Latest news with #PrussianBlue
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
What a sunny van Gogh painting of ‘The Sower' tells us about Pope Leo's message of hope
In his first general audience in Rome, Pope Leo XIV referred to Vincent van Gogh's painting 'Sower at Sunset' and called it a symbol of hope. A brilliant setting sun illuminates a field as a farmer walks toward the right, sowing seeds. Leo referred to Christ's Parable of the Sower, a story in the Gospel that speaks to the need to do good works. 'Every word of the Gospel is like a seed sown in the soil of our lives,' he said, and highlighted that the soil is not only our heart, 'but also the world, the community, the church.' He noted that 'behind the sower, van Gogh painted the grain already ripe,' and Leo called it an image of hope which shows that somehow the seed has borne fruit. Van Gogh painted 'Sower at Sunset' in 1888, when he was living in Arles in southern France. At the time, he was creating art alongside his friend Paul Gauguin and feeling very happy about the future. The painting reflects his optimism. In November 1888, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, in whom he frequently confided, about 'Sower at Sunset.' He described its beautiful colors: 'Immense lemon-yellow disc for the sun. Green-yellow sky with pink clouds. The field is violet, the sower and the tree Prussian Blue.' Van Gogh's painting was inspired by French artist Jean-Francois Millet's 1860 painting, 'The Sower.' But he transformed Millet's composition, in which a dark, isolated figure dominates, and deliberately set the sower in the midst of a landscape transformed by the sun. Other artists, including the Norwegian Emanuel Vigeland, explicitly depicted the Parable of the Sower. Vigeland's series of stained-glass windows in an Oslo church explains each passage's meaning. As the sower works, some seeds fall by the wayside and the birds immediately eat them, indicating those who hear the word of God but do not listen. Some seeds fall on stony ground and cannot take root, a symbol of those with little tenacity. Others fall among thorns and are choked. Vigeland juxtaposed a dramatic image of a miser counting piles of money, indicating how the man's life has become choked by desire for material gain. The final passage of the parable states that some seeds fell on good ground and yielded a hundredfold. Vigeland's depiction shows an image of an abundant harvest of grain next to a man seated on the ground and cradling a child in his lap. Van Gogh's painting corresponds to many of the ideas the new pope expressed in the first days of his papacy. Leo observed: 'In the center of the painting is the sun, not the sower, [which reminds us that] it is God who moves history, even if he sometimes seems absent or distant. It is the sun that warms the clods of the earth and ripens the seed.' The theme of the dignity of labor is also inherent in the image of the sower being deeply engrossed in physical labor, which relates to the pope's choice of his name. The pope stated that he took on the name Leo XIV 'mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.' Leo XIII was referring to the social question of economic injustice in the meager rewards for workers even as owners made great profits from the Industrial Revolution. The pope saw Van Gogh's image of the sower, like Vigeland's, as a message of hope. That message, to him, fits with the theme of hope of The Jubilee Year proclaimed by Leo's predecessor, Francis. Leo also expressed hope that humans listening to God would embrace service to others. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Virginia Raguin, College of the Holy Cross Read more: 'Loyal to the oil' – how religion and striking it rich shape Canada's hockey fandom Can witches fly? A historian unpacks the medieval invention − and skepticism − of the witch on a broomstick Decades on, Delbert Africa's surrender still provides powerful image of US racism and Black victimhood Virginia Raguin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Mainichi
4 days ago
- General
- The Mainichi
Edging Toward Japan: The Japanese discovery of the colour blue
I seem to recall some years ago reading a short story by Haruki Murakami calling "Losing Blue" ("Ao ga Kieru"). If memory serves, this describes a man waking up one morning to discover, to his sadness, that the colour blue has completely vanished from the world, though nobody else apart from him appears to have noticed. The story seemed to me like quite a clever allegory for so many things that slip away from us in the modern world without anyone apparently realising. However, it's not so much losing the colour blue, but discovering it in the first place that has been on my mind recently. In July last year I was at an exhibition at the auction house Sotheby's in London and got to admire up close some original prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige. We are so used to images of Hokusai's famous depiction of "The Great Wave" or his blue-infused vision of Mount Fuji that we tend to think of the "blueyness" of this art as quintessentially Japanese. Yet a particular set of historical circumstances, and international influences, helped to produce this iconic art. A clampdown by the Japanese government on the depictions of the lusty pleasure quarters so beloved by ukiyo-e artists of the 18th century like Harunobu and Utamaro forced 19th century artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige