Monday, February 2, 2015

"Renaissance Painters Gone Wild, and Other News"

A few tidbits from The Paris Review:

Piero_di_cosimo,_scena_di_caccia
Piero di Cosimo, Scena di caccia (A Hunting Scene), ca. 1490.
  • “Among twenty reasonable comments, / The only livid thing / Was the caw of the trollbird.” From an anonymous versificator striking at the very quintessence of the contemporary experience: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Trollbird.”
  • The paintings of Piero di Cosimo, a Renaissance-era artist who ate nothing but boiled eggs and painted scenes of alarming violence and sensuality, are coming to America for the first time in seventy-five years. “While Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci were all making worlds of ideal perfection, their contemporary, Piero di Cosimo, had set out on a different, more twisted path, bewitching his fellow Florentines with his visual fables and mythological fantasies … Piero’s ability to conjure the macabre, the monstrous and the miraculous offers its own distinctive pleasures and a rare insight into the more neurotic recesses of the Renaissance imagination.”
  • ...MORE
We've been debating opening the comments section of the blog but have been deterred by the trollbirds.
Them and the frumious somthing-or-other.