http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/?service=Rss http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-the-living-mirror-ren-magritte-1928-1889480.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-the-living-mirror-ren-magritte-1928-1889480.html ]]> <p>"In the beginning was the word," says the gospel of St John. "In the beginning was the deed," replies Goethe's Faust. But if those prophets had been image-makers, they might have seen things differently: in the beginning was the blob. </p> Great Works Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-leda-and-the-swan-circa-1515-after-leonardo-1882258.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-leda-and-the-swan-circa-1515-after-leonardo-1882258.html ]]> <p>The High Renaissance once embodied the supreme standard, the paragon of beauty and nobility, the norm of all norms. Now it looks more like a freak show. There's Michelangelo with his muscle-bound super-heroes. There's Leonardo with his spooky-faced aliens. It's strangely fashioned world, and that's why it still appeals to our age, which delights in strangeness. </p> Great Works Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-diogenes-seeks-a-true-man-1652-caesar-van-everdingen-1874731.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-diogenes-seeks-a-true-man-1652-caesar-van-everdingen-1874731.html ]]> <p>Max Ernst called Magritte's pictures "collages painted entirely by hand". Magritte disliked it, but the phrase sticks. His paintings often perform those weird re-orderings of the world that collage, with its cutting and mixing, is good at. There's a mother with a child in her arms, say. But the woman has a large baby's head and the baby a small woman's. It's as if the heads had been clipped from other pictures and pasted in – a Madonna and Child grotesquely transposed. </p> Great Works Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-the-isle-of-the-dead-1880-arnold-bcklin-1867905.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-the-isle-of-the-dead-1880-arnold-bcklin-1867905.html ]]> <p>In 1945, George Orwell wrote an essay called "Good Bad Books". It was about "a type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries... that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." A prime example would be the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. </p> Great Works Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:01 +0000