If you want to find things hidden in masterpieces get Charles Bouleau's The Painter's Secret Geometry and learn about the scaffolding which gives imagery its underlying structure and guides the eye around it.
The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
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Re: The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
#12> Remove the ink pot from the epicentre of Raphael’s fresco, and the work dissolves into a fiasco of confused and confusing forms. Heraclitus’s profound, if overlooked, ink pot is the very well-spring from which the elastic energy of Raphael’s masterpiece endlessly emanates. :-/ I don't really buy putting this much on the ink pot. If the ink pot were missing, no one would notice. As is, most reproductions of SoA just…
If the ink pot were missing, no one would notice.
Mystery in the Masterpiece: Raphael and the case of the missing inkpot
[...]
Far from being a careless omission, the missing inkpot is a metaphor for the mystery of the creative process, whereby the artist extracts the image, stroke by masterful stroke, from beyond the veil of imagination. When the viewer has become so absorbed in the reality of the painting that the missing inkpot stands out, it is as if Raphael silently announces his own creative divinity.
Re: The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
#13> a simple ink pot teeters precariously on the corner of a large marble block, an elbow-twitch away from falling, shattering, and opening a black hole at the heart of Raphael’s work. That unassuming object, and it alone, transforms Raphael’s fresco from being a two-dimensional tribute to rational thought into a far deeper and more mercurial meditation on the mysteries of existence. Er, no...? It doesn't look in a dan…
This colorful language is also used by artists to describe their own works. e.g. the artists description of the Tilted Arc ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilted_Arc ): "The viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of…
You have to realize the metagame being played here. The game that art collectors are playing is tax evasion. They want to buy something for $100 from a depressed cigarette smoker in tight jeans, then 20 years later say that it's worth $100 million and donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a mega tax writeoff. If they buy a 1 inch cube of 18/10 stainless steel, they can never claim that it's worth $100 million because the IRS would just say "you can buy that off McMaster Carr for $100." But with the above paragraphs attached, they get to claim that it's unique and not replaceable and therefore worth whatever they say it is.
Re: The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
#14For some reason the entire article reminds me of the artwork descriptions in Rimworld. For example:
Re: The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
#15Kind of clickbaity. I was waiting for some huge delivery about (spoiler alert!) there being an inkpot, but it never really materialized. Like they said, the figure didn't appear in previous drafts. Some student probably made the observation "hey, where's Pen Man getting his ink from?" and it wound up squeaked in on the edge of the desk.
Hey but it worked didn't it lol
Re: The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
#16I actually enjoyed the artistic summary (although it does go a bit long) but I wish the writer would have stated the factual point earlier: the figure with the ink pot is Heraclitus
Re: The School of Athens: A detail hidden in a masterpiece
#17I've seen photographies of this fresco dozens of times, even studied it (superficially) in some art history class, but for the first time I've realized that ancient Greeks did not have paper, much less books.
I imagine Raphael and his contemporaries didn't know as much about ancient Greece as we do today. OTOH the printing press was still fairly recent so Raphael must have been conscious that books were not commonly available centuries before him.
My point is that this depiction of ancient Greece might have been deliberately fantastic which is something I had never thought before about Renaissance art.