2017年6月8日 星期四

amor, Amor vincit omnia, triumphant victory

It was far from the triumphant victory Theresa May had been expecting.

Nadal is triumphant after unforgettable Wimbledon epic

By the time it was over, at 9.15pm, it had become almost impossible to see the ball, yet all eyes remained riveted. There was, after all, an extraordinary afterglow, provided by arguably the greatest tennis match ever played.



Amor

pronunciation

IN BRIEF: n. - (Roman mythology) god of love.


從「愛征服一切」(Amor vincit omnia ) 說起




昔日故友張忠樸先生看Titanic影片,最欣賞的曲his love will conquer all。

受過英國文學基本訓練的學生,知道它出現在《坎特伯雷故事集》女修道院長的金飾雕刻AMOR VINCIT OMNIA (網路上可以買到)

它的原文,出自羅馬大詩人的Virgil 的Ecologues X, 69(dated to 38BC)
Love conquers all; let us too, yield to love!

William Golding ( 1911-1993;1983年諾貝爾文學獎) 1967作品 THE PYRAMID 引用(《金字塔》(李國慶譯,上海譯文,2000,p.15)),不過注不詳盡。

我從這小說的題詞:「治民之道,以愛為本;心有愛則生,無愛則死。」(古埃及箴言)學到哲理。

想起上周聽他諾貝爾文學獎受講演說詞最後的一可愛(可….)英國警察之故事:

The very day after I learned that I was the laureate for literature for 1983 I drove into a country town and parked my car where I should not. I only left the car for a few minutes but when I came back there was a ticket taped to the window. A traffic warden, a lady of a minatory aspect, stood by the car. She pointed to a notice on the wall. "Can't you read?" she said. Sheepishly I got into my car and drove very slowly round the corner. There on the pavement I saw two county policemen.

I stopped opposite them and took my parking ticket out of its plastic envelope. They crossed to me. I asked if, as I had pressing business, I could go straight to the Town Hall and pay my fine on the spot. "No, sir," said the senior policeman, "I'm afraid not."

*****
Amor Vincit Omnia
Caravaggio, 16011602
Oil on canvas
156 × 113 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Amor Vincit Omnia (meaning "Love Conquers All", known in English by a variety of names including Amor Victorious, Victorious Cupid, Love Triumphant, Love Victorious, or Earthly Love) is a painting by the Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610),

Amor Vincit Omnia shows Amor, the Roman Cupid, wearing dark eagle wings, half-sitting on or perhaps climbing down from what appears to be a table. Scattered around are the emblems of all human endeavours – violin and lute, armour, coronet, square and compasses, pen and manuscript, bay leaves, an astral globe, tangled and trampled under Cupid’s foot. The painting illustrates the line from Virgil's Eclogues X.69, Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori ("Love conquers all; let us all yield to love!"). A musical manuscript on the floor shows a large "V" It has therefore been suggested also that the picture is a coded reference to the attainments of Vincenzo Giustiniani: his family was the Genoese rulers of Chios until the island's capture by the Turks) in 1622, hence the coronet; while the cultivated Marchese wrote on music and painting (pen, manuscript and musical instruments), was constructing an imposing new palazzo (geometrical instruments), studied astronomy (astral sphere), and was praised for his military prowess (armour). The symbology thus holds the possible reading: Vincenzo Conquers All. Giustiniani is said to have prized it above all other works in his collection.[1]
The subject was a common one for the age. Caravaggio’s treatment is remarkable for the realism of his Cupid – where other depictions, such as a contemporary Sleeping Cupid by Battistello Caracciolo (Naples 1578-1630), show an idealised, almost generic, beautiful boy, Caravaggio’s Cupid is highly individual, charming but not at all beautiful, all crooked teeth and crooked grin: one feels that one would recognise him in the street. The shock of the Caravaggio, quite apart from the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting and the photographic clarity, is the mingling of the allegorical and the real, this sense it gives of a child who is having a thoroughly good time dressing up in stage-prop wings with a bunch of arrows and having his picture painted. Nevertheless, despite the clear indications of Caravaggio’s practice of painting direct from a live model, there is an undeniable resemblance to the pose of Michelangelo's Victory now in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and it is likely the artist had this in mind.
The painter Orazio Gentileschi called the painting Earthly Love, and it was an immediate success in the circles of Rome’s intellectual and cultural elite. A poet immediately wrote three madrigals about it, and another wrote a Latin epigram in which it was first coupled with the Virgilian phrase Omnia Vincit Amor, although this did not become its title until the critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori wrote his life of Caravaggio in 1672.
Inevitably, much scholarly and non-scholarly ink has been spilled over the alleged eroticism of the painting. Yet the homoerotic content was perhaps not so apparent to Giustiniani’s generation as it has become today. Naked boys could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticisation of children is very much a cultural artefact of the present-day rather than Caravaggio's. Certainly neither Giustiniani, who was not a homosexual, nor his visitors, appear to have been concerned by the question of modesty – or to have even raised it – and the story that the Marchese kept Amor hidden behind a curtain relates to his reported wish that it should be kept as a final pièce de résistance for visitors, to be seen only when the rest of the collection had been viewed – in other words, the curtain was to reveal the painting, not to hide it. (According to the historian Joachim von Sandrart, who catalogued the Giustiniani collection in the 1630s, the curtain was only installed at his urging at that time). The challenge is to see the Amor Vincit through 17th century eyes.[2]

