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References in 8/16/02 Kleeman and Mike:
(from WebMuseum)
Francisco Goya, (1746 - 1828), consummately Spanish artist whose multifarious paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters.
Mike references the Goya engraving The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters:
click for larger image
Mike also references a painting from Goya's "Black period" - Saturn Devouring One of His Sons:
click for larger image
"The one with the little Napoleon guy" - The cartoon they're watching is a 1956 Bugs Bunny cartoon called "Napoleon Bunny-Part"
Kleeman calls it ironic because Goya painted many images of atrocities by Napoleonic forces in Spain, the most famous of which is his painting The Third of May, 1808:
click for larger image
The Napoeonic figure in Bugs Bunny brings to Mike's mind the image of the guillotine. He references a Dickens passage in A Tale of Two Cities. The entire quote is one of my all time favorites:
| It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees ... already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. |
Goya bio:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/goya/ |
