The Eiffel Tower rises above Paris with such familiarity that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Its lattice of iron has become part of the visual order of Paris, alongside the stone facades, the river, the bridges, and the great monuments created from earlier centuries. Yet, when the tower was proposed in …
Category Archives: Art History
The Uncanny and the Failure of Order
Let us journey back to the time of Dr. Freud in 1919 – A lamp sits on a table in an ordinary room. The lamp rises, but there is something wrong about the lamp. This is the peculiar force of the uncanny, where it is not an ugly event. It is ugliness of situation, which …
Ugliness in Art – Redemption & Romanticism
On ugliness in art – If art seeks beauty, what is it to do with pain, deformity, terror, revulsion, and disorder? Artists should not simply exclude them, because the world does not exclude them if it can be reflected. Lessing saw this problem in Laocoon. Poetry and sculpture, he argued, do not suffer from the …
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Reclaiming Form During the Renaissance
The Renaissance did not only restart antiquity, it reordered what could be observed and valued. From the margins, the coarse, the bodily, the obscene, moved into the center of cultural life. In Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, obscenity is no longer a feature of carnival or tolerated disorder. It becomes deliberate, cultivated, and visible within educated …
Order, Error, and the Eye
Greek culture did not claim that the world was wholly beautiful. Its myths include monstrosities, mistakes, and bodies that fall outside any ideal. Plato sharpened that tension into philosophy. Sensible reality, as he saw it, was a diminished copy of a more perfect world of forms. The visible world was not the final standard. It …
Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
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Eros Barefoot, Beauty Unfinished
Walk through a museum and the first signal is chromatic. Marble reads as white, and white reads as pure. Aphrodite and Apollo become an argument before they become a figure: ideal beauty, ideal calm, ideal proportion. Neoclassicism did not merely preserve the antique, it manufactured an antique that could serve as a stable reference for …
Geometrics and Art
The Renaissance, a period of significant intellectual, artistic, and cultural rebirth, marked the combination of art and science, especially through the application of geometric principles in artistic representation. This era witnessed the pioneering development of linear perspective, a technique that revolutionized the way depth and three-dimensional objects were portrayed on two-dimensional surfaces. The mathematical foundation …
Priestess of Delphi (Oracle or Pythia)
A twenty year dream came true this December, 2023, as I traveled to Adelaide, Australia to view John Collier’s Priestess of Delphi (1891), the Oracle, or Pythia. I was able to view the painting for two days. I am not afraid to say that the experience was overwhelming, and I definately had tears in my …