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regular posting somewhere else just ask
SET FOURTEEN - ROUND ONE - MATCH SEVEN
"Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks" (1880–1891 - Ilya Repin) / "Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490-1510 - Hieronymus Bosch)
My Repin propaganda:
It’s actually a nice detail that this matchup was posted today considering it’s Ukraine’s independence day; [1] for context (that I regrettably didn’t add when I submitted), the Cossacks composed the “reply” in question to the Sultan Mehmed IV’s demand that they surrender, despite the fact that the Cossacks had just wiped out the entirety of one of the Sultan’s Janissary forces. [2]
So, in high spirits from victory, the leaders of the Cossacks got together and co-wrote a vulgar letter to tell him to sod off, which is the subject that Repin chose to paint. The detail is enough to keep you absorbed for ages:
The dog in the lower left corner disgruntled at all the noise, the Cossack in a white coat turned away to assess newcomers, from the main version alone. The blue of the distant horizon is so beautiful it wounds me. It’s in harmony with the smoke from their pipes and cigars (and a vessel that I can’t really identify).
If you read the Wikipedia page, there’s a very charming compilation of all the models with their bios. For example, the man penning the letter is Dmytro Yavornytsky, the historian and archaeologist who helped Repin depict the scene with historical accuracy. There’s a man he chanced upon at Alexandrovsk pier and captured studies of, and Kuznetsov the battle painter, and Glinka’s nephew, and the man with a “makitra” bowl cut, beside the serious man in yellow — who Repin never saw in real life. He was a student who had to leave the Academy of Arts because of his illness. They took a gypsum mask of his face and Repin referred to it. While they were taking the mask the young man smiled, and left a smile in the gypsum, a smile that carried all the way to Repin’s Reply. [3]
He also made several versions apart from the main one above, which I think should be accounted for; Repin’s process itself is the masterwork to me. Many drafts stand as whole works on their own, as they’re all complete with stunning grounding detail:
From a preliminary sketch [4] that is just as lovely. Repin is incredible at capturing fine human emotions (as evinced in the sublime horror of Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan), and he is just so good at laughter. You can almost feel the laughter from all the way deep in the man’s chest, or feel it wrack the second man until he’s wheezing.
From [2]: “That Zaporozhian legacy is very much alive today. Modern Ukrainians accord their Zaporozhian forebears pride of place in the nation’s history and culture. It’s a heritage which helps to explain how - right now, in the face of overwhelming odds - Ukrainian people up and down the country are displaying an almost inconceivable bravery on the battlefield.”
Dewar’s piece on the painting details virtually all the historical background you could want, with the gore and tragedy that you might not get from Repin’s painting. But despite the distance between now and the 1600s, the message of independence is very relevant:
A reenactment by Ukrainian soldiers. [5] Vote Repin!! Happy Ukrainian Independence!!!
[1] Åslund, A. (2009). How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy, Peterson Institute for International Economics, ISBN 978-0-88132-427-3 (page 185)
[2] Dewar, A. (2022). Ukraine’s Zaporozhian Cossacks.
[3] Wikipedia. (n.d.). Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Models. Accessed 24 August 2023.
[4] Repin, I. (1880-1890). Sketch for Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Place: Tretyakov Gallery.
[5] u/thewyspa (2022). Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. In r/ukraine. Can’t find a more original source so Reddit will have to do. Accessed 24 August 2023.
* at least 4 lines; not a song (or not learned as a song); can be an excerpt which holds up as a standalone piece; any theme, type and source (children's poems, memes, bits from novels and plays in verse, etc.)
** will remember with 95%+ accuracy if u have the time to think about it, but no looking up
for extra credit share your first language or nationality with the answer. if you consider your number to be high compared to your irl circle, would love to know what you think the reason behind that is.
SET THREE - ROUND ONE - MATCH EIGHT
“Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World)” (c.1499-1510/2006-07 - Leonardo da Vinci) / “Untitled (billboard of an empty unmade bed)” (1991 - Félix González-Torres)
So first off I REALLY urge you to open Salvator Mundi in a new tab to have a proper look at it.
Allow me to paraphrase an old post I wrote about this for propaganda purposes:
If you know anything about this painting, it is probably that in 2017 it sold for over $450 Million, the greatest sum of money paid for a painting by a WIDE margin (over $100 million more than the second most expensive if Wikipedia is to be believed). But the thing about that price tag is that it is really just shorthand for what an utterly outlandish object this even is:
It is attributed to the defining artist of European art tradtion. It is a "male companion" to the most famous painting in the world. As a lost object it was already famous and between the 1700s and its reappearance in 2005 we don’t really know what happened to it. We never knew what happened to it, where this particular painting has been. We assume that the object described in inventories and sales notices in the 1600s is this painting! We assume that that object, noted as inventory, is the original but really we do not know! There is a painting in a 1525 inventory that is believed to be the original, but even that, we have no idea!
And yet. $450 million.
(This is the painting post-cleaning but pre-restoration. Both the process of attribution and restoration were highly controversial and if you're interested, there is an excellent documentary from 2021 titled The Lost Leonardo.)
$450 000 000+ for some pigment on scuffed up wood. For one of the most common motifs of western art tradition. Made in the likeness of a model who likely was nobody special (except, perhaps, in the eyes of the painter). For what might once have been touched by the hands of some bloke who painted about 20 other paintings, in Italy many hundered years ago. For something that is now, allegedly, hanging out on a Saudi Arabian yacht, that has not seen public eye since the auction. Salvator Mundi was a demonstration of wealth in renaissance Italy and it is now.
When I look at the scuffed up and damaged wooden panel, while I see the image of Christ gazing at me through five hundered years, I also see the Object and all the ways in which it seems to drive people to a sort of rational delirium.
500+ years ago, some guy attempted to convey the idea of Jesus as sacrifice and world saviour - the core of Christian theology - by use of paint and brushes, into a single picture for a single customer. It survived wars and revolutions and reformations and while I know the image and the story of the object intimately, I have never actually seen it and I probably never will, it is paint on a wooden panel and it is quite likely to outlive me by centuries.
THAT, friends and tumblrinas, fucks me up.
have to get my ass to an 8am dentist appointment so this isnt getting finished but anyway
this was supposed to be about nesting simulated realities (like russian dolls) and it actualy being an infinite loop of simulation so you can never get to the “real” thing because it doesnt exist, its just a shepard tone of digital physics
happy early ides, have a scandal!
per artnews, it's looking pretty certain that this "eid mar" coin (originally minted by Brutus to celebrate Julius Caesar's assassination), which sold at auction in 2020 for a record-breaking $4.2 million, was looted. at the very least, its provenance (the record of who has bought, sold, and owned a work throughout its history) was falsified, and in 2015 owner Richard Beale was telling potential buyers that it came from "an old Swiss collection," (love that) which is apparently known code that something's provenance is dubious.
it's unknown at this time why a manufactured provenance was necessary, but the scheme was uncovered following the discovery that 5 coins Beale attempted to sell last year were looted from Gaza.
