Everything has its own revenge – Weekend
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Cambridge researchers have found that Albrecht Dürer depicted himself on the altar painting in the church of the Dominican monastery in Frankfurt am Main because of revenge. He worked on the central part of the triptych in 1509 and carried on an active correspondence with the customer, the patrician Jacob Heller, demanding more generous payment, but the agreement was never reached, and in retaliation, Dürer decided to make himself the center of the composition – the figure of the artist is immediately below the ascending Mary. Uliana Volokhova found out what else revenge brought to art.
Michelangelo: revenge for insulting work
In 1536, Michelangelo Buonarroti, commissioned by Pope Paul III, began to work on the painting of the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. The large-scale fresco was dedicated to the Last Judgment and the separation of the righteous from sinners – there were almost 400 human figures in the composition, almost all of them, in the tradition of the Renaissance admiration for the human body, were naked. According to the Renaissance chronicler and biographer of Michelangelo Giorgio Vasari, in 1541, a few months before the end of work on the fresco, Paul III came to look at it together with his master of ceremonies Biagio da Cesena. The latter categorically did not like the fresco: “It is a shame that naked bodies are depicted in such an obscene form in such a sacred place,” he said, adding that such drawings are more suitable “for public baths and taverns.” Michelangelo was offended and, having reached the scene of hell, depicted the master of ceremonies in the form of the mythical king Minos with donkey ears, whose penis was swallowed by a huge snake. Cesena tried to persuade Paul III to force Michelangelo to remove him from the fresco, but the pope said that he had no power over the devil and Cesena himself had to negotiate with Michelangelo. Judging by the fact that the fresco has survived to this day, they failed to agree.
Mikhail Lermontov: revenge for unrequited love
In 1830, 15-year-old Mikhail Lermontov met 18-year-old Ekaterina Sushkova and fell in love with her. He tried to court, wrote a cycle of love poems, but was rejected and did not meet Sushkova for three years. In 1833, she began an affair with Lermontov’s cousin Alexander Lopukhin, they wanted to get married, but their relatives opposed this marriage, and the lovers thought how to convince them. In the midst of this difficult situation, Lermontov decided to take revenge on Sushkova: he recaptured her from Lopukhin, and then abandoned her himself. This, however, seemed to him not enough, and in 1836 he decided to write a novel based on this story – “Princess Ligovskaya”. The events in it accurately convey the ups and downs of the relationship between Lermontov and Sushkova, exposing the latter not in the best light: the main character, an aged girl, Elizaveta Negurova, is desperately afraid of being alone and therefore responds to any courtship in the hope of getting married.
Edgar Allan Poe: Revenge for a Caricature
In 1846, a feud broke out between Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dunn English. It’s hard to say why exactly it started, it’s hard to say: it is known that Poe wrote several sharp critical essays about English in the press, then the writers got into a fight, then they exchanged barbs in the press again and, finally, English released the novel “1844, or the Power of S.F.”. The novel was about secret societies and was rather confusing, but one thing was immediately clear: the main character, Marmaduke Hammerhead, a drunkard, a domestic tyrant and the author of the Black Crow poem, always muttering “Nevermore” under his breath, is a caricature of Edgar Allan Poe. He did not remain in debt and in retaliation wrote the story “The Cask of Amontillado”, filled with quotes from the works of English and built around revenge: the Italian nobleman Montresor takes revenge on his friend for bullying and humiliation, luring him into the cellar to try rare wine and walling him up there. The story was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1846, Poe refused royalties.
Gustav Klimt: revenge for criticism
In 1894, Gustav Klimt received an order from the University of Vienna for three large paintings: allegories of Medicine, Philosophy and Jurisprudence. They planned to decorate the ceiling of one of the halls of the university. Klimt fulfilled the order, depicting the sciences in the form of naked women, and sent the paintings to the customer. The works provoked protests at the university: 87 teachers demanded to refuse their placement in the educational institution, calling the paintings pornographic and obscene. Soon the discussion became public: Klimt was criticized in the press, and the fate of the paintings was even discussed in parliament. The university eventually abandoned the work and forced Klimt to return the fee. In 1901, when the scandal finally subsided, Klimt painted a picture of a smiling woman showing her buttocks to the viewer. The first title of this work was “To My Critics”, but the artist’s friends persuaded him to give it a neutral name, and now it is known as “Goldfish”.
