Thanks for the link!! But I have to admit that I prefer the black and white ones. They are more poignant in a way. (Running out of words here, to describe what I mean...) Even though the Winter night is beautiful.
(Erik Werenskiold I don't know as well. Google showed only a few naturalistic paintings and some illustrations which I have to agree are less gripping then Kittelsens. It's a shame that there is no literature on Norwegian illustration of this time. Or is there?)
To the iconographic context: I have to admit, I thought about it the whole day. I don't know. Everything I try seems to lead no-where. My first idea was the association: plague - Middle Ages. But (of course) what comes to my mind first is the topic of the "Totentanz", the dance of Death. The iconographic tradition of this is the "male" skeleton, and even though Kittelsen seems to cite a few motives of this tradition: such as the long black coat and her scythe like instrument, it's a female Death/Plague personification and this is the crucial point. Then I thought of "Herr der Welt" (Lord of the World): the medieval cathedral sculptures of young monarchs: one side in perfect health and beauty, the back rotted and deformed as if infected by the plague or similar catastrophic illnesses of the time. But I don't think there is a female version of this. The only other motive in which women were portrayed as old and sometimes with rotten flesh is in the case of the three ages of man (Baldung Grien and others). But this doesn't lead to anything helpful... I simply don't know. Perhaps it's specifically Norwegian??? Perhaps it is a combination of different traditions: Old witch (as by Dürer or Baldung Grien and then highly stereotyped in fairy tale illustrations to Grimm, Bechstein and others in the Nineteenth Century), then the goddesses of the fate, the Norns, which are often depicted as old women with a spindle and so influenced the depictions of the evil fairies and consequently the whitches... Well, you see, I am poking around in the dark. Sorry. I seem to have been carried away a bit here.
And to answer your question about which period, school I specialised on in my art historian studies. I wrote my Master thesis on the iconographic tradition and the visual interpretation of Tristan and Isolde in British paintings/murals/glass windows/tapestries of the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: this was mostly Pre-Raphaelite with William Morris and his fellow artists such as Waterhouse, Marianne Stokes, Frederick Sandys and others. In the beginning I included book-illustrations (Beardsley, Russel Flint, Rackham, etc.) but had to leave them out in the end, it was too much material. At the moment I am working (or better: completing, for which I am eternally grateful:-))my doctor thesis on illustrations and paintings etc. to the Brother Grimm's fairy tales, 1812-1945 in German-speaking countries. And I saw your post about the Goslarer Kaiserpfalz with great joy, because it's completely true, and not the only example for the use of fairy tales in a highly political context. The "Dornröschenschlaf" was a popular figure of speech such as the sleep of Barbarossa, by the way. And, similarly like Sleeping Beauty, Tristan and Isolde was used in a state mural program to pitch a certain politic idea to the beholders. In the case of Tristan and Isolde it is William Dyce and Westminster Palace. Did you write about the Goslarer Kaiserpfalz in your Master thesis? You said it was about Visual Rhetoric in Wilhelmine Germany? Sounds fascinating... And before this comment grows any longer, I better post it and ramble on somewhere else...
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Date: 2007-09-12 09:19 pm (UTC)(Erik Werenskiold I don't know as well. Google showed only a few naturalistic paintings and some illustrations which I have to agree are less gripping then Kittelsens. It's a shame that there is no literature on Norwegian illustration of this time. Or is there?)
To the iconographic context: I have to admit, I thought about it the whole day. I don't know. Everything I try seems to lead no-where. My first idea was the association: plague - Middle Ages. But (of course) what comes to my mind first is the topic of the "Totentanz", the dance of Death. The iconographic tradition of this is the "male" skeleton, and even though Kittelsen seems to cite a few motives of this tradition: such as the long black coat and her scythe like instrument, it's a female Death/Plague personification and this is the crucial point. Then I thought of "Herr der Welt" (Lord of the World): the medieval cathedral sculptures of young monarchs: one side in perfect health and beauty, the back rotted and deformed as if infected by the plague or similar catastrophic illnesses of the time. But I don't think there is a female version of this. The only other motive in which women were portrayed as old and sometimes with rotten flesh is in the case of the three ages of man (Baldung Grien and others). But this doesn't lead to anything helpful... I simply don't know. Perhaps it's specifically Norwegian??? Perhaps it is a combination of different traditions: Old witch (as by Dürer or Baldung Grien and then highly stereotyped in fairy tale illustrations to Grimm, Bechstein and others in the Nineteenth Century), then the goddesses of the fate, the Norns, which are often depicted as old women with a spindle and so influenced the depictions of the evil fairies and consequently the whitches... Well, you see, I am poking around in the dark. Sorry. I seem to have been carried away a bit here.
And to answer your question about which period, school I specialised on in my art historian studies. I wrote my Master thesis on the iconographic tradition and the visual interpretation of Tristan and Isolde in British paintings/murals/glass windows/tapestries of the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: this was mostly Pre-Raphaelite with William Morris and his fellow artists such as Waterhouse, Marianne Stokes, Frederick Sandys and others. In the beginning I included book-illustrations (Beardsley, Russel Flint, Rackham, etc.) but had to leave them out in the end, it was too much material. At the moment I am working (or better: completing, for which I am eternally grateful:-))my doctor thesis on illustrations and paintings etc. to the Brother Grimm's fairy tales, 1812-1945 in German-speaking countries. And I saw your post about the Goslarer Kaiserpfalz with great joy, because it's completely true, and not the only example for the use of fairy tales in a highly political context. The "Dornröschenschlaf" was a popular figure of speech such as the sleep of Barbarossa, by the way. And, similarly like Sleeping Beauty, Tristan and Isolde was used in a state mural program to pitch a certain politic idea to the beholders. In the case of Tristan and Isolde it is William Dyce and Westminster Palace. Did you write about the Goslarer Kaiserpfalz in your Master thesis? You said it was about Visual Rhetoric in Wilhelmine Germany? Sounds fascinating...
And before this comment grows any longer, I better post it and ramble on somewhere else...