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It is already the middle of October! This year has ground by with such agonizing slowness that it is easy to overlook how swiftly it has flown by! (?) Uhh…anyway, regular readers know that Ferrebeekeeper always presents a special theme week for Halloween, and, plague or no, this year will not be an exception. Past topics have included the Monster Echidna, Flowers of the Underworld, Flaying, the Undead, and Evil Clowns! Place your bets on what the special theme for 2020 will be!
Before we get there, though, I though lets call back to one of my favorite posts from years back by featuring a beautiful ceiling in Venice. Nobody can travel to Venice this year (ahem, not that I was exactly a regular ’round the ol’ Lagoon before all of this happened) so we might as well go there by means of the magical time/space dispensation which art gives to us.
Here is the ceiling of The Chamber of Apollo in the Palazzo Grimani di Santa Maria Formosa in Venice. It was painted by the somewhat strange Florentine mannerist, Francesco de Rossi (AKA Francesco Salviati). Completed around 1540 AD, the work showcases Apollo, god of art and light. The center of the composition portrays Apollo riding the chariot of the sun while the constellations of the horoscope circle around him. The four main panels show special episodes from Apollo’s canon of myths. Two of the four concern Apollo’s dispute with Marsyas!
Although the sad end of the contest definitely appears on the ceiling, my favorite panel is the panel (above) which features Apollo listening to Marsyas play. As Marsyas plays his aulos he prances with wild proud abandon! Apollo’s lyre sits at his feet as the god angrily listens to the concert. Not content to let Marsyas play unmolested, Apollo points an angry finger of foreshadowing at Marsyas’ torso.
My own artwork of Apollo and Marsyas portrays the contest itself as opposed to the outcome (although de Rossi painted Marsyas bound to a tree in the next pendant to the right). Like de Rossi’s artwork, my thoughts concerning Apollo and what he means keep going in a circle. I wish somebody from the Renaissance would post some comments so we could get to the bottom of this bloody myth, but I suppose time does not work quite that way. We already have the opinion of long gone artists though, however they are not expressed as little snippets of digital prose, but as magnificent paintings. we will just have to keep on staring at them!
As we move closer to Halloween, it is time to present some more beautiful Gothic imagery…but there is a problem. Ferrebeekeeper has already featured posts about Gothic clocks, gates, gazebos, houses, gingerbread houses, beds, mirrors, Christmas trees, literature, fonts and, uh Goths. What is left?
The great Gothic churches and cathedrals of yesteryear were built in an age before elaborate & inexpensive steel work. While it is easy to understand how stone columns, tall stone arches, and flying buttresses could be used to give height to the great cathedrals of the middle ages, what is harder to grasp is how these huge halls had ceilings! Timber has certain limits of size & strength. Stone, though strong, is heavy! How did the great architects of medieval Europe surmount these limitations so that they didn’t have to pray in the rain?
The answer is that they designed elaborate and beautiful rib vaults. These structures utilized crossed or diagonal arched “ribs” of stone as a supporting framework for thin stone ceiling panels. The results are as stunning as the outside of the cathedrals–but in a more functional way.
To show what I mean, here is a gallery of famous Gothic vaults. Some are plain whereas others are complex. A few are even ornamented (although the ceilings seem to have been left less encrusted with statues, paintings, and mosaics than other parts of the cathedral because they were a weak point and they needed to be functional. The beauty of these structures is thus more like the beauty of diatoms and less like the beauty of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling…although…come to think of it…
There are whole architectural treatises detailing the fans, crosses, liernes, groins, stars, and domes of such cathedrals (and all of the ways they can be combined) but for now let’s just savor the beauty and artistry of stone made into sky.
The Library at Strawberry Hill
Horror writer Horace Walpole was one of the foremost figures responsible for the Gothic revival style which swept the English speaking world during the nineteenth century. Ferrebeekeeper has dedicated a post to his bizarre literary monsterpiece “The Castle of Otranto” and we have described the history of his own bizarre Rococo Gothic manor house “Strawberry Hill”. What we never showed you was the sumptuously decorated Gothic library of Strawberry Hill, which is surely one of England’s most splendid and eccentric rooms.
In the library, great white pointed arches reach up a green ceiling (dark green prior to a recent restoration and pale green after) towards a sumptuously painted ceiling. On the ceiling knights ride through intricate decorations around Walpole’s great “W”. Though he was the Prime Minister’s son, a baron, and a powerful politician, Horace Walpole was foremost a man of letters. His beautiful library reflects that interest and is a real work of art in its own right. It is not hard to see why the room, like the house, influenced a whole century of imitation and cast aesthetic echoes down to the present.
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