Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Versailles, France
Artist: Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857–1927 Paris)
Date: 1923
Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative
Dimensions: 17.8 x 21.9 cm (7 x 8 5/8 in.)
Classification: Photographs
Although he studied drama in Paris in the mid-1870s and was an itinerant actor for some years thereafter, Eugène Atget’s theatrical sensibility found its best outlet in a more deliberate, contemplative, and purely visual art form. In 1898 he began to photograph old Paris, and within a decade he had made a name as an assiduous documenter of the art and architecture of the ancien régime. Except for a brief attempt to capture life in the streets early in his career, Atget rarely photographed people, preferring the streets themselves as well as the gardens, courtyards, and other areas that constituted the cultural stage.
After the Great War, Atget frequently focused on mannequins, statues, and other “substitute” actors. At Versailles, where he had worked since 1901, he came to see the sculptures not as felicitous ornaments but as characters in an immemorial play. In this picture, which represents Michael Mosnier’s replica of the “Dying Gladiator” in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, Atget contrasts human pain and artistic beauty, mortal man and the immortal soul. Drawing on his long experience relating near and far objects and vistas in the gardens of Versailles, the photographer juxtaposed the statues so that the figure of Apollo in the background seems to rise like the living spirit escaping the body at death.
It must be a cloudy day because you have a lot of diffused lighting here. No direct sunlight that I can see. What’s funny is that the main sculpture seems to be a man trying to get up, perhaps he’s wounded or has just been knocked down in a fight. But rising up over his calf is a 2nd statue that looks, in this picture, like a little elf, kinda like the good angel / bad angel from cartoons. This elf’s pose is all about glory.
It looks like the man in front has a chain or a choker around his neck. I would imagine this is not jewelry but a kind of ring that could be attached to a chain, meaning he’s either a slave or a prisoner.
His skin looks blotchy like he has some kind of disease. Is that why he’s fallen down?
Part of this sculpture is the debris on the ground. There’s a tusk-like object by his feet and what looks like some broken tile under his right hand, plus a cylinder with two holes in it.
There must be a story to all t his!!!