anonymous
oil on canvas, c. 1620–1630
Ashmolean Museum
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Archive for the Painting Category
Truth presenting a Mirror to the Vanities of the World
Posted in Painting with tags Vanitas on April 29, 2018 by Dylan Thomas HaydenAutoritratto entro uno specchio convesso
Posted in Painting with tags Parmigianino, Self Portrait on April 28, 2018 by Dylan Thomas Hayden
Parmigianino
oil on panel, c. 1523
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien
Martha incolpa sua sorella Maria
Posted in Painting with tags Orazio Gentileschi on April 27, 2018 by Dylan Thomas Hayden
Orazio Gentileschi
oil on canvas, c. 1620
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Mirror
Posted in Painting, Philosophy with tags David Bentley Hart, Georges de La Tour on April 25, 2018 by Dylan Thomas Hayden
In those moments when our experience of the world awakens us to the strangeness—the utter fortuity and pure givenness—of existence, we are confronted by two mysteries simultaneously, or at least by a mystery with two equally inscrutable poles. No less wonderful than the being of things is our consciousness of them: our ability to know the world, to possess a continuous subjective awareness of reality, to mirror the unity of being in the unity of private cognizance, to contemplate the world and ourselves, to assume each moment of experience into a fuller comprehension of the whole, and to relate ourselves to the world through acts of judgment and will. In a single movement of thought, the mind is capable of receiving the world in both its integrity and its diversity, of holding past, present, and future together, of contemplating reality at once under both its particular (or concrete) and its general (or abstract) aspects, of composing endless imaginative and conceptual variations upon experience, of pondering itself as it ponders the outer world—and all the while preserving that limpid and silent presence to itself in which it indivisibly abides. Being is transparent to mind; mind is transparent to being; each is “fitted” to the other, open to the other, at once containing and contained by the other. Each is the mysterious glass in which the other shines, revealed not in itself but only in reflecting and being reflected by the other.
