p.42: (the beauty and energy of animals)
The horse plays a large part in Delacroix animal battle pieces, but it is far form being the horse of instruction. Usually it is the wretched victim. But occasionally it too is made to participate in the general frenzy, as in the famous water color in the Louvre of a horse frightened by lightening, which.. ‘is Delacroix’s doodle, his automatic writing, occurring again and again in his work, whenever his unconscious took command.
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| Horse Frightened by a Storm, 1824 - Eugene Delacroix |
Delacroix noted in his journal, ‘Art does not consist in copying nature, but in recreating it, and this applies particularly to the representation of animals’.
The words come to our mind in front of his picture of horses fighting in a stable, which is certainly NOT painted from nature, but is a superb arabesque of animal energy.
p.45: (animals beloved)
They play a large part in literature; cats have inspired good poems, dogs bad ones. Cats are also beautiful to look at, and would seem to offer the painter an irresistible subject.But the fact remains that, since the time of ancient Egypt, the number of loving representations of cats is extremely small. (Leonardo da Vinci’s cats are drawn with more curiosity than love)
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| Cats on the Roof, Edouard Manet, 1869 |
p. 49:
The best-loved dog of the Renaissance is in Piero di Cosimo’s picture known as the Death of Procris. The dead girl lying on the ground is mourned by two creatures, a faun with goat’s legs, half animal, half human, who touches her tenderly, and a dog, who looks at her with a human sorrow and gravity. Of all Renaissance painters the misanthropic Cosimo seems to have had the greatest sympathy with animals, and he has left us one picture in which animals are the sole protagonists.
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| Death of Procris, Piero di Cosimo 1500-1510 |
This is the Forest Fire:…although man has not yet fully emerged, one finds among the bulls and bears some deer and pigs with human faces. The integration of animals and men (that had obsessed the Egyptians) is working in Cosimo’s mind, and led him to pain a cruel and violent vision of the Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths.
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| The Forest Fire, Piero di Cosimo 1505 |
p. 50
investing animals with human characteristics.
p. 51
‘I am secretly afraid of animals…. I think it is because of the us-ness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and it is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them, left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? Their eyes seem to ask us,’
p.53 (animals destroyed)
we love animals, we watch them with delight, we study their habits with ever-increasing curiosity; and we destroy them. We have sacrificed them to the gods, we have killed them in arenas in order to enjoy a cruel excitement, we still hunt them and we slaughter them by the million out of greed.
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| The death of the boar, from Giovannino de' Grassi sketchbook |
p. 58
..the omnivorous Gustave Courbet, who not only enjoyed painting dead animals in the snow, but entered heartily into the moment of kill.
p. 60
There is defensible greed, and conspicuous greed. Animals eat each other, and we eat animals. It seems to be a law of nature.
p.61
The relations of men and animals, which had been a haphazard mixture of love, exploitation and destruction, provided some natural balance such as existed in the animal world itself.
p.92
Fear of animals is something which everybody has experienced, and which seems to live on even more powerfully in the unconscious. When medieval artists wanted to portray the forces of evil or the punishments awaiting the damned they often turned to images of bestial ferocity.
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| Chauvigny in France |
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| Isola di San Giulio, Italy |
p. 94
Shorn of their magic but still keeping something of their old numinous power, sacred animals lived on in the stylized ranks of heraldry…. behind nearly all of them lurk the dim shadows of once terrible animal gods.
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| White Hart |
p. 96
The world of Bestiaries is a strange mixture of observation and dogma.
The dog which sees the reflection of a cake and lets go the real one in order to secure the illusion ‘symbolises those silly people who leave the Law for some unknown thing,’ The two dogs at the bottom are licking their wounds in order to cure them.
p. 98
The enraged swan of the Netherlands defends her nest against ‘the enemy of the state’ The swan is over life-size, the whole picture nearly 5 feet tall.
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| The Threatened Swan, Jan Asselijn 1650 |
p.116
Durer’s curiosity was universal and insatiable, embracing both the familiar and the exotic. His drawings of animals have an analytical quality, as if he were using the medium of art as a scientific technique to probe the structure of natural things.
His hare of 1502 combines photographic realism with an intense nervous vitality, making it one of the most popular animal pictures in all art. Duress’s rhinoceros was not actually observed, but re-created in imagination from a sketch and a description.
p.121
How animals move and stand has fascinated artists, who perhaps relish the absence of self-consciousness which a human subject can never overcome.
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| Durer |
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| Augustus John |
p. 124
How men see animals can indeed be as revealing about men as about animals. Munch’s tiger and mandrill, by contrast, are mirrors of his own inner torment. He drew them in Copenhagen Zoo in 1909, when under psychiatric care and when human subjects were thought to be to upsetting.
p. 157
Terror, fury, frenzy, ecstasy.. all the most extreme emotions find expression in the animal paintings of Géricault and Delacroix. ‘One must’, wrote Delacroix, ‘be very bold. One must be out of one’s mind, if one is to be all that one might be,’
p.158
‘A terrifying confusion of lions, men, and horses… a chaos of claws, swords, fangs, lances, torsos and backs,’ They are not, in fact, hunting pictures. They are episodes in an eternal battle between men and animals, reason and passion, civilisation and nature.
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| Lion Hunts (Detail) - Delacroix |
p.176
Can human beings ever see into an animal’s mind, or an animal into a human’s? Cosimo imagines a prehistoric world when men and animals were not yet distinct species and strange hybrids could still exist.The dog in his Death of Procris is completely true to life, but seems to mourn with a human understanding.
p. 196 (animals destroyed)
The death of animals is the subject of the majority of animal representations from ancient civilisations.
p.217
For Delacroix the human and animal worlds were equally savage: ‘Men are tigers and wolves, bent on destroying one another,'
