floored

i always loved sculpture, but was never truly moved by it, until i saw two things.

the first was this:

il ratto di proserpina (the rape of persephone) by gian lorenzo bernini @ the galleria borghese in rome.

persephone was the daughter of zeus and demeter, and forcefully taken by hades to be his queen of the underworld. she was missed so much by her mother that demeter caused a terrible drought in the world. zeus allowed persephone to return, bringing the world back to life, but was obliged to spend one season a year in the underworld. thus persephone is also known as the goddess of vegetation.

that's the back story that explains what is happening in the sculpture, but as far as sculpture goes, it looks fairly "standard" in terms of composition and subject material. like so many other sculptures i had seen in so many other museums around the world.

that is, until you see this:

this is the money shot, the close-up detail of where hades grabs persephone as she is in flight. 

when i saw this, i was floored.

the fact that bernini could sculpt so much emotion into cold, hard stone showed his unmatchable skill, his artistry and his depth of understanding. if you look at most sculptures, you can see technical skill in the folds and layers of the way a cloth drapes. but when it comes to body parts touching other body parts, they always lightly rest on the surface. faces, hands, legs, anything. the most amount of contact is simple light touch.

but bernini's hades actually grabs-- persephone and you can just feel his overwhelming strength in this tiny little detail. his hands are actually digging into her flesh, forcing her into his violence. the fucking veins in his hands are popping.

absofuckinglutely brilliant.

the second thing that made me appreciate the infinite difficulty and thus beauty of this art form was this:

if you go the galleria dell'accademia in florence to see michelangelo's david, everyone immediately flocks to the main attraction. but if you take your time, you will notice his series of unfinished sculptures called "prisoners" that line the hallway leading up to david. these four massive unfinished works show the detail and the process of how excruciatingly difficult sculpture is, to end up with a beautiful finished work of art that tells a story. seeing these monstrous pieces was actually much more impressive than seeing his finished works, because i came to understand how painstaking every single little chip and chisel and sanding down must have been. it's almost as if michelangelo freed his forms out of these massive blocks, giving them life. if you see it in person, each little chip in the stone is about the size of an eraser head on a pencil, and these blocks are approximately ten feet tall. the process... the process.

and then within that context of understanding, to then see how bernini sculpted those fingers digging into pure stone flesh...

completely blown away. that's all.

(nyc)