“It is our own misperceptions of who we really are that leads to every self-created hell you’ll find in this world”*…
“Penitent Mary Magdalene”, by Nicolas Régnier
The idea that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute before meeting Jesus is not found in the Bible…
Revel in wrongness at the “List of common misconceptions.”
* Bill Hicks
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As we render ourselves to rectification, we might send masterful birthday greetings to Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes; he was born on this date in 1746. An artist and printmaker who was Court Painter to the Spanish Crown, Goya is regarded both as the last of the Old Masters (for “La Maja Denuda,” among many, many others) and the first of the Moderns. Indeed, in the words of art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, “El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid” is “the first great picture which can be called ‘revolutionary’ in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention.”
Goya’s “Black Paintings,” created late in his life, are anguished, haunted works, reflective both of his fear of dementia and of his dystopian outlook for humanity.
“Saturn Devouring His Son” (detail), probably the most famous of the Black Paintings
Portrait of Francisco Goya by Vicente López y Portaña (1826)