From cave drawings to Tolstoy: this is how the art of life and death developed

Yes, literature is a delayed death: stretched out, tense, tortured.

Painting is life. In any case, her, life, feeling. I understand that this is amateurish positioning. But even from this amateurish height, it is extremely noticeable that the art of painting is more immoral than, say, literature.

In romance, Bolkonsky can rave endlessly before leaving. Painfully erecting over oneself an illusory-hallucinogenic building of needles, splinters… As if prolonging and prolonging earthly existence in unwillingness to part with the real.

In painting, everything is much faster – it is necessary here and now to make the hero die as brightly, expressively, boldly as possible, in the end. Leading the action into the realm of beauty, and not into insensitive plot visions of grief and sadness. Echoing Tolstoy’s formulation of death as rebirth.

Painting is the eternal renaissance of mankind. Literature is preparation for his departure. United together by the ancient dances of death, rhyming iconography of the Middle Ages, these two hypostases of being look at each other biasedly from time immemorial. Like askew. Intentionally and incessantly peeping. Burning with failure. Immensely rejoicing in every second bursts of genius. Pressed down by an incredible load of unbearable labor – similar to a slave. But that’s not the point…

Turning crime into an aesthetic property is the beginning of the beginnings of the delimitation of good and evil.

And what is interesting: having become a man (or appearing from somewhere – someone who is against Darwin), shivering from cold and fear, we immediately, without hesitation, scribbled something in the cave on the wall, and in color. Life and death: animals, hunters, healthy and deceased relatives. Also, some incomprehensible contraption on the heads of some.

And only after many centuries, scientists found out that this device “on the head” (helmet) is not an alien antenna (there was an anti-scientific screech at one time!). And just an image of a woman’s hairstyle.

And when Homer compared women’s hair styling with hyacinth, the Greek Venuses curled “under hyacinth” for a whole century. This is how fashion was born. So beauty eclipsed grief, brazenly intercepting the gaze of the trembling public. Directing him into the immorality of embellishment of suffering. And epic traditions watered with abundant blood.

The earth by that time is already full of myths, fables and fairy tales. They are beautiful. Even those that tell of a terrible death.

After all, the angry gods mercilessly destroyed the children of Niobe (Niobe) not just with arrows, but with the sharpest peaks from the sun’s rays. The fall of Phaeton’s chariot turned into a phantasmagoria of a fiery sunset. And this is a miracle, an extravaganza …

So the edges of vice became the norm. So inhuman bloody battles turned into brilliant magnificent canvases. Paid for the heroes suffering from them at the highest Faustian price: the terrible mental anguish of the artists who paint them. And this crazy price list is the absolute norm for creators and writers.

If you don’t suffer, you won’t create. Without suffering – do not stay forever.

In the year of Pushkin’s death, 27-year-old Chopin wrote his famous piano sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor. The third part of which Marche funèbre: Lento will be played at his own funeral. Under the Funeral March of the sonata, hosts of world leaders, writers, and scientists will be buried. politicians.

We die under Chopin… We are born under a personal wild cry. Getting out of the warm haze of dreams into an alien hostile environment: an intergalactic vacuum. In someone else’s hands. In some strange unfamiliar room. From which Brodsky convincingly advised not to leave.

And it is still not known what is more terrible – to be born or to die.

The art of death. The art of life… The relationship of times.

When the sculptor Merkurov removed the death mask from Leo Tolstoy, he swore unpleasantly and juicy – his beard stuck to the plaster. That is not cynicism. Elementary – professionalism. Covered, in turn, with the guise of black humor. Also professional. From the point of view of an outside observer.

All this was born long before us – music, choreography, sculpture, prose poetry. And he will never die, unlike people. We are just a part of someone’s diaries, restored after – by a spell of someone’s corrosive mind.

And we will be physically felt by those who will read, listen, listen to our works. Created by us. In which there is everything, except for their own death.

Michelangelo breathed life into Delacroix. That one is in Rodin. Thinking in mathematical formulas, painting flowed into the conventions of massive sculptures. The statues turned into speculative contours. Those were again filled with marble. Revolutions swept away palaces. A drunken sailor nailed Serov’s paintings of Nikolashka on bayonets. Saying with a hoarse voice to the oncoming gentleman, wrapped in a sable collar: “Brother, let me smoke!”

I feel like an invisible stale crumb of half-eaten bread, thinking about all of them. Departed. Who gave me joy just to think about them. Just think. Because trying to do something (after what they did): to invent, draw, pile – is unrealistic. Funny.

Lying on his back under the dome in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo only had time to cough up the paint dripping from above while working on The Last Judgment. Van Gogh, spitting on the Lilac, cuts off his ear with a razor. Botticelli seemed to have foreseen the painting of the XXI century – so modern.

At Leonard’s Madonna, one can admire for hours with just one lacing on the chest. And about the angels looking up at the barefoot Raphael Madonna, you need to create a poem. Well, or a story about two cheerful playful twins. (Leonard’s playful lacing will be raised to a cult by the Madonna of the current century – Louise Ciccone.)

And by the way, there is an optical illusion on the canvas by Raphael.

The angels leaning on the lower frame of the picture contemplate the audience. The Madonna and Child Jesus are walking behind. But the viewer is convinced, they say, the angels are looking at her. When they look at you, they look at her.

The Golden Venice of Canaletto, strange, fabulous. Titian’s Venuses. Giorgione with Flores and Ledas. People in fantastic masks, loud night chants on gondolas. Outward admiration of Bonaparte, who latently longs to take all this lewdness of Roman braids for himself. Or, at the very least, destroy it.

Byron, Rousseau, Edgar Poe, who left their traces on the piers of the Adriatic. At the same time – unprecedented barbarism. And – an unprecedented Paradise.

They will be remembered for centuries, I will not. This is the difference.

They were grateful for every second spent on Earth. Me too. That is our similarity. And our destiny with them to descendants.