Алла Миньяр-Белоручева: Западноевропейское искусство от Хогарта до Сальвадора Дали

6. What does one of Goya's rare references to Classical mythology illustrate? What does this work of art symbolise?

III. i. Give Russian equivalents of the following phrases:

the greatest artistic genius; at the turn of the century; the supreme achievement in portraiture; an inspired parody; a sketchier version of the picture; an unconventional portrait; to commission a painting; a firing squad; helpless victims; brushstrokes of an unimagined ferocity; an example of «social protest» in art; etching-aquatints; denounce the inhumanity of war; lineal descendants; references to Classical mythology.

ii. Give English equivalents of the following phrases:

офорт с акватинтой; пример «социального протеста» в искусстве; прямые потомки; ссылки на классическую мифологию; высшее достижение портретной живописи; беспомощные жертвы; на рубеже веков; нетрадиционный портрет; энергичные мазки; стрелковое подразделение; гениальный художник; осудить жестокость войны; заказать картину; рабочая версия картины.

iii. Make up sentences of your own with the given phrases.

iv. Arrange the following in the pairs of synonyms.

a) ferocity; lineal; parody; supreme; squad; commission; achievement; monster; evil;

b) satire; order; immoral; viciousness; hereditary; beast; exquisite; unit; feat.

IV. Here are descriptions of some of Goya's works of art. Match them up to the titles given below.

1. This painting is the earliest explicit example of «social protest» in art.

2. Goya unmasked these people as evil.

3. The first section, dealing with events from daily life, is surpassed by the second, devoted to fantastic events.

4. The monsters take over entirely.

5. This work of art is an allegory of Time which engulfs us all.

6. This picture is an unconventional portrait of the duchess of Alba.

a. Maja Desnuda

b. Saturn Devouring one of his Sons

c. Los Disparates (The Follies)

d. The Third of May, 1808, at Madrid: The Shooting on Principe Pio Mountain

e. Los Caprichos (The Caprices)

f. Family of Charles IV

V. Summarize the text.

VI. Translate the text into English.

Франсиско Гойя, величайший художник Испании, работал на рубеже XVIII и XIX вв. Придворный живописец испанского короля Гойя, чтобы скрыть истинный смысл своих произведений, был вынужден прибегать к аллегориям. В знаменитой серии офортов «Каприччос» художник изобразил кошмарный мир чудовищ и уродов. «Каприччос» включает 80 листов. Это обвинительный акт церкви, дворянству, абсолютизму – миру зла, лицемерия и фанатизма.

Значительное место в творчестве Гойи занимают портреты. В них наиболее ярко проявился блестящий талант живописца. В одних портретах Гойя сумел показать красоту людей богатой духовной жизни. В других – мастер изобличил моральное падение стоящих у власти людей. Таков «Групповой портрет короля Карла IV».

В период борьбы испанцев против наполеоновского вторжения Гойя создал одно из наиболее выдающихся своих произведений – «Расстрел испанских повстанцев французами в ночь на 3 мая 1808 г.», в котором изобразил трагическую развязку мадридского восстания и раскрыл могучий дух непокоренного народа.

Искусство Гойи предваряло романтизм – новое художественное направление в западноевропейском искусстве.

VII. Topics for discussion.

1. Goya's portraits.

2. Goya's engravings.

3. Goya as a forerunner of Romanticism.

Eugene Delacroix was one of the leading French and European painters for more than a generation. He was a real Romantic – solitary, moody, imaginative, profoundly emotional. Although Delacroix admired Italian art and wanted to go to Italy, he never went there; his journeys were to England, Belgium, Holland, Spain and North Africa. His life was marked by few external events. His real life, of great intensity, was lived on the canvas. «What is most real in me," he wrote, «are the illusions I create with my painting; the rest is shifting sand». In the course of his life he produced thousands of oil paintings and water-colours and innumerable drawings, and not long before his death he claimed that «in the matter of compositions I have enough for two human lifetimes; and as for projects of all kinds, I have enough for four hundred years.» Delacroix wanted to paint scenes of emotional or physical violence. Often he drew his subjects from English poetry, especially Shakespeare and Byron, and from medieval history. He admired Beethoven, but his idol in music was «the divine Mozart». His lifelong loyalty to the sixteenth century Venetians and to Rubens constantly strengthened.

In the Bark of Dante , of 1822, Delacroix illustrates a moment from the Divine Comedy in which the poet, accompanied by Virgil, is steered across the dark tides of the lake surrounding the city of Dis, attacked in the sulphurous dimness by damned souls rising from the waves against a background of towers and flames. In this painting Delacroix has broken up the pyramidal grouping, and is more concerned with effects of colour and of light and dark than with form. Some of the drops of water are painted in pure tones of red and green. Delacroix's basic compositional principle is a series of free curves, arising from the central area and always returning to it. This painting was highly praised.

Delacroix's next major work the Massacre at Chios , of 1824, was not easily accepted. The subject was an incident from the Greek wars of liberation against the Turks, which had excited the sympathies of Romantic spirit everywhere. The foreground is scattered with bodies. The neobaroque composition is diffused in Delacroix's centrifugal curves, which part to display the distant slaughter and conflagration. The observer's sympathies are supposed to be with the sufferings of the Greeks, but their rendering is not convincing. The expressions tend to become standardised; the head of the young woman at the lower left almost repeats that of the dead mother at the lower right. This picture was called the «massacre of painting.» The colour shows a richness and vibrancy not visible in French painting since the Rococo. He brought this huge picture to Paris for the Salon of 1824, and before the exhibition opened he took it down and repainted it in tones emulating those, he found in Constable. From here on, Delacroix's interest in colour was great. He investigated colour contrasts on the canvas and in nature and derived a law – «the more contrast the greater the force.»

With the Death of Sardanapalus as a manifesto of Romanticism, the artist drew down upon himself the disapproval of royal administrators. The legendary subject concerns the last of the Assyrian monarchs, besieged in his palace for two years by the Medes. On hearing that the enemy had at last breached his walls, the king had all his concubines, slaves, and horses slaughtered and his treasures destroyed before his eyes, as he lay upon a couch soon to become his funeral pyre. Lacking the pretext of humanitarianism that justified the Massacre at Chios and other pictures inspired by the Greek struggle for independence, the painting becomes a feast of violence, spread out in glowing colours against the smoke of distant battle. The picture is a phantasmagoria in which no real cruelty is exerted. Faces are paralysed with fear but no blood flows. Quivering female flesh is heaped like flowers or fruit, among the glittering jewels and the fabrics of crimson. In his solitary fantasy the artist, identifying himself in imagination with the king and the executioners, discharges all his creative and destructive energy in an explosion of tones.