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Wilde and Borges in Paris

L’Hôtel, Paris

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The Hôtel d’Alsace at 13 Rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris, is the place where Oscar Wilde spent his last few months in 1900 prior to expiring in room no. 16. There is a plaque to Jorge Luis Borges on the wall opposite the one for Oscar Wilde. Borges had a lifelong fascination with Wilde, the first piece he had published was a translation into Spanish of The Happy Prince (and The Modern Word has a short essay by Borges about Wilde). Wilde is celebrated with two plaques but what these pictures don’t show is the atrium itself, a small space in the centre of the building which gives the hotel a distinction that Wilde might have appreciated, even if he would have preferred to spend his final hours in one of the more luxurious establishments.

There are more views of the narrow Rue des Beaux-Arts at Google Maps while the hotel has a website here.

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Prints

Transformation

Transformations

Jun 5, 2013

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The Transformation of Actaeon (no date) by Jean Mignon.

More gleanings from one of the better provinces of the Google Empire (unless and until they abandon it…), these being recent additions to the Google Art Project from the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.

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Jean Mignon’s etching shows Diana’s transformation of Actaeon into a stag as punishment for his catching her bathing. This is one of those scenes where subsequent developments are shown in the background of the same picture, in this case poor Actaeon’s pursuit and death at the jaws of his own dogs. Off to the side there’s the curious detail of a pissing-boy statue like the famous Manneken Pis in Brussels.

Artworks, Prints

Jacques Callot

The Devil in the Detail






[The top image is the complete work – click on it for a reasonably large sized version – and the images below are details from it]

Jacques Callot (1592-1635) created the above etching – The Temptation of St Anthony – in the last year of his life. It is likely that his previous depiction of St Anthony from 1617 is online(Artcylopedia) but I couldn’t find it. In the intervening period there had been a brutal invasion of his native land, the Lorraine Duchy, by the French, which probably influenced the nature of some of the details in this wonderfully grotesque and severe portrayal.

St Anthony lived sometime during the 3rd and 4th centuries and is said to have established the religious practice of ascetism. Legend (recorded by Athanasius) has our hermit Saint beseiged by the devil on a number of occasions, projected in the present circumstances as phantoms of wild beasts, wolves, lions, snakes and scorpions.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.fr/2005/12/devil-in-detail.html

(c) Prof. Ian Howard; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation\

Summa Theologiae

Ian Howard

Arts Council Collection