"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