Nigel Bruce

How to Look at a Naked Lady

Coventry Cathedral Ruins

Coventry is the city of Lady Godiva and the ruins of Coventry Cathedral of Saint Michael. The ruins commemorate the bombing of the city in World War II; this is the same view in 1941 during a Churchill visit. But, Lady Godiva and her husband were associated with a different

A Tale of Two Women

Coyoacán

Coyoacán is the place to stay in Mexico City if you love art and history. The original house of Malinche and Cortés is there. It dates from around 1521 and 1522 and it is on Higuera Street, across the street from the Plaza La Conchita, but it does not look

Homer's Women

Cream: 'Tales of Brave Ulysses'

This song by Cream was released in 1967 as the B side to Strange Brew and on their Disraeli Gears album, and it is marvelously evocative. Told, one assumes, by a modern-day English Odysseus in the Greek islands, the object of his desires is identified with Aphrodite. Australian pop

From Russia with Love

Are you a Cynic?

To find out if you are a cynic, start here (Putin's Kiss) or here (Pictures at an Exhibition) or here (The Poisoning of Litvinenko). YOU ARE A CYNIC Do you believe in anything really? Politics maybe. Everyone is a potential enemy in Russia: Litvinenko had many enemies and

Life as Opera

Dalí's 'Tristan and Isolde'

Leave it to a Spanish painter (or Catalan) to return the favor and spell out what he really thought of the gloomy Tristan and Isolde myth - Salvador Dalí's satirical Tristan and Isolde. This painting began life as a small oil painting back in 1936-38, but it was

A Tale of Two Women

Salvador Dali's 'Virgin of Guadalupe'

Above is Dalí's wife, Gala, as the Virgin Mary, with roses of course. The sunflower seeds is a lovely touch. Below is Vision Of Hell (Visión Del Infierno) (1962), based on another vision of the Virgin Mary, in 1917, by three children in Fátima, Portugal. They claimed they

Angel Incarnate

Dame Fortune

Niccolò Machiavelli met Leonardo da Vinci periodically between 1503 and 1506. This was when Cesare Borgia employed Leonardo as a military architect and engineer and Machiavelli was the envoy for the Florentine republic. For Leonardo (as for Shakespeare a century later), encounters like this were governed by Dame Fortune and

The Age of Consent

Dante Alighieri’s 'Inferno'

I find the painting above faintly ridiculous. Or perhaps I just find Dante and the traditions of courtly love poetry faintly ridiculous. There is no irony. The woman is always meant to be unattainable. In the painting above, Dante is being ignored by Beatrice Portinari, if his La Vita Nuova

Voices and Saints

Saint Michael the Archangel in paintings

A small sample of the many drawings and paintings of Saint Michael, in chronological order:

The Judgment of Paris

Delacroix's 'Mephistopheles'

Eugène Delacroix's lithograph of Méphistophélès dans les Airs (sometimes translated as Mephistopheles Flying Over Wittenberg), which he produced in 1828 as the first of a series of 17 to illustrate Goethe's Faust. If Martin Luther was Faust, who was Mephistopheles? Was he a demon? An agent

Homer's Women

The Oracle at Delphi

To get home more quickly, could Odysseus have received guidance from the Oracle at Delphi, rather than Tiresias? The Oracle does not put in much of an appearance in the Odyssey. This implies that Homer may have been largely unaware of it and that most divination there came in the

Beauty & the Beast

Disease in the History of Painting

In medieval times, there was a widespread belief that signs of physical corruption mirrored the state of the soul. Bad people were ugly or sick. That view is still around today. But, following St. Augustine and Aquinas, and their classical Greek sources, it also was argued that all of God&

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

'Diva'

Diva collides the images of Greek mythology with Paris in the 80s, filtered through American film styles. A world in which Classical Greek and Catholic symbolism co-exist in its blue dreamscapes. Below are the messenger boy Jules and Alba. I love this movie. In the story, two audio cassettes

Spinster

Dogcart

A dogcart, or donkey cart, as it was called: the conventional mode of transportation for the Austens at the time, drawn by a single horse, with seating for two, sitting over two wheels. Larger versions could seat four, with passengers facing forward and backwards. The dogcart was soon upgraded to

The Whore's Revenge

Don Juan

Don Juan first showed up in Tirso de Molina's play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. Usually this is translated as The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest but "burlador" has been translated as "ladykiller," "seducer," "joker,"

The Whore's Revenge

Don Juan's 20 Proverbs of Evil

1. Sex is Life. Love is not Life. Love is the Abyss. 2. Sex is light, fire, friction, a spiral, exterior. Love is interior, a vicious circle. 3. Sex isn’t just sexual intercourse. Some equate it with the divine. Or the demonic. 4. Sex is not Romance; Romance is

Precious Bodily Fluids

'Don Quixote' and its dueling sequels

Many novels have inspired sequels, but how many have inspired them by people other than the original author, at least before the age of comics and spin-offs? Cervantes’ Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha) appeared in 1605. Before he published his sequel, someone else got

Precious Bodily Fluids

Don Quixote as the Spanish Christ

There's an essay from 1860 by Turgenev, the Russian writer, called Hamlet and Don Quixote. In it, he contrasts two heroic types. There is the man who thinks he is strong, like Don Quixote, but who really isn't. He takes action, but he is ridiculous. Yet,

A Tale of Two Women

Don Quixote

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were Cervantes' extremely popular but rather less than successful heroes. The celebrated images above and below are by, respectively, Jules David in 1887, Pablo Picasso in 1955 and Honoré Daumier in 1850. This Pedro de Urdemales image from lower down in another sidebar page,

Oz is China

Dorothy and the Munchkins

Is Dorothy in China? Meeting the Munchkins and they have shaved heads with tufts of hair and long beards? Hmmm, Qing dynasty Buddhist monks or Taoist priests? 身体发肤，受之父母，不敢毁伤，孝之始也

How to Look at a Naked Lady

Dr. Seuss's 'The Seven Lady Godivas'

Who knew? And why seven? Dr. Seuss's The Seven Lady Godivas (1939)...but you won't see this one at the local bookshop. It was one of his earliest books and it didn't sell well. Its full title is The Seven Lady Godivas: The True

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

Dreams and Miracles

A dead man comes back to life and his mother remains a virgin... Two miracles! Add to that the astonishing idea that God had a child... Is this Egypt? It has been said that Horus was born after the murder of his father Osiris (by Set) and in a virgin

Loki's Children

Dreams as Autobiography

The Norse legends as told in the Poetic Edda rely a lot on dreams, especially the wonderful Völuspá and quite literally in Baldrs draumar. After Ragnarök there is a chessboard on the green grass and Níðhöggr the dragon appears overhead, bearing corpses in his wings, and then the Völva emerges

Kama Sutra

Dulac's Arabian Nights or Disney's Agrabah?

Immediately above (and below) is Edmund Dulac's illustrations for Stories from the Arabian Nights (1907). Up top is Disney's Agrabah in Aladdin - clearly an homage. Dulac was a French book illustrator whose heyday was in England in the years before World War I. He produced his

The Age of Consent

Dylan Thomas and Adam and Eve

Dylan Thomas wrote the lines “I know the legend/Of Adam and Eve is never for a second/Silent in my service,” in Ceremony After a Fire Raid, one of his many brilliant emotional poems about the fire-bombings of World War II and one of his many acknowledgements of