As part of the “Art History” afternoons at the Micro-Folie space of the media library, Jacques Martin, painter from Gramat, will host a conference on Tuesday January 14 at 2 p.m. around the painting “The Fountain of Youth” by Lucas Cranach.
He specifies: “The providential water springing from a hidden source was venerated and deified by primitive humanity. The myth of man’s vital and regenerative relationship with water was at the origin of the fountain of youth with miraculous properties for those who bathe in it or drink from it. Renaissance artists were inspired by the Bible to treat the source of perpetual rejuvenation or eternal life which sat at the heart of the garden. of Eden Two great masters were sensitive to the primordial state of divine perfection lost by humanity: the German Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) and the Dutch Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516).
Jacques Martin will explain how everyone has intuitively dealt with the problem of humanity condemned to exile from Paradise for having turned away from its divine source and the only solution of redemption in order to reconnect with it. Thus Lucas Cranach, ideally combining immortality and eternal youth, wanted to eliminate the inequality between men and women. In his vast “Fountain of Youth”, while being the first to develop a new style of fusion of landscape with the representation of characters, Cranach celebrates Eve, granting her, in a rediscovered youth, the right to experience true social advancement. As for Hieronymus Bosch, his abundant triptych entitled “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, between “Paradise and Hell” highlights all the human delights which become illusory obsessive passions where souls can get lost. He will show how Hieronymus Bosch proceeds in this work, a veritable comic strip where beauty and ugliness coexist, good and evil merge, to criticize the excessive representations of love in courtly environments.
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