{"id":3565,"date":"2011-04-22T23:27:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T06:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/?p=3565"},"modified":"2011-04-23T00:03:19","modified_gmt":"2011-04-23T07:03:19","slug":"discord-and-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/?p=3565","title":{"rendered":"Discord and Mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discord!<\/em>, composed by Samuel Webbe for the newly-formed London Glee Club in about 1787:\u00a0 It’s first movement is based on a passage from Iliad, but the second verse, it is thought, he composed himself.<\/p>\n

Discord!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Discord! Dire sister of the slaughtering power,<\/p>\n

Small at her birth, but rising every hour,<\/p>\n

While scarce the skies her horrid head can bound,<\/p>\n

She stalks on earth, and shakes the world around.<\/p>\n

But lovely Peace in angel form<\/p>\n

Descending quells the rising storm.<\/p>\n

Soft ease and sweet content shall reign<\/p>\n

And Discord never rise again.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Pieta – Michelangelo<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

About 300 years earlier, at age 24, Michelangelo created the Pieta,\u00a0and by accepting not the Virgin’s grief but her acceptance of fate,\u00a0sought to stir the beholder to philosophic reflection.\u00a0 “If life pleases us,” he once wrote, “death, being made by the hands of the same creator, should not displease us.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

He turned the nude figure of Christ into the very quintessence of man—a figure in which there was no need, as he put it, “to make the human disappear behind the divine.”<\/p>\n

Michelangelo, persuing what he called “the heart’s image,” disregarded conventional reality and substituted for it a set of strange and compelling paradoxes that build into a super-reality.\u00a0 The Christ, though dead, is still alive, His veins distended by the pulse of life, His body limp with sleep, His torso flowing into the mold of his mother’s arm and lap.\u00a0 The Virgin, traditionally represented as a woman disfigured by grief, is here much younger than her Son—the personification of “perpetual purity.”<\/p>\n

And while the Christ is life-sized, in keeping with Michelangelo’s obligation to provide a figure as big as a well-proportioned man, the Virgin is bigger than life.\u00a0 Were she to stand, she would be seven feet tall.\u00a0 And yet her head is the same size as Christ’s.\u00a0 One of the wonders of the Pieta is that aberrant proportions like these in no way disturb the viewer.<\/p>\n

A work of deep Christian piety, the Pieta also expresses Michelangelo’s Neoplatonic belief that physical beauty is the manifestation of a noble spirit.\u00a0 To critics who carped at the youthfulness of\u00a0his Virgin, the sculptor had a ready reply—“Do you know that chaste women maintain their freshness longer than those who are not?”<\/p>\n

[Illustration by Wikipedia.\u00a0 The World of Michelangelo 1475-1564<\/span> The Time\/Life Library of Art]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discord!, composed by Samuel Webbe for the newly-formed London Glee Club in about 1787:\u00a0 It’s first movement is based on a passage from Iliad, but the second verse, it is thought, he composed himself. Discord! Discord! Dire sister of the slaughtering power, Small at her birth, but rising every hour, While scarce the skies her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[317,315,316],"class_list":["post-3565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-poetry","tag-easter","tag-michelangelo","tag-pieta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3565"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3574,"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3565\/revisions\/3574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astrowin.org\/rffriends\/wpx\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}