[Navo]

Good stuff Zeeshan. Will follow it keenly (I hope Mufi opens the linguistic anthropology thread too)
Would be great to read some personal reflections/reviews on art exhibitions or museums attended in addition to general info. Recommendations are always welcome.

Here is a brief excerpt from a travel account I wrote when visiting Spain a couple of years back. It's about my visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid with a friend:

"The first place she took me to was the Prado Museum. It was afternoon already and we knew we didn't have much time in the museum, so we went immediately to her favourite section - the one exhibiting the Black Paintings of Francisco Goya. Though I did go to the Prado again, once my other friends arrived, it was the paintings of this section that left the biggest impression on me. I was particularly taken by the painting below, which was possibly inspired by the Ruben's painting beneath it (also displayed at the Prado):

Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son c. 1819-1823


Ruben's Saturn Devouring His Son (1636)

The paintings depict the Greco-Roman myth of Chronos (Saturn) the Titan devouring his children because he had heard it prophesied that one of them would overthrow him. (There seem to be many such narratives in Greek and Roman mythology - the story of Oedipus springs to mind)

I find the former painting to be more potent in its imagery than the latter, despite the latter being more refined. The crazed, desperate look in Saturn's eyes as he peers out of the darkness leaves a particularly haunting impression. I have read on one blog that this painting can be seen as an allegory "on the situation in a country [Spain] that was consuming its own children in bloody wars and revolutions". I think this is an apt way of explaining the imagery as the painting was made weeks after the French declared their war on Spain. (On the other hand, contemporary accounts also say that Goya was also experiencing the onset of paranoid dementia at the time, so that could have had an effect to!)

These were also some of the memorable paintings I saw at the Prado:

Velazquez's The Triumph of Bacchus (1629)


Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych (1490-1510)