Petrifying Gazes
Danae and the Uncanny Space
by B. Baert
Of all the ancient myths where rain plays an important role, the impregnation of Danae by Zeus through a golden rain is perhaps the one most often depicted in art. This essay is dedicated to the artistic afterlife of the myth, with special focus on the painting of Danae (1527) by Jan Gossaert van Mabuse (1478-1532). Gossaert’s Danae is a sophisticated articulation of outer and inner discourse: the hard, dry, background, with its eclectic architecture, in contrast with the sweltering, moist, foreground with the figure’s naked body. This essay develops Gossaert’s complex phantasmata surrounding architecture, decoration, and the female body in three spaces: the intimate space of impregnation, the psychosomatic space, and, third, the petrifying space of Medusa. Barbara Baert writes: “Danae is the living emanation of painting as the uttermost exhibitionistic medium. Her unveiled skin fragile exposed in the midst of an overwhelming symphonic outburst of details, facades, windows. Danae: martyr of glossy materials – marble and flesh – unable to disappear in her own skin; held hostage within a medium of walls. Her only desire is to disappear in the ultimate thin membrane, to vaporize beyond the harsh brocks and, then, at the very end, leave the medium of textile too. There were threads become drippings, lines become tears.”
- By (author) B Baert
Other Titles in this Series
Signed ‘PAN’
Erwin Panofsky's (1892-1968) "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" (Princeton, 1938)
Volume 18
Late Medieval Enclosed Gardens of the Low Countries
Contributions to Gender and Artistic Expression
Volume 2
The Right Moment
Essays Offered to Barbara Baert, Laureate of the 2016 Francqui Prize in Human Sciences, on the Occasion of the Celebratory Symposium at the Francqui Foundation, Brussels, 18-19 October 2018
Volume 20
Rocks and Tears
Niobe's Fate and the Dynamics of Form. Lecture on the Occasion of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftungsprofessur 2023
Volume 25
Nymph. Motif, Phantom, Affect. Part II
Aby Warburg's (1866-1929) Butterflies as Art Historical Paradigms
Volume 4
In Response to Echo
Beyond Mimesis or Dissolution as Scopic Regime (with Special Attention to Camouflage)
Volume 6
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