Spencer Alley: August 2022

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Unassigned Italian Figure Drawings at the Louvre - V

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

from Figure of Aeolus

They found you under twenty feet

of loose ash – one vowel

solo in an archipelago

of strung-out vowels and doting volcanoes –

Isole Eolie – O hoop

of exhilaration, O sigh of relief

softening your votive mouth . . .

– Kevin Craft (2015)

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

Unassigned Italian Figure Drawings at the Louvre - IV

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie
ca. 1600-1650
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Figure

You want a piece of me

to see, from the flesh of me,

a flesh from within me

no one's ever seen, not me,

nor the mother or the lovers of me.

A piece that will have been me

but then no longer me,

instead a synecdoche of me,

or possibly metonymy,

a figure of speech of me,

in contiguity or association with me,

a part for the whole of me,

a sliver that once was me,

so you might perceive the end of me.

– Robert Wrigley (2019)

Monday, August 29, 2022

Unassigned Italian Figure Drawings at the Louvre - III

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Faun)
17th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Dead Christ)
17th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as The Dying Gaul)
ca. 1600-1650
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Executioner
in The Massacre of the Innocents)
17th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Jupiter)
17th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Hercules)
17th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Hercules)
ca. 1550-1600
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Bacchus)
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Crucified Christ)
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Adoring Saint)
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Adoring Shepherd)
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Prophet with Tablet)
17th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as Prometheus)
18th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Académie (as St Sebastian)
ca. 1650-1700
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Figure

A poem I keep forgetting to write

Is about the stars,

How I see them in their order

Even without the chair and bear and the sisters,

In their astronomic presence of great space,

And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving,

Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure.

Having not mathematics, my head

Bursts with anguish of not understanding.

The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments

Of a tortured victim, far from me

In his galaxy of minds bent upon him,

In the oblivion of his headline status

Crumpled and exploding as incomparable

As a star, yet present in its light.

I forget to write.

– Josephine Miles (1979)

Sunday, August 28, 2022

Unassigned Italian Figure Drawings at the Louvre - II

Anonymous Florentine Artist after Agnolo Bronzino
Figure Study
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Sienese Artist
after Domenico Beccafumi
Anatomical Studies
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Roman Artist after Raphael
Figure Study
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Woman embracing Fantastic Beast
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
River God
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist after Michelangelo
St Sebastian
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Bolognese Artist after Pelegrino Tibaldi
Group of Figures gesturing toward the Sky
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Study of écorché Figure
ca. 1550-1600
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Study of écorché Figures
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Study of the Belvedere Torso
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Two Studies of an Antique Torso of Apollo
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Study of the Farnese Hercules
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous Italian Artist
Study for Thief on the Cross
16th century
drawing
Musée du Louvre

Classics

Students know the name of Oedipus,

Know his disaster, where it grinds

The lanterns, sparkling, of his grecian flesh.

The classroom shines; each mother's son

Made helpless by the dazzle, shades his eyes –

He has an inkling he has seen Jocasta perish.

The mother's daughters of another mind

And mood are harder eyed, receive the shock

Of distant gods and their perverse exactions,

Guard their brothers from the eidolon,

The size implacable of tense priapus.

None evolves a word, turn Christian faces

Twisted for an instant in a strange king's rages

To an embattled calm. The classroom waits

The passage of an hour and twenty pages

When their instructor to a saner climate shifts

And to a better god. Once free of Greeks

Light warms them from a burning bush. They find

Themselves inside a text whose landscape shows

The fulgurations and the brimstone traces

Of luminous, abominable Hebrew places.

– Leonard Wolf (1953)