Oh Rose, thou art sick

mercredi, août 24, 2005

Particle by particle

With the emphasis on ART. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to be precise. With a huge Aragog in front. She used to live in New York, but she decided to migrate North. Better for her eggs and all. Yes, she does speak Chinese.

The gallery was so huge that you could lose days and days of your life in there. It existed 125 years, therefore they had a temporary exhibition on the Renaissance painters in Florence. You know, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael ..

Experience one of the most outstanding periods in the entire history of art: Florence from about 1500 to 1550. For Florentine artists, life drawing and expressive human form were the traditional basis of good art, and this approach crystallized during the High Renaissance in the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Implicit in disegno – the Italian term for drawing – is not only the idea of skill, but also the talent required to design in a more spiritual sense, in the invention of beautiful objects of all descriptions. The active and expressive figure is paramount, especially in those works with a strong narrative content.
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There was lots about Mythology, Leda and the Swan etc. Also Christian tales of yore. This one saint who seemingly died smiling with lots of arrows in his body everywhere seemed to be very popular. Sebastian was his name. He was a Roman army dude, who healed people with cross signs, and never did die from the arrows but was beaten to death anyways later on for being a Christian. He became the Small God of the Plague in the 14th century.
Yes, so that was very interesting. We saw the masters et all.
Those were not the only masters we saw ~ this gallery has an enormous collection, amongst others Mondriaan and Jan Steen, impressionism and Inuit art, The group of seven and modernism. My favourites were as always Monet, Renoir, Degas, Gaugin .....
The best part was, I saw a Rossetti painting for the first time ever in real life! It was this painting he made intended for William and Jane's marriage, of some Dante scenes about Beatrice -->
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