Outdoor Paris

Transferred in 1867, Giuseppe De Nittis quickly became a prolific painter of Paris as a modern and worldly city, capturing its energy and transformative power through a series of outdoor paintings that will grow significantly larger. Uninterested in the classic urban view, often celebratory of streets and historical monuments, he approaches the painting of streets and parks as he did the paintings of the countryside: through a total immersion and real-life observation of its life and society, of how people experience public places. As urbanists struggle to understand even nowadays, monumental landmarks such as the Arc du Triomphe, the Place de la Madeleine, and les Invalides,  are merely backdrops for the life of the city.
His compositions are photographic, and he thrives when the weather is harsh. Splendid examples are Gardens of Paris with Pale Sun, Seine Landscape with Gray Sun, and Frost Effect. I’m completely in love with these atmospheric effects that will reach their peak, as one might imagine, once the artist visits London.

As we have seen, De Nittis had been a devoted painter en plain air since his earlier years with the Resina School, and he found in Paris the greatest supporters of this approach with the Impressionists. He frequented Édouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, and Edgar Degas. In 1874, Degas himself invited him to take part in the group’s historic first exhibition at the studio of photographer Félix Nadar, to which De Nittis sent five works, all examples of en plein air painting.

Horseracing in Paris

Starting in the 1850s, Paris experienced a series of urban transformations that permanently altered its landscape and, particularly, the city park called Bois de Boulogne was transformed from hunting grounds for French royalty to an open venue that quickly became popular amongst the new elite: leisure activities such as horseback riding and racing became widely requested and, to accommodate these pastimes, two racecourses were established at the park’s southern periphery: Longchamp and Auteuil.
Longchamp opened in 1857, followed by Auteuil in 1873.

For a man who loved dust in his youth and had grown to love well-dressed gatherings, this environment might have felt like Christmas, as it offered both.

Study for the Races

De Nittis recorded with an attentive eye the image of the elegant society sitting on the stands, carefully following the race hovering on the seats as in Alle corse di Auteuil. Sulla seggiola or distracting themselves, lost in the frivolous chatter of society, as in Studio per le corse I. A splendid canvas such as Il ritorno dalle corse (La signora col cane) tells of how races were a worldly event, in which one participated almost parading, wearing the best dress.

Return from the Races (Lady with a Dog)Paris under the snow

For a guy from Apulia, snow must have been quite an extraordinary event and the weather in Paris made a point to astonish De Nittis with exceptional snowfalls between 1874 and 1875. The white candor provides a perfect backdrop to highlight people and their behaviour, but the artist doesn’t fail to capture the rarefied and luminous atmosphere, the impalpable dimension given by the snow to the grand city of Paris. De Nittis depicts the city engaged in amusements and struggles, white elegant ladies wrapped in heavy fur cloaks traverse Paris accompanied by small dogs and children. One particular pastime he appreciates is ice skating: On the Snow, The Skater and Léontine Skating, perfectly capture a sort of carefree winter joy.

These are works that mark the progressive alignment with the research of the Impressionists, in the meticulous study of atmospheric rendering and refraction of light. Played on a narrow range of colours and on the contrast between the figures in dark clothes in the foreground and the very bright and often deliberately blurred backgrounds, these paintings are characterised by great virtuosity in the weaving of chromatic accords, based on a thousand variations of white, beige, grey and violet.

Paris Indoor

In a city such as Paris, life doesn’t only happen in the street. On the contrary, it is in the salons that the aristocracy and middle-class meet and mingle, spreading new ideas and discussing the novelties of the age.

From the late 1870s, De Nittis began to study the effects of artificial light while indoors, and his research will follow the same approach it did en plein air. The numerous scenes of drawing rooms, by candlelight or gas lamps, will always pay great attention to the light source and quality, scattering or glowing around richly decorated interiors and elegant crowds.
And he will be welcomed among these gatherings, as he had triumphed in the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and was awarded the Legion of Honor. The painter held parties for artists and authors at his home on the rue Viète, and he was a regular guest at the salon of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, in rue de Berry.
He paints one of these gatherings in the stunning canvas below.

