Dali House

German artist Simon Schubert’s folded paper presented me with a small, unexpected dilemma when it was preparing these images to post. Above is one of his portraits — I’m not sure if this is Samuel Beckett or not — with contrast added, and below as it’s presented on his website.

Does it lose something when the contrast is enhanced? It certainly looks less like a sheet of paper that anyone might pick up and toy with absent-mindedly — or go to work on vigorously.

The two folded images below, only slightly enhanced, might give a better sense of the ghostliness that’s lost when Photoshop utilised on Schubert’s creations. Because that’s what I think he’s trying to maintain in the clever process, when seen in a more neutral light: a spirit roaming the page, an inkling of potential, a memory of something lost.

See the rest.

There seems to be some dispute as to whether this painting of the Last Supper is actually by Santo Peranda (1566-1638), also known as Sante and, according to other sources, Santa (not kidding).

Evidently the much busier Palma Giovane (1548?-1628) is another suspect, but this “Ultima Cena” was being auctioned off in Peranda’s name in Milan recently, for around €35,000.

Regardless of who’s responsible, it’s certainly not the way we’re accustomed to seeing Jesus’ going-away party.

Here the banquet is transported to a rather lively Italian restaurant that lets dogs and cats loaf about. And two of the apostles appear to be having a secret tipple directly opposite the boss.

Mannerism takes its liberties, but you wonder what Leonardo must have thought of this. He was working just down the road at the time.

Vincent is showing two of his works at the month-long fifth Salon des Indépendants — “Irises” and “Starry Night on the Rhône” — and the reaction has been very encouraging for him. Monet and Pisarro have expressed their admiration, and so
has the influential critic Albert Aurier.

When Rolf Gross last visited Dali House in February, he had some wonderful things to reveal about Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. The man does not sit idly. His latest contribution to art history (and, not incidentally, Google Earth) is a thorough survey of the great fresco painters of Tuscany.

You can view the project at Rolf’s website here or, if you have the free Google Earth program, download the tour here and enjoy a virtual hike around the Renaissance chapels of northern Italy.

The frescoes, painted between 1200 and 1600 and many of them fully restored in recent years, are displayed along with biographies of the artists, from champions of the stature of Piero della Francesca to the little-known Jacopo Potormo.

Cimabue is featured, Giotto del Bondone, Gozzoli and, in Florence — “the treasure house of Tuscany” — you can get better acquainted with Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Luca Signorelli and a man called Il Sodoma.

Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549) evidently didn’t mind people calling him The Sodomite at all, and even exulted in the nickname in poetry and song — and used it as his signature.

He was married with children but, according to one detractor at least, “he had always boys and beardless youths about him of whom he was inordinately fond”. And his house was full of strange animals, too. So there!

Rolf Gross offers a look at Il Sodoma’s 1508 fresco cycle at the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, “his major work”, depicting scenes from the life of St Benedict.

A work by the illustrator, name unknown, of Oliver Madox Hueffer’s 101-year-old treatise “The Book of Witches”, which is seemingly never out of print. In fact, Google Books has it online here, though without the pictures.