Prints

Transformation

Transformations

Jun 5, 2013

mignon1.jpg

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.

mignon2.jpg

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