Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: The Apotheosis of Aeneas ((c. 1765)

Gallery Notes: This bozzetto, or preparatory sketch, was part of Tiepolo’s designs for the fresco ceiling of the Guard Room in the Royal Palace in Madrid, which was executed by his large workshop. The artist excelled at manipulating perspective and color to create dramatic compositions in which space seemingly recedes toward infinity. Here he combines two events derived from Virgil’s Aeneid. The first is the promised deification of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who is depicted in red rising to the Temple of Immortality, accompanied by winged personifications of Victory and Justice. The second is the appearance of his mother, Venus, who is clad in white at the upper right of the painting. Along with the Graces, she presents Aeneas with arms forged by her lover Vulcan, who supervises their making below. Tiepolo gradually lessened his use of earthly reds from the bottom to the top of the composition, which exaggerates its dramatic effects.

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"I wonder what I so passionately and, ultimately, passively sought there."

In the 16th Century, Giordano Bruno argued for the existence of infinite worlds within infinite worlds. He was burned at the stake for his trouble, yet we recreate his speculation each time we try replacing one habit with another. Scrolling, for instance, seamlessly immerses us in an infinity, one in which space and time lose meaning. This easily becomes all-consuming, so high a priority that we can neglect everything else without remorse, without even noticing. The time when I first chose to limit my entry into the scrolling infinity, the first thing that occurred to me was a sense of nearly limitless time. My most prominent limit had essentially evaporated, leaving me with a fresh sense of infinity. Unlike the infinity I inhabited when scrolling, which had gone beyond my conscious awareness, this 1stInfinity overfilled my consciousness. I felt a real sense of excess. I couldn’t yet grasp what to do with it.

I suspect that this sense will diminish over time, as fresh infinities cast shadows over this latest, freshly discovered one.

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz