In South Africa, Greece, Rome: Classical Confrontations, Grant Parker (2018:7) observes that: “Far from being a one-sided, unchanging set of material, classical antiquity has fulfilled very different ...social roles at different times”. Interestingly, despite the oppressive patriarchal foundation of classical mythology, its broad scope lends itself to contemporary adaptation. Classical myths might then be perceived less as static constructs than as stories which offer material amenable to re-definition through feminist re-telling (Zajko 2007:397). Since ancient writers imbued the concerns of their times into their mythmaking, so too can feminist adaptations invest them with modern-day ideologies (Zajko 2007:397). The primary objective of this research is to ascertain how and why a selection of South African women artists are negotiating classical imagery and an inherited classical past within their practices, in a search for, and the representation of, post-apartheid femininities. For the purpose of this investigation I focus on selected works by visual artists Christine Dixie, Minnette Vári, Diane Victor and Nandipha Mntambo...
Auguste Barbier and Léon de Wailly's libretto for Hector Berlioz's 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini contains a work stoppage by the foundry workers who are casting the Italian Renaissance artist's ...sculpture of Perseus and the slain Medusa. While Cellini describes no such event in his autobiographical Vita, he does recount another story that may have suggested to the librettists their invention of the workers' strike episode. Contemporary Romantic writers, including Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo, in their theater and verse, treated the themes of the suffering of industrial workers and the insensitivity of industrialists. Barbier published, also in 1838, Lazare, a collection of satiric poems that analyzed the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, above all the exploitation and suffering of the working class. The France of the 1830s saw a notable increase in the pace of industrialization, the formation of the proletariat and the manufacturing capitalist class, and the first laborers' strikes. It is in this historical and literary context that one can best understand the incorporation of the apocryphal and anachronistic work stoppage episode into the opera libretto.
The article aims to rethink the several stereotypes of Romantic tradition, which are still reproduced in regard to Benvenuto Cellini and his Vita . Using the approaches of intellectual history and ...iconographical studies, the present study pays attention to the coherent system of lay, scientific and ‘secret’ knowledge of the epoch lurking under the surface of the simplicity and even naivety of the author’s language. I argue that this autobiographical writing embodies a certain type of culture of the self deeply rooted in contemporary medical, alchemical and magical contexts. Organized around the concept of “getting pleasure,” Cellini’s practices of the self are built into the Neo-Platonic picture of the world. Analyzing the two passages of Vita , I demonstrate the author’s spiritual ascent from the corporeal suffering to union with ‘the One’ by means of individual and collective magic rituals, transforming his Life into a work of art.
It is widely agreed that the German Lied underwent a profound reinvention under the auspices of Franz Schubert, who recognized untapped artistic potential in the setting of poetry to music. There is ...far less agreement on the philosophical meaning of Schubert’s innovations. Half a Life: Dialectics of Music and Poetry in German and English Art Song asks what is expressed and accomplished through the German Romantics’ renewed interest in the setting of poetry to music. The two basic questions that drive the project are: What are the aesthetic properties of the art song (speaking both generically and of individual art songs), and what conditions permitted and promoted the rebirth of art song in nineteenth-century Europe? While focusing on the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century, this dissertation also looks to England for comparison, especially by way of the nineteenth-century British novel and the English Musical Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The central claim is that in the art song form, words and music exist in a dialectical relationship that is at once cooperative and mutually undermining. Several dialectical phenomena receive special attention, including dialectics of meaning-making, meter, the creative aspect of interpretation, the concept of the “lyric” in Lieder, and the capacity of music to extend the afterlife of a poem in posterity. The conclusion develops the analogy between intermedial and interpersonal interdependence, exploring the ethical as well as aesthetic implications of the comparison. An introduction and coda situate this inquiry within the political and pedagogical contexts of the present moment.
The author explores the function and significance of the bronze bas-relief that formed part of Benvenuto Cellini's "Perseus and Medusa," the sculptural ensemble that has occupied the east arcade of ...the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence's Piazza della Signoria since it was unveiled in 1554. She assesses the ways in which the relief, as a gloss representing art forms other than sculpture, can be seen to impact, enhance, and alter the art-theoretical content of Cellini's "Perseus and Medusa" as a whole.
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