ller in the HISTORY of ART from his home city of Nuremberg he crossed the Alps more than once in trecherous conditions, staying in icy mountain shelters. The ship on which he sailed for six days to see a beached whale in Zeeland was almost lost in a winter storm. He lived in Venice in times of cholera, and possibly picked up malaria on a trip to the Low Countries where he was astounded by Aztec gold in Brussels and the Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent. And all of these journeys were undertaken during outbreaks of the plague" and so you can only just imagine how disappointed I was also, that as far as the National Gallery's Exhibition in, London was concerned "the strange creatures, saints and distant landscapes depicted by the great German artist were thrown together with the work of lesser painters in a show that veers between wondrous and inexplicable." What an absolute shame therefore that although "His travel journals are full of astonishing sights – soaring comets, conjoined twins, the bones of a giant (which in fact belonged to a whale). He sees, and draws, girls in Dutch costume, Turkish merchants, African women. Boats lie at low tide in the port of Antwerp, fantastical castles rise on pinnacles above the river Rhine. There is a sheet of magnificent sketches of dozing lionesses, a blue baboon and even an alarmingly sharp-eared lynx in the new zoos of the Low Countries, alas only the last appears in this long-anticipated exhibition devoted to Dürer’s travels. To say that the experience in the Sainsbury Wing is baffling would be an understatement. Veering between wondrous, meandering and occasionally inexplicable, this is a show without a map."
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Added by Michael Grove at 11:42 on November 26, 2021
n 1497 composing the text of Divina Proportione, which is an in depth study of the golden ratio, or ‘divine proportion’ [a : b = b : (a + b)], in geometry and art and which also detailed Euclid’s regular and semi-regular Platonic solids and concludes with a treatise on perspective and architecture. Pacioli’s text made the golden ratio central to the understanding of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry and philosophy and was illustrated by models drawn by Leonardo, making Divina Proportione the only book illustrated by the artist in his lifetime. Two copies of this work survive, now kept at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and the University Library of Geneva.
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effect on US society beyond any singular work, with his paintings seen as indelible images that went on to inspire American directors such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and particularly Robert Zemeckis, whose 1994 film Forrest Gump recreates several of Rockwell’s paintings as scenes throughout the film.From my own three-score year perspective, I would suggest that I can think of no better exponent of my own concept of THE ART of the POSSIBLE for, by and of the people, than he !!!THE WELDER & HIS MATES are particular favourites of mine, since I first became aware of his work whilst studying ART at Grammar School.
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alent and inclination to become musicians, artists, poets, or writers, were never encouraged to pursue those paths; instead they were admonished for their lack of rigor and levity, and they never developed the courage to follow their passions.…