The Salon of Princess Mathilde

My favourite painting of this period however has to be either the charming little scene titled Around the Shade, in which the point of light is such a main character that it’s in the freaking title, or the absolutely stunning Lady with a Fan.

Lady with a Fan

De Nittis was recognised by critics as “the painter of today’s elegance,” according to a definition by André Michel. In these refined interiors, mirror of the sumptuous taste of the Second Empire, are distinguished men in tuxedos, chatting quietly, but above all elegant ladies, wrapped in evening dresses with long train and vertiginous necklines, described with an incredible attention to the rendering of the shiny fabrics.

Around the ShadeLondon

In April 1874, De Nittis left for London in search of new patrons, as he finally fell out of favor with the merchant Adolphe Goupil. In the English capital, he found the painter James Tissot, who introduced him to London circles, fostering an acquaintance with the wealthy banker Kaye Knowles, among the artist’s greatest supporters.

“I worked so much in England and I loved London so much… from the first day, London was propitious for me.”

Study for the London Bridge

Far from being a stranger to poverty, De Nittis is profoundly struck by the living conditions he encounters in the slums and, though his patrons wouldn’t appreciate paintings dedicated to these themes, he manages to capture social differences even when celebrating the vibrant, modern life of London streets. From the National Gallery to the Church of Saint Martin, from Westminster to its Bridge, from Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square, people of all kinds mingle in his paintings, and the keen observer will manage to capture all the contradictions De Nittis shows us.

Westminster Bridge

The best example of the way De Nittis mixes the subjects might be this view of a street in London, where an elegant lady with an umbrella crosses the street with her child and a homeless man is scrutinized by the uncaring look of a policeman, people go about in their carriages and a cardboard panel shouts about some things we will never know.

Japanese Fascination

When Japan participated for the first time in the Universal Exhibition of 1867, Paris and the whole world were flooded by a sort of fever for Japan: artists, writers, critics, and the public developed a hunger for these new forms and shapes, this aesthetical approach that was so pleasant and yet so modern.

De Nittis himself tried his hand at Japanizing subjects from 1869 onwards, introducing into his interiors oriental elements such as screens, etchings or kimonos. Three splendid examples are The Japanese Screen, Between the Screens and The Orange-colored Kimono.

Fascinated by Japanese art, De Nittis would also try his hand at creating silk fans with near-abstract brushes of watercolor. Although not traditionally included in exhibitions and retrospectives, these are unquestionably a testament to his will to understand the deepest principles of Japanese art, and are way ahead of their times in terms of technique and abstraction.

Back to painting outdoors: Switzerland and Saint-Germain-en-Laye

The exhibition goes full circle by dedicating one last room to the scenes De Nittis painted in the countryside, close to the premature end of his life.

An approach that always connected him with Impressionism, painting outdoors allowed De Nittis to pick a bright palette, especially when far away from the fogs of Paris and London, and his paintings light up with luminous tones, increasingly free brushstroke and chromatic contrast, the results of careful research on light.

He would die unexpectedly, on August 21, 1884. Buried at Pere Lachaise in Paris, his epitaph reads:

“Here lies the painter Giuseppe De Nittis, who died at the age of thirty-eight. In full youth. In full love. In full glory. Like heroes and demigods.”

#MermaidMonday: Venilia

Venilia was a minor deity in Roman times, associated with the winds and the sea, and mentioned by both Virgil and Ovid. Part of a two-entities group associated with Neptune, Salacia and Vénilia, she expressed one of two aspects, domains or modes of action of the god: while Salacia can represent the rushing and possibly rebellious and dangerous flow of water, and Venilia, the calm and docile flow of the same waters. Salacia is the goddess of salt, in a time when the commodity of exchange was not money but salt itself, and no less vital than water. The more archaic cults of Salacia and Venilia were largely supplanted by the cult of Amphitrite, the official wife of Neptune, particularly venerated on the coasts and in the ports for the success of navigation and trade.

She’s today’s focus on my Patreon.

#ChthonicThursday: Kalma

Kalma’s name, the Finnish goddess associated with death and decay, possibly means “The Stench of Corpses,” which is enough of a declaratory statement in itself. Narratives revolving around her, often find her lingering in graveyards and cemeteries so much that the Finnish word for graveyard, kalmisto, is thought to derive from her name.

She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.