to devote their attention to landscape portraiture instead. And crucially, they were suddenly given access to a vibrantly new colour pigment, Prussian Blue, produced in the factories of Northern Europe -- a world until then entirely closed to them. The combination of Japanese artists having their eyes turned towards previously ignored subjects and having a newly imported colour in which to paint them helped produce such iconic, visually arresting artworks. But then, the story of Japan's interaction with the colour blue has always been a rather peculiar one. One of the first things any student of elementary Japanese learns is that the word for "blue" in Japanese is "ao," but that this word actually means "blue or green." I must confess that, for long decades, I did not understand this. How could a word mean both blue and green? This seemed to me equivalent to having a word that meant "square or circular" i.e. very confusing about the meaning it is trying to convey. What makes this even more baffling is that the Japanese language also has a perfectly clear and common word for "green" ("midori"). So why on Earth would you not just have a word for "blue" ("ao") without bringing in the possibility that what you are talking about is not blue at all, but green? In terms of everyday usage, "ao" does indeed mean for most of the time "blue," but just when you think you can ignore the confusing "...or green" part of its meaning, it turns out that "green" things, which could be called "midori," are also called "ao." The most common example of this is the green of a traffic light, which is "ao," not "midori." As if all this isn't confusing enough, the expression for "deep green," the type of green you see when walking through summer woods for example, is "ao ao shita midori," which literally means "blue blue green." Why can't Japan keep "blue" and "green" apart? To answer that question, you have to think about the way we conceptualize colour in the world. We tend to think it natural to clearly differentiate the colours in a light spectrum as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet etc. But there is no particular reason why a specific band of the light spectrum is intrinsically obvious to us a definitive colour. Both wider and narrower bands of colour on the light spectrum might appear to us as recognizable colours depending on our associations with them. Most colours are obvious to us by connection with objects in the real world: blood is red; the sun is yellow. Indeed, many colours in Japanese are denoted by connection to real world objects. Grey is "rat-coloured" (nezumi-iro) or "ash-coloured" (hai-iro), while brown is "tea-coloured" (cha-iro). The problem with blue is that there are not many solid objects in the world that we can actually associate with blue. The two things people immediately think when you mention "blue" are the sky and the sea, but both of these are things you cannot grasp and whose colour are often a will-o-the-wisp of illusion. Pour some of that "blue" sea into a glass and it suddenly turns out to be colourless. The sky meanwhile is just empty air. With no solid object of fixed colour against which to correlate, "blue" has historically had the capacity to range loosely over the colour spectrum. In the case of Japan, "ao" denoted a range of blue and green, and retained that meaning even after the introduction of the word "midori" for green in the Heian Period. Japan is by no means unique in its often confusing approach to the colour "blue." In his book, "The World According to Colour", the art historian James Fox remarks how when European nations came into first contact with many ancient cultures -- from Pacific Islanders to the bushmen of southern Africa -- during the 19th century, they were baffled by the fact that so many of them seemed to have difficulty discerning exactly what "blue" was. Theories even abounded that they might even be colour blind to "blue." It's now more generally accepted that the decisive factor is linguistic and nearly all civilizations define "blue" at a later stage than other colours such as red, white and green. As the Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone observed, Homer frequently refers to the "wine-dark sea" and yet never once calls either the sea or the sky "blue." Is this because Homer was -- as tradition has it -- blind or is it because there was simply no precise concept of "blue" amongst the Greeks of his time? We live in a world in which we often pessimistically contemplate, like Haruki Murakami's protagonist, how dangerously close we are to losing precious things from the world. But we sometimes forget just how recently even something as blindingly obvious as the colour blue fully entered our field of vision. When you look again at those intensely redolent blues of Hokusai's and Hiroshige's prints -- of Great Waves of Blue surging over you or a Mount Fuji of Blue soaring in your imagination -- you gain some sense of what it must have felt like to have the scales taken from your eyes and a primary colour to be transmitted to your senses in overwhelming Technicolor magnificence for the first time. There is seeing and then there is seeing. And there is always the potential of waking up one morning and perceiving the hues and texture of the world in a thrilling new way. @DamianFlanagan (This is Part 60 of a series) In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain. Profile: Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
