HELLO ARTH 424.

THOUGHT I WOULD SWITCH MY BLOG FROM SHAKESPEARE THEMES TO HIGH RENIASSANCE CONCERNS.  So here is a fine EARLY TITIAN to contemplate to start us off. (MORE ABOUT THIS IMAGE LATER).
LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR BLOGS: responses to readings, to your research, and anything you'd like to share that you feel might be relevant or at least interesting. . .

2 Hamlets playing in New York now; one with just 4 actors! (click for link)

                         Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) -- a must for all film lovers

We were lucky enough to see one of my favorite actors, Peter Ustinov, as King Lear in Stratford, Canada (c. 1980).  We also saw Maggie Smith in "The Seagull" the next day!

Here is my best friend from Philadelphia College of Art, JOE DANTE (you may know him as the director of GREMLINS) with his blog "Trailers from Hell" discussing the great Ernst Lubitsch comedy from 1940 TO BE OR NOT TO BE in which Jack Benny TRIES (several times) to deliver the soliloquoy, but the Nazi invasion of Poland keeps getting in the way. With the great Carole Lombard (her last movie). See it!

Flaying of Marsyas (details) ---see full view below

                                                                  The Titian (1576)

Two great Actors and a Third Guy who reminds me of Polonius

ALFRED HITCHCOCK ON PUNS.  Also some other revealing comments

"Nietzsche insisted that Hamlet possessed 'true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth,' which is the abyss between mundane reality and the Dionysian rapture of an endlessly ongoing consciousness."

Discuss.

This is the end of Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthasar" (1966) alluded to in class. You can watch the ENTIRE movie on YouTube (tho not in Criterion Collection quality!) if you would rather not have the end spoiled.  But here it is.  Sad, sad, sad.

Can do no better than to quote the great Robert Rosenblum:

"One of the pioneers in this exploration of the irrational [in the Romantic movement] is the Swiss-born but thoroughly cosmopolitan HENRY FUSELI (1741-1825) who thrilled audiences with his prolific displays of the stuff that dreams are made of. (Shakespeare) provided him as well as contemporaries with an especially wide spectrum of imaginative possibilities. (Entrepreneur John Boydell) commissioned a group of British artists to paint illustrations for his new "Shakespeare Gallery" which opened in 1789. (Here in his illustration from A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1790, Tate Gallery)) we are levitated to a gravity-defiant world presided over by Titania queen of the fairies who has just conjured up an ectoplasmic whirlwind of her elves, sprites and gnomes to attend to Bottom . . . This murky fluid world seems charged with a curious erotic fantasy in which voluptuously attenuated women, like the one on the right who leads the tiny old dwarf on a string, dominate the scene like giddy but imperious courtesans. An almost exact contemporary of the Marquis de Sade, Fuseli seems also to be investigating the more extravagant regions of the sexual imagination, though here given more public propriety thru the Shakespearean source. . . the bizarre and morbid character of his art has an intensely personal ring . . ."

In this early work by TITIAN, the two female figures have been interpreted as representations of SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE.  But which is which . . . ?

Michelangelo, The Dream, 1533

Renaissance Trivia:  Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year that Michelangelo died, 1564

Here is a BLIND CUPID from a painting by BOTTICELLI in the 1480's  (but from which

 painting . . .?)

THE BEATLES performing PYRAMUS AND THISBE!!!???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXkdYr5JYg

Can you identify these images of the loves of the gods?  The first is by Renaissance artist Correggio -- Amendment by Rembrandt

Detail of Bernini's astonishing Apollo and Daphne  (Rome, Galleria Borghese)

Shakespeare was "one of the few writers in all literature who could present a young woman as both virtuous and interesting.  He fashioned nine of them and they continue to affect the spiritual weather of the world."---Thornton Wilder

Quick guide to Shakespeare movies:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-15/film/the-bard-goes-global-shakespeare-on-the-international-screen-at-walter-reade/

The Campo Fiore in Rome.  Where Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake (see statue). Today it's a great outdoor bar scene alla notte

puckish