Thanatos and Art - Selection # 1
Generally, amnesiac to all that refers to what the Czech writer Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being, man usually looks the other way, since the most persistent and in fact, the oldest of his taboos expensive plant, with all the consistency of its ineffability: Death.
And yet, paradoxical as it may seem to us, there is an irrepressible gothic instinct in him that inevitably pushes him to be fascinated by her, to the point of surrendering her to a whole cultural infinity.
Nothing better to understand part of this fascination, than to embark on the metaphorical ship of Art and let yourself be carried away by these ambiguous mythological currents, to enter with them in the deep oceans that feed the sacred tears of piety.
Piety is usually represented, in Christian art, as that inconsolable Mater, with jaws gripped by the most unbearable of sufferings and rivers of tears that spill like a torrent over the inert body of the dead son that she maintains on her lap.
In this sense, it is curious to observe how the background remains, with all the force of its meaning, while the figure changes, depending on the political-religious inclinations of the deceased - conservative or liberal - what would come to confirm, and Art thus confirms it. he understood –at least in this Madrid Pantheon of Illustrious Men- that Death, after all, was not, if not, the return to the origin of the origins: the maternal womb.
And in this other conception, the Mother is represented as a solitary Lady, with a veil that partially conceals her head, but reveals part of an inscrutable face, with her eyes closed, planted with vaporous presence on the threshold that separates the ambivalent worlds of existence, awaiting with commiseration the arrival home of the prodigal son.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.
Qué hermoso lugar, y maravillosas fotos, las esculturas son muy bellas y expresivas, todo se conjuga para crear esa estética atmósfera mortuoria que tan bien analizas y explicas, abrazos cálidos amigo juancar, seguro que ese post que me comentas harás sobre la catedral de Burgos también será muy especial.
Bueno, estimado amigo, dejando a un lado las siempre engorrosas cuestiones políticas que inevitablemente están asociadas con este lugar, se puede decir que su elección forma parte de esas antiguas zonas mistéricas del viejo Magerit, donde el Panteón se levantó al amparo de una Virgen Negra, la de Atocha, que ya lo hace posiblemente más especial. Es un lugar con cierto encanto, cierto aire de misterio, cuyo silencio impone y donde dejarse llevar por la magia de los claroscuros y los múltiples detalles que se localizan en sus monumentales esculturas, hechas por artistas de reconocido prestigio, como Mariano Benlliure. Me alegro que te guste y procuraré no decepcionarte cuando tenga tiempo para acometer la ardua labor que es hablar de un lugar tan monumental, tan sobrecogedor (al menos artísticamente hablando) como es la catedral de Burgos. Un abrazo