Giovanni Baglione. Sacred Love Versus Profane Love. 1602-1603 Oil on canvas. 179 x 118 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
In 1602, shortly after Amor Vincit was completed, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, Vincenzo’s brother and collaborator in the creation of the Giustiniani collection of contemporary art, commissioned a painting from the noted artist Giovanni Baglione. Baglione’s Divine and Profane Love showed Divine Love separating a juvenile Cupid on the ground in the lower right corner (profane love) from a Lucifer in the left corner. Its style was thoroughly derivative of Caravaggio (who had recently emerged as a rival for Church commissions) and a clear challenge to the recent Amor, and the younger painter bitterly protested at what he saw as the plagiarism. Taunted by one of Caravaggio’s friends, Baglione responded with a second version, in which the devil was given Caravaggio’s face. Thus began a long and vicious quarrel which was to have unforseeable ramifications for Caravaggio decades after his death when the unforgiving Baglione became his first biographer.
Sandrart described Amor as "A life size Cupid after a boy of about twelve...[who] has large brown eagle's wings, drawn so correctly and with such strong colouring, clarity and relief that it all comes to life."[3]. Richard Symonds, an English visitor to Rome about 1649/51, recorded the Cupid as being "ye body and face of his (Caravaggio's) owne boy or servant thait (sic) laid with him"[4] - bearing in mind that "laid with" in 17th century English meant simply "lived with". The Italian art historian Giani Pappi has put forward the theory that this Cecco may be identical with Cecco del Caravaggio ('Caravaggio’s Cecco'), a notable Italian follower of Caravaggio who emerged in the decade after the master’s death. While this remains controversial, there is more widespread support for Pappi's further proposal that Cecco del Caravaggio should be identified as an artist known as Francesco Boneri. Cecco Boneri, if this is his name, appears in many of Caravaggio's paintings, as the juvenile angel supporting Christ in The Conversion of Saint Paul, (1600-1601) possibly as the angel offering a martyr's palm to the saint in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599-1600) (although seen only as the top of a curly head of hair), as the young Isaac about to have his throat cut in The Sacrifice of Isaac (1603), as an adolescent David in David with the Head of Goliath (1605-1606 - the head is Caravaggio's), and as the John the Baptist now in the Capitoline gallery in Rome.

References


Notes

  1. ^ Puglisi, Caravaggio, pp. 201-202
  2. ^ Carrier, David (1 February 1993). "Homosexuality", Principles of Art History Writing. Penn State Press, 65. ISBN 0-271-00945-4.
  3. ^ Quoted in Peter Robb, M, p. 194
  4. ^ Quoted in Peter Robb, M, p. 195.

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