[New post] A life of Theseus in paintings: 1 Whose are those sandals?

hoakley posted: "Theseus was among the great heroes of the classical Greek world. Sometimes considered the founder of the city of Athens, in myth and legend he was more accurately the person responsible for its early development and growth. He was also, like most classica" Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on The Eclectic Light Company A life of Theseus in paintings: 1 Whose are those sandals? by hoakley Theseus was among the great heroes of the classical Greek world. Sometimes considered the founder of the city of Athens, in myth and legend he was more accurately the person responsible for its early development and growth. He was also, like most classical heroes, fundamentally flawed. We owe much to Plutarch for his lengthy biography comparing Theseus' life with that of Romulus, founder of the city of Rome. For a long time, the life of Theseus was as celebrated a series of myths as those of Heracles, Jason or Aeneas. In about 1340-41, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a very long (almost 10,000 line) epic poem Teseida, or The Theseid, which in turn inspired The Knight's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Paolo da Visso (1431–1481) Scenes from Boccaccio's Teseida (date not known), front of a cassone, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons. Paolo da Visso (1431–1481) painted these three scenes from Boccaccio's epic on the front of a cassone - the visual equivalent of Plutarch's account of the adventures of Theseus. Like Perseus, Theseus had complicated origins. His mortal father, Aegeus the king of a much smaller Athens, had been childless, but following the prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, the King of Troezen got him drunk and packed him off to bed with his daughter Aethra. She was instructed in a dream to leave Aegeus asleep, and to go to a nearby island, where she was also impregnated by the god Poseidon. Theseus, who is presumed to have been conceived that night, was thus considered to have double paternity, by god and man, a common qualification for the heroes of myth. Aegeus returned to Athens, after burying his sword and sandals under a massive rock. He told Aethra that when his son grew up, she should tell him to move the rock, as a test. If he succeeded, then he should take the sandals and sword as evidence of his paternity. When Theseus was old enough, his mother Aethra showed him the rock, and gave him Aegeus' instructions. Theseus moved the rock, found the sandals and sword, and then undertook an epic journey overland to visit his father in Athens. Laurent de La Hyre (1606–1656), Theseus And His Mother Aethra (1635-36), oil on canvas, 141 × 118.5 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary. Wikimedia Commons. One of the earliest depictions of the young Theseus is Laurent de La Hyre's Theseus And His Mother Aethra (1635-36). This shows the lad lifting a heavy pillar to reveal a pair of shoes and a sword. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Jean Lemaire (1598–1659), Theseus Recovering his Father's Sword (c 1638), oil on canvas, 98 x 134 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. Wikimedia Commons. In one of his rare collaborative paintings, Nicolas Poussin worked with Jean Lemaire to tell this fragment of the story in Theseus Recovering his Father's Sword (c 1638). They draw a marked contrast between the two actors: Theseus, destined to be a great hero, looks rough and brutish, while his mother Aethra wouldn't look out of place standing in for the Madonna. Nicolas-Guy Brenet (1728–1792), Aethra Showing her Son Theseus the Place Where his Father had Hidden his Arms (1768), oil on canvas, 50.2 × 59.7 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Wikimedia Commons. Nicolas-Guy Brenet's rather more sketchy Aethra Showing her Son Theseus the Place Where his Father had Hidden his Arms (1768) adds a river god for good measure, and has Aethra giving Theseus marching orders to go find his father. Antonio Balestra (1666–1740), Theseus Discovering his Father's Sword (c 1725), oil on canvas, 287 x 159 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons. Antonio Balestra's Theseus