Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting

I went to see an exhibit of 19th century paintings at the Thyssen-Bornemisza called Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting in the Perez-Simon collection.  This is the kind of traditional realist art that makes a modernist/conceptual/abstract expressionist aficionado´s lip curl along with a simultaneous retina-detaching eye-roll. I thought it was gorgeous.

From the website:

After being shown in Paris and Rome, the exhibition Alma-Tadema and Victorian Painting arrives at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in June 2014, offering visitors the chance to discover the aesthetic sensuality of some of the most celebrated 19^th-century English artists. In their paintings Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Sir Frederic Leighton, Albert J. Moore and Dante Gabriel Rossetti emphasised values that were strikingly different to the moralising attitudes of the day, including a return to classical antiquity, an interest in the nude, rich decorative effects and references to medieval themes inherited from the Pre-Raphaelites.
The exhibition, curated by Véronique Gerard-Powell, Paris Sorbonne University professor, includes a selection of works, among them icons of British art such as The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma-Tadema; Greek Girls collecting Pebbles from the Sea by Leighton: The Quartet by Albert Moore; and Andromeda by Poynter, have been loaned from the private Pérez-Simón collection, one of the most important in the field of Victorian art.

The skin glows, the drapery alternatively clings and floats, the sun dazzles.  Masterful technique that sweeps you away to the long ago and far away as conceived by the  imagination of Victorians.  Anachronisms, paternalism, sexism, colonialism all there, but also stunning draftsmanship, color, and unabashed romanticism.

 Via

The pièce de résistance is the enormous The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888 by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Dutch!) depicting a Roman (of course) banquet wherein the guests are slowly smothering under a deluge of rose petals.  Those petals are all individually rendered, accompanied by the scent of roses wafting through the salon.

via

I was very much looking forward to Waterhouse´s Crystal Ball, but  have to say I wasn´t knocked over.   I was more impressed by  the luminescent nymph Crenaia.

 via

Virtual tour here.
Informational video here.

San Roque

August is a month of festivals.  Practically every pueblo has a festival this month.  And one of the most poplar is San Roque.

Cambados, igrexa de San Francisco

San Roque, or St. Roch, was a 14th century Christian Saint, born in Montpellier the son of a nobleman.  After the death of his parents, he distributed all his possessions and set out on a mendicant pilgrimage to Rome.  Italy was suffering an epidemic of plague at the time and Roque performed many miraculous cures by touch and the sign of the cross while tending the sick at various hospitals.  When he himself fell ill, he was run out of town to build himself a hermit´s hut in the forest where a spring miraculously arose.  He was saved from starvation by the dog of a local nobleman who brought him bread.  The nobleman, Count Gothard, became an acolyte.

And then, to top all ths off,

On his return incognito to Montpellier he was arrested as a spy (by orders of his own uncle) and thrown into prison, where he languished five years and died on 16 August 1327, without revealing his name, to avoid worldly glory. (Evidence suggests, as mentioned earlier, that the previous events occurred, instead at Voghera in the 1370s.) After his death, according to Legenda Aurea,

"anon an angel brought from heaven a table divinely written with letters of gold into the prison, which he laid under the head of S. Rocke. And in that table was written that God had granted to him his prayer, that is to wit, that who that calleth meekly to S. Rocke he shall not be hurt with any hurt of pestilence."

With all the recent talk about Ebola, a patron saint against pestilence seems timely.
 

In Galicia there are August 16th festivals to San Roque in:  Vilagarcía, Vigo, Santiago de Compostela, Viveiro, Ribadeo, Cervo, Meira, Rábade, Sada, A Laracha, Cee, Melide, Celanova, Ourense, O Barco, Castrelo de Miño, Forzáns (Ponte Caldelas) y Caldas de Reis, and Betanzos, amongst others.  Vigo is a big one,

Every year, thousands of devotees gather in the vicinity of the Praza de España, in the neighbourhood of San Roque, to keep the largest pilgrimage in Vigo alive. Votive offerings are the most typical part of this celebration: the custom is to buy wax reproduction of diseased body parts to ask San Roque for a cure. The saint’s devotees guarantee that the 'holy milagreiro' is able to heal all ailments.

Melide has a medieval market.  Maybe next year.

It´s alive

A miracle.  All the rose cuttings I took seemed very, very dead.  But one survived!

Unfortunately, I think it´s the more vigorous, but unscented one.

Someday, when it grows up, it will look like this.