Les dessins de Rodin, part 1
Les dessins de Rodin, part 2
While researching my thesis, I came across the text “Les Dessins de Rodin” (above), in which Arthur Symons says:
“The principle of Rodin‘s work is sex-a sex aware of itself, and expending energy desperately to reach an impossible goal.”
Also new to me was Rodin’s Iris, Messenger of the Gods and “Rodin’s Reputation“, Anne Wagner’s deft article on it.
All my research on Rodin and eroticism can be found at Eros and Rodin.
“The Music of Gounod” illustrates liminality, which in a previous post I called neither fish nor fowl, something inbetween.
At the same time it illustrates something non-existent, an impossible object, like music for the deaf or for people who are tone deaf. The aural experience has been synaesthetically translated in a visual experience.
Listen to this drawing, it seems to say.
I am reminded of the dictum by Walter Pater: “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” And of medium specificity.
The Invention of the Art of Drawing (1791) illustrates the Butades myth.
The myth is reported by Pliny.
This is the story: a certain Kora (also called Callirhoe), was in love with a boy at Corinth who had to leave the country. Whereupon she drew on the wall the outline of the shadow of his face. From this outline her father Butades modeled a face in clay, and baked the model, thus preserving for his daughter a face in relief of the boy she loved.
My thoughts? Amazing, but, couldn’t Butades just as well have made a death mask of the face of the boy?
This post is inspired by Victor Stoichita‘s book Short History of the Shadow (1997).
PS Pliny’s shadows remind me of da Vinci’s stains.