Discovering his Father's Sword (c 1725) makes Theseus look a little less enthusiastic to follow his mother's directions. Aethra told her son to travel by sea to take the sword and sandals to his father in Athens, but he chose to travel overland instead. His inspiration for this was the adventures of Heracles. Like his hero, Theseus had a series of adventures on this journey. He first killed Periphetes, who had wielded a large club at him; impressed by this club, he took it and killed another opponent, Sinis, raped his daughter and made her pregnant. Theseus went out of his way to meet the fearsome Crommyonian Sow, which he also killed. Coming to the borders of Megara, Theseus met Sciron, whom he threw down a cliff to his death, and killed another two people before reaching the city. Theseus found Athens, and his father's court, in disarray, with the king cohabiting with the sorceress Medea, who had promised to cure his lack of children. Aegeus was still unaware of Theseus' true identity, but invited him to a banquet, at which Medea acting in conspiracy with the king tried to get Theseus to drink a goblet laced with the poison aconite. Luckily for Theseus, just before he was going to drink from the goblet, he drew his father's sword, making as if to carve the meat with it. Aegeus recognised the sword, realised that his guest who was just about to drink poison was his son, and knocked the goblet from Theseus' hand to stop him from touching it with his lips. Antoine-Placide Gibert (1806-1875), Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), oil, dimensions not known, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France. Image by VladoubidoOo, via Wikimedia Commons. In Antoine-Placide Gibert's Theseus Recognised by his Father (1832), the three principal actors are arranged almost linearly across the canvas. Just left of centre, Theseus stands, his head in profile, the fateful cup in his left hand, and his father's sword in his right. The king is just right of centre, looking Theseus in the eye, and appearing animated if not alarmed. At the far right is Medea, her face like thunder, sensing that her plot to kill Theseus is about to fall apart. Hippolyte Flandrin (1809–1864), Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832), oil on canvas, 114.9 × 146.1 cm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Wikimedia Commons. Hippolyte Flandrin's Theseus Recognized by his Father (1832), which beat Gibert's painting for the Prix de Rome that year, has a more neoclassical look, as if influenced by Jacques-Louis David. With a view of the Acropolis in the background, this shows the moment immediately after Aegeus has recognised his son, and the cup of aconite lies spilt on the table. Theseus, conspicuously naked, stands in the middle of the canvas, his father's sword held rather limply in his right hand. Aegeus stands to the left of centre, talking to his son quite emotionally. But of all the characters shown in this painting, it is Medea who is the most fascinating. Stood at the far left, she appears to be on her way out. She is po-faced, and looks as if she has come not from Greece, but from central Asia, perhaps. Aegeus then declared Theseus to be his heir and successor as King of Athens. This was opposed by the sons of Pallas, who tried to attack the city. Theseus was tipped off by one of their men, surprised his opponents, and killed them all. Like his hero Heracles, Theseus then set out to deal with the problem posed by the Marathonian Bull, captured it, and drove it through the city of Marathon before sacrificing it to Apollo. In tomorrow's article, I'll show what happened with a different bull, the Minotaur, on Crete. hoakley | October 1, 2021 at 11:30 am | Tags: Balestra, Brenet, da Visso, de la Hyre, Flandrin, Gibert, history of painting, Lemaire, myth, narrative, painting, Poussin, Theseus | Categories: General, Life, Painting | URL: https://wp.me/p5CIcf-fYt Comment    See all comments    Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from The Eclectic Light Company. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://eclecticlight.co/2021/10/01/a-life-of-theseus-in-paintings-1-whose-are-those-sandals/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

