Dali House

The 1600 version of “The Judgement of Paris” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), which was based on Raphael’s. Rubens did at least three variations, but we’ll get to that.

And the Internet always tosses up three different renditions of Salvador Dali’s “Judgement of Paris”, and I’m not sure they’re all correct. He did his etching in the mid-1960s for a series called “Mythologie”. Have a look at this post for a bit more information on the subject.

Hacking into the legend of the Trojan War and all the paint that’s been poured into recording the event that started it.

The riveting soap opera played out in and around the myth that has for 3,000 years been known as “the Judgement of Paris” has for just as long had artists falling all over each other to get their versions down on canvas. Of course, all of Greek mythology has been painted as many times as Tom Sawyer’s picket fence, including the whole Trojan War ball of yarn back to front, but consider this particular episode:

* Three of history’s most beautiful women practically or altogether nude, and each aquiver with naked jealousy
* A guy — Joe Average — called upon to be the judge in their divine beauty pageant
* God the Father watching with keen interest
* And the fate of human civilisation teetering in the balance.

Who could resist subject matter like this? No one!

The Judgement in porcelain, from about 500 BCE, at Rome’s Capitoline Museums.

For centuries it was the ancient Greek and Roman scribes who had their way with the tale, complete with ribald humour, while the pot-painters of their time fumbled with the essentials. Finally, though, the more modern artists who knew how to depict lust properly got their chance and set up their easels on Mount Ida, where Paris was tending his sheep, an odd thing for him to be doing, since he was a prince of Troy.

Paris must have wondered why he was suddenly the designated model for an art class, but then he had had his moment of fame: He’d been the adjudicator in a bullfight — his own bull against a bovine who turned out to be Ares (not Taurus). Ares, to no one’s surprise, won.

Raphael’s “Judgement of Paris” is in fact the engraving made from it in 1515 by Marcantonio Raimondi. Somebody lost Raphael’s copy. Not to worry, Marcantonio (c1480-c1534) was one of the best in the printmaking business, influenced by Dürer and exceedingly clever at adding in his own backdrops.

In this detail, viewers take note of a character who’s taking note of them. This is where Édouard Manet found his tableau for “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” in 1863. Raphael or not, polite people at the Paris Salon freaked when they saw a naked female picnicking with a couple of swank “customers”. So Manet borrowed instead from Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and painted “Olympia”, and you should have heard the howling then!

The reason for the impromptu painters’ salon in the Phrygian highlands began to dawn on Paris when Hermes, the messenger boy, turned up with three quite fetching ladies. The painter-paparazzi must have had advance notice of their coming, Paris thought.

Hermes was carrying an apple, never a good sign in these scenarios, Paris thought further, and then he stopped thinking because the women had shed their clothes and begun bathing in the Spring of Ida. Hermes would have explained to him, if he could have held his attention long enough, that he was holding the Apple of Discord, which Eris, the Goddess of Discord, had chucked onto the banquet table at a party that she’d crashed.

Girolamo Benvenuto (1470-1524), with all the gilded, not-quite-natural nature of the Sienese artisans in his day.

The banquet was another scene of which there are dozens of great paintings: a wedding party that Zeus had thrown for Peleus and Thetis, who would one day give birth to Achilles, who would one day be played by Brad Pitt in a blockbuster film that would be quickly forgotten because it didn’t have much going for it beyond a couple of pretty good swordfights.

Eris wasn’t invited because she was, well, the Goddess of Discord, and who wants discord at a party? Disco, maybe, in a pinch, but not discord. She showed up anyway and, staying in character, caused discord. The golden apple she added to the buffet, she said, without naming names, belonged to the best-looking woman in the universe.

“Why, that would be me!” said the goddess Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and also of Cuckolded Wives, who was wedded to (and cuckolded by) Zeus.

“No, me!” said the goddess Athena, who enjoyed a good hunt.

“In your dreams,” said the goddess Aphrodite, who was, after all, the Goddess of Beauty. “It’s me!”

All eyes turned to Zeus, the capo del tutti capo of Mount Olympus, who, like most chairmen of the board, was all bluff and bluster. He passed the buck and nominated Paris, the cattle judge, to decide which babe was the best looking. See the rest.

Two weeks and 140 years ago something happened in Mexico that got Éduard Manet and a whole lot of other people upset. What happened next is also an amazing story.

Manet, not content at having tossed bombs into the courtyard of public opinion with a pair of inflammatory paintings featuring gratuitous nudity, set out in 1867 to blow a hole in French politics with this festive Mexican scene. Then he exported the resentment that it caused to America, to see what kind of damage he could foment there. It was a near-complete rout all the way — for Manet, that is.

Monsieur Manet, a dementedly provocative mass of quirks on two legs, was at the time actually persevering in art long enough to be gaining some critical and public acceptance. The avant garde had started to catch up with him and tempers had cooled about the pompously naked “Olympia” and the muffin-in-the-buff in “Dejeuner sur l’herbe”. Time for another unholy scandal, he seems to have decided.

Politics obliged by providing the subject matter wrapped in newsprint: Maximilian, the Habsburg duke whom Napoleon III had maniacally named emperor of Mexico three years earlier, had been abandoned there when the French troops were yanked out at the outset of a civil war, and had now, on June 19, 1867, been shot by a firing squad. The travesty boiled Manet’s republican blood and he went after Napoleon with vermillion-tinged brushes in both hands. See the rest.

Claude Monet was riding a train in early 1883 when he first saw Giverny, population 300. Now the train is gone, having served its purpose in delivering him here.

Monet bought a spacious farmhouse and by May had moved in with his companion Alice Hosched, his two sons and her six children. The property came with a vegetable garden and a hectare of fruit trees. He rented until 1890, when he bought the place and turned it into an Eden with strictly enforced rules for the flora bunda. It saved him walking out into the surrounding countryside (although somehow his neighbours’ haystacks proved irresistible).

Monet didn’t want anything overly organised, and as long as the flowers were in rows of complementary colours they could grow any way they wanted. When he bought the neighbouring property across the railway in 1893and freaked out the villagers by widening the little brook called the Ru (a tendril of the Seine) into a pond, the water garden it eventually became was all askew and curvy.

The inspiration came from his collection of Japanese prints, and he topped it off with a bamboo grove the now-famous arched bridge, caressed by weeping willows. Monet made sure his gardener cruised around the pond every morning and scrubbed the railway soot off the lily pads. They had to be ready to have their portraits painted at any time. See the rest.

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside. See the rest.

I’ve done some damage to my right shoulder and, pending a visit to a doctor, envision myself in some sort of cast and unable to type with my right hand. Could I manage with my left? Then I found this line in the basic, one-size-fits-all, self-replicating online biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919): “In 1880 Renoir broke his right arm and for some time painted with his left hand.”

For me it raises two questions: How did he break his arm, and what did his southpaw paintings look like?

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1880 paintings, even with one website that’s still under construction being quite off-handed (pardon the pun) about jumbling the dates of his works. Then I discovered that the self-replicating biography itself had the wrong year for his skeleton-rearranging accident — it was in 1897.

There was a lesson to be learned here, but I like to make the same mistakes twice, just to be sure I wasn’t right the first time.

It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1897 paintings, and put the ones from 1880 back in the museums when no one was looking. The broken-arm paintings, displayed throughout this post (shown here is “Young Woman in Profile”), are fine, nothing bizarro or skewed about them that I can see, nothing you can spot and say, “Oh, that’s so gauche!” (get it?). But more on that later.

How did he break his arm? I kept searching and found the “official” reason: He fell off his bicycle. See the rest.