John Martin (painter)

La figura de John Milton influyó enormemente la literatura y el pensamiento del siglo XIX. A partir de la figura de Satán en "El Paraíso Perdido" estableció un nuevo orden de héroe romántico y una percepción novedosa del mundo desde la Caída. A partir de su obra, una hermandad de parias, unidos por las líneas de un nuevo pensamiento sobre la Imaginación y por el consumo de opio, trazarán otro camino dentro de la construcción estética del Romanticismo a partir de la creación de lugares comunes en sus obras.

Taking as its starting point Tate Britain’s recent John Martin retrospective, entitled John Martin: Apocalypse, this paper considers the possibility that depictions of biblical apocalyptic scenes in Martin’s paintings are actually metaphors for revolution (French and American). The first half of the paper investigates possible links between Martin’s apocalyptic imagery, British imperial ambitions and the rise of capitalism. It also considers how Martin’s plans for urban redevelopment are linked to his preoccupation with cataclysmic doom. Through iconographical readings of Martin’s paintings the paper hypothesizes that themes such as the fall of great civilizations and the wrath of god are not coincidental but concerns contemporary to Martin caused by capitalist expansion. The second part of the paper goes on to investigate the possibility that our contemporary interest in the apocalypse is in fact, just as it was in Martin’’s time, a metaphor for militant unrest, which is manifested in theory and culture because of our inability to imagine the end of capitalism – in this context the paper turns to contemporary painter Gordon Cheung to reconsider the idea, attributed to Jameson and Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Something you may or may not deny: Henry Holiday (as much as Lewis Cerroll) was a master of The Art of Deniability, when he illustrated Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark". Ambiguity helped him to stay out of trouble.

2015-03-16: Link to http://50watts.com/Illustrating-An-Agony-in-Eight-Fits added

2014-04-11: I added an paragraph about intentionality and interpretation.

This thesis explores the striking proliferation of large-scale religious paintings in the public exhibition-spaces of London and other urban centres during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It is particularly concerned with the three-cornered relationship between art, religion and money, postulating that configurations of these factors were of major importance to the production, exhibition and reception of works in the genre, and to how their spectators were discussed and represented. On the one hand, it was believed by artists that, by painting scriptural subjects, various professional and commercial opportunities might open up through the patronage of wealthy individuals, art institutions, the government or the church, or by exhibiting such works in special exhibitions as commercial speculations. They hoped that these ambitions might be brought into a mutually beneficial union with the needs of the church, and the religious faith and sentiments of a Christian nation. On the other hand, however, the priorities of art and religion frequently proved to be at odds with each other, and therefore produced barriers to the achievement of these goals. Furthermore, this sense of incompatibility between art and religion became a means by which elite players within the cultural field defined themselves in opposition to a newly identified mass audience, which they considered to include people who (through a lack of experience) were ill-equipped to understand and appreciate paintings as art, so instead enjoyed them as visual spectacles, or admired them out of religious respect and because of devotional feelings. The accessibility and popularity of religious art, however, also led other commentators to seek to cater for and represent the interests of this new class of spectators, and thus to present the genre and its admirers in a more positive light. It is therefore suggested that the reception of spectacular scriptural paintings reveals an important cultural dimension of the wider struggle over enfranchisement in the early nineteenth century.

2015-05-25 (another Snark exercise):
Images (neither with interpretations nor with any assumptions) for educational purposes:
(1) John Martin, "The Bard" (1817).
(2) John Martin, "The Bard", filtered using GIMP (Retinex: Scale=160, ScaleDivision=6, Dynamic=2.5).
(3) The Baker (vanishing). Illustration (1876) by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", Fit 8.
(4) The Butcher. In the background you see the Bellman. (I almost forgot him although that little figure is important.) Illustration (1876) by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", Fit 5.

Henry Holiday's Snark illustrations and John Martin's "The Bard":
- https://www.academia.edu/9885417/The_Bellman_and_the_Bard
- https://www.academia.edu/9923718/Henry_Holidays_Monsterspotting
- https://www.academia.edu/10251338/Monsters_and_Monstrances
- https://www.academia.edu/12586460/The_Bard_the_Baker_and_the_Butcher

Bycatch: M. C. Escher:
- https://www.academia.edu/9854308/M._C._Escher_-_and_John_Martins_The_Bard_

2016-03-22: I added two pages, without too much explanation either.

“This Visible World” examines Byron’s use of a stationary style of visual description akin to that of a painting, to craft a literary persona in Manfred that harnesses the natural effects of the weather and environment to amplify the emotional strain of the titular character. His suffering leads to a form of cathartic release from melancholic calcification. Using Timothy Morton’s essay on Manfred and ecology, “Byron’s Manfred and Ecocriticism, ” more specifically, his analysis on the work of John Martin’s Manfred on the Jungfrau (1837), in conjunction with an analysis of Martin’s Manfred and the Witch of the Alps (1837), I examine Act I, Scene II of the work, in which Manfred is situated on the edge of a vast cliff, seemingly contemplating his own suicide, and the relationship between the character and nature.  This relationship is further analyzed through a close look at Martin’s Manfred and the Witch of the Alps, as there is a spiritual copy of Manfred next to the character in Martin’s painting. This “copy” stands as a visual representation of Byron himself, who uses Manfred, what I call an avatar, as a means of transportation, guiding a recreation of himself as his reader would have viewed him at the that time. I examine these paintings and articles to develop my discussion of Byron’s use of an avatar to mediate his treatment of nature in the play.

