Author Archives: Alexander Brey

It is all theatre, all incredibly false…

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This painting by Francesco Hayez just ripped my heart out and stomped all over it. Which is supposed to be what’s happening to the protagonist, Maria, who has just been informed by Rachele that her lover is unfaithful. The dramatic title: Vengeance is Sworn. It’s part of a triptych on love and revenge, along with The Secret Accusation, now in the Civica Pinacoteca Malaspina of Pavia, and A Rival’s Revenge (The Venetian Women), the whereabouts of which are currently unknown.

Francesco Hayez, 1851. 237 x 178 cm, Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum

Francesco Hayez, 1851. 237 x 178 cm, Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum

A Maffei verse was originally carved into the frame: “via dal mio cor si vil pensiero” (banish from my heart so vile a thought).

hayez_detail4

A note stands in for the absent referent that structures the narrative drama of the painting, the unfaithful beloved. Maria touches Rachele’s hand as if to push it away, while Rachele clutches Maria’s shoulder, completing a circuit between the women that calls into question the centrality of the missing third party.

hayez_detail3

A figure silhouetted on a balcony in the background seems to be turned away from the drama. The deserted canal functions a semi-private space in which secrets are revealed, but only to some.

hayez_detail1

Masking and unmasking shift the drama from the realm of the quotidian into theater, implicitly problematizing the erotic intrigue as a performance. The true feelings of the actors, submerged beneath a set of scripted gestures and historicizing costumes, remain a mystery. Perhaps there is no depth to be found here, only surface.

hayez_detail2

Vengeance is Sworn
Francesco Hayez, 1851
Oil on Canvas, 237 x 178 cm
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna
Inv.-No. GE1642

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The Hunt: Performing Masculinities

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Images of hunting have been charged with socio-economic issues and highly visible performances of gender for as long as they have existed. But technological innovations (in particular the popularization of film and digital photography) have transformed the relationship between class and gender that characterizes such images and their creators in some unexpected ways.

How do we get from here

Royal Hunt, Noth Palace of Ashurbanipal, British Museum

Royal Hunt, North Palace of Ashurbanipal, British Museum

to here

A Shooting Party, Edith H. Lowber, BMC 2009.23.7

A Shooting Party, Edith H. Lowber, BMC 2009.23.7

from which this is but a small step:

Howard Family Hunt, Racine WI, 11/23/2003

Howard Family Hunt, Racine WI, 11/23/2003

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Wadi el Hasa, beyond the Lithic

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For a landscape archaeology seminar I’m working my way through material from a survey of Wadi el Hasa by Burton MacDonald et al. I’m especially interested in the medieval and early modern material, in particular whether the seventh century conquest is visible in the archaeological record and how it manifests itself. They found almost no early Islamic material in the area they surveyed, but this goes largely uncommented in a final publication that is focused on significantly earlier periods.

So far I’ve entered potsherd data (site, number of samples, number of sherds) for all of the sites dated from the Byzantine period up to the present into one google doc spreadsheet, and all the site data (location, classification) for the Byzantine period into another. I still need to enter the site data for post-Byzantine sites, but I wanted to get started working on a Processing program to visualize, and eventually analyze this information.

So far, all it does is map the sites, pulling data (only for site location, and therefore currently only for the Byzantine period) dynamically from the google doc when it starts running, and displays them in a 3d environment which you can navigate with the mouse. Hopefully it will do much more, but for two days of data entry and two days of programming (slow learning) it’s not bad:

Elevations

Elevations

Overhead

Overhead

Perspectival

Perspectival

The red dot is located in the south-eastern corner, and greener points are lower in elevation, while bluer points are higher.

You can access the site location data in this googledoc spreadsheet.