[New post] Recipe by Tweety_U

Bilk Food posted: "Recipe by Tweety_U " New post on Bilk Food Recipe by Tweety_U by Bilk Food Recipe by Tweety_U This free site is ad-supported. Learn more ​ Bilk Food | October 1, 2021 at 11:29 am | Tags: Avocado, Cheese, cheeseburger, japan, salsa | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: https://wp.me/pczJ1m-a3 Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Bilk Food. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://bilkfood.wordpress.com/2021/10/01/recipe-by-tweety_u/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

[New post] A Review of Judy Bolton-Fasman’s Asylum

Guest Blogger posted: " By Ellen Blum Barish A curious girl who grows up around people who keep secrets is like a balloon filling with water. It's only a matter of time until it bursts. But secrets don't stand a chance against a girl who can find the words. And Judy B" Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog A Review of Judy Bolton-Fasman's Asylum by Guest Blogger By Ellen Blum Barish A curious girl who grows up around people who keep secrets is like a balloon filling with water. It's only a matter of time until it bursts. But secrets don't stand a chance against a girl who can find the words. And Judy Bolton-Fasman is one of those girls. With sophisticated sleuthing and tender prose, she investigates her secret-keeping parents in Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, the book she wrote to "release the pull of a mystery that had taken up sprawling real estate in my mind for too long." That her birth name is the same as the fictional girl detective Judy Bolton popular in the 1930s and 1940s, only fuels her curiosity. "It was the case of a lifetime," she writes. The book is her personal, emotional detective story. The prologue sets the tone and the tension. In the summer of 1985, a thick envelope arrives at Bolton-Fasman's New York City apartment from her father who has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She's hopeful that the envelope might contain some sort of final confession that could put an end to her lifelong questions about his trastiendas, the word her Cuban mother used to describe secrets. "The letter might be telling me that my father no longer had dreams to comfort him," she writes. "After all, a trastienda is a dark, dank place, and this letter carried a whiff of that because no one's trastiendas were more hidden away than those of my parents." But just as she is about to open it, she sees the flickering red light of her answering machine. Thinking it might be her ex-boyfriend whose swift departure has left her reeling, she hits the play button and hears her father's voice imploring her not to open the letter. He says, "I need you to burn it." Another daughter might ignore that request. But when it came to her father, she writes, "obedience had always prevailed." She placed a lighter to the envelope and dutifully let it burn in a metal garbage can, watching as the trastiendas disintegrated into ash—secrets she suspected "had the power to crack open the sky." I, too, would have wanted to know the contents of that package. But like Bolton-Fasman, I was a good Jewish girl who sensed that something wasn't quite right: that there was a missing piece, a truth unspoken, a successful silencing. But one needs to be ready. Bolton-Fasman writes, "If I opened the envelope, I would come face to face with secrets I was still too afraid to learn." What follows is a sensitively written account of her fact-finding quest for answers—many of which she finds, some not conclusively—powered by her curiosity and her strong Jewish faith. Ultimately reciting the traditional Jewish Kaddish prayer for her father after his death helped bring her some clarity. "...Kaddish was symbolic of a spiritual anechoic chamber in which my public acknowledgment of God's presence harmonized with the private silence of my grief. Even after I had finished the eleven-month ritual, the words of the Kaddish played out in the endless symphony of silence my father had left behind." The book's title does a beautiful job of framing the story in metaphor. Bolton-Fasman grew up on a street named Asylum, in Hartford, Connecticut. This word is simultaneously associated with the idea of protection and security, but also an institution supporting the mentally ill. She describes her Cuban mother as a "beautiful hysteric" and "an emotional terrorist" and her Connecticut-born father as "a noble man" whom she followed around the house because he knew how to do practical things. Growing up on Asylum Street was both "refuge and madness," she writes. This tension holds the reader's interest, while mirroring Bolton-Fasman's internal struggle. She was a curious girl living in a family of secrets—two things that usually don't go well together. Yet, her deep desire to know illustrates how the search to unlock secrets through words can be its own reward. There's a Jewish teaching, Bolton-Fasman writes, that an uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter from God. Asylum is a return to that unopened letter from her father that allows her to share her own interpretation. ____ Ellen Blum Barish's memoir, Seven Springs (Shanti Arts), about breaking a long-held silence, was published in May 2021. Her essays have appeared in Tablet, Full Grown People, Literary Mama, and the Brevity blog, and have aired on Chicago Public Radio. She is the founding editor of Thread, which earned four notables in Best American Essays, and the author of the essay collection Views from the Home Office Window: On Motherhood, Family and Life (Adams Street Publishing, 2007). Barish teaches writing and offers private coaching for essayists and memoirists. Guest Blogger | October 1, 2021 at 7:02 am | Tags: Kaddish | Categories: Book Reviews | URL: https://wp.me/pMFr-4M2 Comment    See all comments    Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://brevity.wordpress.com/2021/10/01/a-review-of-asylum/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com