Comparison of two images: [main image]: John Martin: The Bard (ca. 1817), by GIMP: contrast enhanced in the rock area & light areas delated & color removed & Retinex filtering. [inset]: Henry Holiday: Illustration (1876) to chapter The Beaver's Lesson in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, detail.

Henry Holiday's Snark illustrations and John Martin's "The Bard":
- https://www.academia.edu/9885417/The_Bellman_and_the_Bard
- https://www.academia.edu/9923718/Henry_Holidays_Monsterspotting
- https://www.academia.edu/10251338/Monsters_and_Monstrances
- https://www.academia.edu/12586460/The_Bard_the_Baker_and_the_Butcher

IncidentalSnarkhunter.pdf was about how I got into Snark hunting. It was a PDF file made from http://www.ipernity.com/doc/goetzkluge/34431511. But as that file is not so important (and the hyperlinks did not work), I removed it from academia.edu. You still can find it in the Snark Archive (https://www.academia.edu/12408574/Snark_Archive).

Just in a nutshell: In December 2008 I incidentally discoverd an allusion to an etching by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder in one Henry Holiday's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's "The hunting of the Snark". Since then I found more sources, e.g. works by Gustave Doré, Philip Galle (after Maarten van Heemskerck), Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Matthias Grünewald, John Martin, J.E. Millais and William Sidney Mount. Also, in "The Hunting of the Snark", there may be pictorial and textual allusions to Charles Darwin's Beagle voyage and Thomas Cranmer's burning.

Daniel 5 is a text about writing, and the anxiety it evokes. When a hand appears that inscribes a cryptic message on the wall before King Belshazzar and his guests, what it is transmitting is far from clear, and the king is terrified. The focus of this paper is how artists have engaged with this visionary act of writing, and how this in turn complicates conceptions of the written word as the locus of truth. To do this, the paper focuses on two Daniel-dialoguing visualizations that ascribe particular importance to the medium of writing within the scene: Rembrandt van Rijn’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1636–8), and Susan Hiller’s Belshazzar’s Feast, the Writing on Your Wall (1983–4). We will explore how these visualizations of Daniel 5 have chosen not to cut ties with textual trappings, but to re-inscribe the medium into their work. Particular attention will be given to Rembrandt’s arrangement of the Aramaic inscription, which exhibits a concern with veracity in a way rare among visual portrayals of Daniel 5, and to Hiller’s practice of the 'paraconceptual' with its focus on exploring the ‘distinction between literally reading and understanding signs or marks and interpreting them'. By considering these visualizations of this scene, through Rembrandt’s luminous letters and Hiller’s video, vision transcriptions, and automatic writing, we will encounter notions such as the fragility of translation, the numinous characteristics of inscriptions, and memory and misrepresentation. This will lead us back to the anxiety evoked by the writing in Daniel 5, and we shall see how these visualizations help show that when Daniel states ‘This is the interpretation of the matter’, its written truth is precariously insubstantial.

This article discusses the work and the reception of the artists Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) and John Martin (1789–1854), both in terms of their engagement with art as an academic discipline and in terms of their relationship to the emergent middle-class interest in the consumption of visual spectacle. A central concern in both respects was the aesthetic category of the sublime, which had been established around the mid-eighteenth century as the primary visual mode of experiencing the force and power of nature. De Loutherbourg successfully recreated sublime spectacles (for example, shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, waterfalls, avalanches) within academy painting and stage design. Later, he invented the Eidophusikon, a multimedia device that was designed to stage dynamic natural phenomena. The Eidophusikon is thought to have influenced London’s pictorial entertainment circle, which proved inspirational for John Martin around half a century later.

Comparison of gnarly monstrances drawn by Henry Holiday and John Martin

Henry Holiday's Snark illustrations and John Martin's "The Bard":
- https://www.academia.edu/9885417/The_Bellman_and_the_Bard
- https://www.academia.edu/9923718/Henry_Holidays_Monsterspotting
- https://www.academia.edu/10251338/Monsters_and_Monstrances
- https://www.academia.edu/12586460/The_Bard_the_Baker_and_the_Butcher

A monster in an illustration by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" has at least two roots in John Martin's painting "The Bard".  (2015-01-15: Minor layout changes)

2015-03-13: "by Henry Holiday" added on page 1

2015-05-25:
Henry Holiday's Snark illustrations and John Martin's "The Bard":
- https://www.academia.edu/9885417/The_Bellman_and_the_Bard
- https://www.academia.edu/9923718/Henry_Holidays_Monsterspotting
- https://www.academia.edu/10251338/Monsters_and_Monstrances
- https://www.academia.edu/12586460/The_Bard_the_Baker_and_the_Butcher