Diego Rivera: revenge for censorship
In 1932, the Rockefeller family commissioned Mexican artist and leftist Diego Rivera to paint a wall in the newly built Rockefeller Center office building. The clients and the artist discussed the theme of the mural – the political and social problems of the modern United States – and the title of the work – “Man at the Crossroads”. In the spring of 1932, the still unfinished mural was criticized in the New York World-Telegram – it seemed to the correspondent that the proletarian placed in the center of the composition should be regarded as an anti-capitalist statement. Then Rivera or one of his assistants added the figure of Lenin to the fresco: the leader of the proletariat was quite recognizable, but hidden in a crowd of people and hardly distinguishable. One of the subordinates of Nelson Rockefeller Lenin nevertheless discovered it, and a long dispute began between the artist and the customer. Rockefeller demanded that Lenin be removed, but Rivera refused – the only thing he was ready for was to add portraits of Lincoln and famous abolitionists. In the end, the order was canceled, and in 1934 the fresco was dismantled. However, Rivera’s assistants managed to photograph her, and the artist recreated the fresco in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Only this time it was called “The Man in Control of the Universe” and featured not only Lenin, but also other communist leaders – Trotsky, Marx and Engels. And among the crowd of idle rich people, Nelson Rockefeller was clearly recognizable: an exemplary family man and a convinced teetotaler, he was depicted with a glass of martini next to a woman, and syphilis cells hovered over their heads.
Mikhail Bulgakov: revenge for bullying
Vladimir Kirshon, an aspiring writer and functionary of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, in the 1930s was one of the ideologists and initiators of the persecution of “fellow-traveller writers”. At meetings, he caustically criticized Zoshchenko, Kaverin, Alexei Tolstoy and Prishvin, but he especially disliked Mikhail Bulgakov and smashed him with all his might in the Soviet press: “The face of the class enemy was clearly revealed. “Running”, “Crimson Island” demonstrated the offensive of the bourgeois wing of drama. Bulgakov did not remain in debt and used the image of Kirshon for his most unpleasant characters. In 1934, he began to write the story “It was May” and in one of his heroes, the playwright Polievkt Eduardovich, Kirshon is easily guessed: “a young man of dazzling beauty, with long eyelashes, cheerful eyes” has just returned from abroad, dressed in the latest foreign fashion, but writes a play about decaying Europe and criticizes Bulgakov’s “Running”. Bulgakov did not stop at Polievkta and endowed Judas with the features of Kirshon in the novel The Master and Margarita, adding one more detail: after the murder on the orders of Pilate, his face becomes “some kind of spiritually beautiful.” Thus, he not only took revenge on the offender, but also predicted his fate. After the arrest of Yagoda, who favored Kirshon, the writer was also arrested and shot in 1938.
Ernest Hemingway: revenge for divorce
In 1945, Ernest Hemingway left his third wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. The divorce was provoked by the writer himself, who gave his wife an ultimatum: “Either you are a correspondent in this war, or a woman in my bed.” Gellhorn chose war, and Hemingway held a grudge. He was able to take revenge on his ex-wife five years later. In the novel Across the River, in the Shade of the Trees, the protagonist, 50-year-old Colonel Richard Cantwell, arrives in Italy with a 19-year-old mistress and there, lying in bed, tells her about his past and about his wife, a war correspondent: “She had more ambition than Napoleon, and talent – like the first crammer at school. With such an conceit like hers, no one is offended, but she got married in order to cling to the military elite and acquire contacts useful for her profession or, perhaps, for her art. Hemingway spoke of his ex-wife with such bitterness and causticity that the publisher was seriously worried that she would file a libel suit against the writer, but Gellhorn treated her husband with sympathy: “The fury in hell is nothing compared to the abandoned Hemingway.”
John Lennon: revenge for everything
The Beatles officially disbanded in April 1970. In August 1971, Paul McCartney and his wife released the joint album Ram. The opening song “Too Many People” was a cryptic and not too friendly message to John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono: “Too many people preach all the time / Don’t let them tell you who you want to be.” The song opened with the words “Fuck off, pie” (“Piss off, cake”, which is consonant with the idiom “piece of cake”, meaning “as easy as shelling pears”). A month later, Lennon released the response song “How Do You Sleep?” In it, he, in particular, sang: “These eccentrics were right when they said that you died” and “Your music is only suitable for elevators.” The song was supposed to end with the line “How do you sleep, ya cunt?”, also built on a play on words and the use of a consonant obscene expression, but when mixing the song, this phrase was nevertheless decided to be deleted.
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