Jake Manion has designed a new website for me, published this evening.
www.bridgetheriz.co.uk
This includes a 360 degree record of several sculptures. The photographer is Peter Huggins and it was his idea to make this animated photographic record. It makes so much sense: sculpture is created to be read in the round and it is always hard to catch the essence of a piece in two dimensions only.
Sunday, 23 March 2014
The Judgement of Paris, A Conversation with Luca Giordano
This is a solo show at the new Merchant House Gallery in Lowestoft - a really lovely gallery housed in a listed building in the centre of town.
I saw the painting by Luca Giordana (1634-1705), 'The Judgement of Paris', at Houghton Hall last year, when Walpole's original art collection was loaned from the Hermitage. There were some wonderful pieces in the collection, but in the central hall were these huge Giordano's, of which the Judgement caught my eye in a very annoying way. I bought a card and spent Winter evenings studying it and making exploratory drawings based on the picture and its theme. This exhibition is the result.
The poses are very dynamic and the picture is well structured, which makes the offense of the underlying narrative presentation - arrogant Paris surveying the three great goddesses as if he was in a brothel - more striking than usual. On checking texts, I was surprised to find that Paris did indeed insist that each goddess stripped naked as they came forward one by one to offer him their bribes to be selected as the fairest. So this degradation of the female divine goes back to the roots of the story.
Of course exploring narrative so directly within visual expression has long been considered the business of academics or at best illustration, but it has been fascinating to take up the challenge and try out for myself what is possible. Returning to the long-discredited activity of studying an C18th mythological painting in the Grand Manner has been a surprisingly rewarding experience!
It's good to get back to first things now and again, studies in drawing, terracotta, not thinking about making 'art' but just exploring a theme for its own sake, watching out for what germinates.
I am surprised yet again at how resonant the myths are if you live with them for a while. It was especially interesting to find out that Aphrodite did not exist within the Mycenaean pantheon at the time of the Trojan War (about C13th BC), but was possibly introduced to Greece from the Phoenicians in Cyprus in the first millennium BC, and by the time Homer wrote the Iliad. So I imagine the role of Aphrodite in the Judgement of Paris story and subsequent elopement of Helen, followed by the seige of Troy, can be seen in context of the emerging Doric culture on the Greek mainland after the decline of the Mycenaeans.
It echoes with all sorts of cultural realignments relevant to the social re-organisation of the Greeks in the first millennium BC, an age which Ovid describes as one in which men lost their reverence, and one in which women lost their voice (as recently outlined by Mary Beard), becoming chattel within marriage, the legal possession of their male relatives.
Though degraded by this time as the jealous and vengeful wife of Zeus, the goddess Hera, according to Gimbutas, has roots way back in Neolithic cult, being paid homage as the very essence of life on earth, creative, destructive and regenerative in its bounty. In contrast, Aphrodite, however divine, severely lacks dimension, her lovely body being sadly insufficient to contain the awesome power of earth's force. But men and women are still dazzled to this day by her enchantment and promise.
And as Neo-Platonic symbol of aesthetic aspiration, both male and female artists perhaps continue to worship Aphrodite, for our notion of the world of 'high art' is founded upon her attributes, not least the promise of glamour and fame.
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