Art and propaganda.

Great excitement in the art community. Two bronze statues of muscular chaps riding snarling panthers are now believed once more to be the work of Michelangelo. I say once more because up until some time in the 19th century they believed this to be the case but then they changed their minds. Now someone has spotted a corner of a drawing in a Paris museum made by one of Michelangelo's minions and which features a sketch of a chap on a panther. So art experts have had a look and have then compared the musculature of the Panther riding chaps with that of Michelangelo's David - same six pack and the like - and have almost gone back to opinion number one. It is, of course, all subject to verification. All other Michelangelo bronzes were melted down long ago so there is no possibility of that kind of comparison. Will we ever know for sure? Probably not, unless someone finally invents time travel. 

I showed photos of the bronzes at my Italian class but our teacher was singularly unimpressed. She must have gone on to another topic. Only a couple of weeks ago she was full of admiration for the cleverness of the artist (Michelangelo) in depicting God in a brain shaped vessel on the Sistine Chapel ceiling: some kind of comment on who created who! But maybe she was pressed for time today and did not want to talk about bronzes. 

Dr Victoria Avery of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, on the other hand, is very excited. She said: "It has been fantastically exciting to have been able to participate in this ground-breaking project, which has involved input from many art historians in the UK, Europe and the States, and to draw on evidence from conservation scientists and anatomists." 

We have been looking at examples Italian Fascist propaganda in the Italian class. It's amazing how many sayings we take for granted as part of everyday speech are claimed to have been said first by Mussolini. "Who dares wins." "Those how are not with us are against us". It lead to some interesting discussion. Here are a couple of examples of his propaganda on the walls of buildings. 

I was amused to read about members of Germany’s neo-Nazi National Democratic party (NPD) who were forced to cancel a protest in the south-west city of Freiburg after they got on to a train to Mannheim by mistake. They were going to demonstrate in Freiburg in solidarity with a woman who had allegedly been refused permission to take the final exam for a public management studies qualification because of her allegiance to the NPD. However, the police prevented them from boarding a train to Freiburg because it was full of far-left "ultra" football supporters on their way to a Bundesliga match. Wanting to avoid clashes on the train, the police told them to take another, presumably later, train to Freiburg. But the NPD folk just got on the next train from the same platform without checking where it was going and ended up going in completely the opposite direction. There were only about twenty of them, so it would not have been a very big demonstration anyway. Don't you love it when groups like that get all confused? And nobody missed them in Freiburg! 

As I walked through Manchester this afternoon, I noticed once again how dull Piccadilly Gardens look these days. Really you can't call them gardens. A friend of mine posted this picture of what they used to look like. Much better. Whoever agreed to the present arrangement really needs some education. 

And finally, since I put some of Mussolini's graffiti on earlier, here's a link to an article  about graffiti from the 1970s. Nothing changes.