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Aphrodite Blues -stephanie pope
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an origin in light paints blue a mandolin
aphrodite on a ladder of
descend dividing air
uniting there in
poetry 
----------Picasso/ Woman Playing |
holds captive here a bit of feathered fin
a smudge of blue a bend
a blend a sigh turned
exit on a stair of
violence
------------Dali Aphrodite, 1963 |
plays disappear in canvas blued and
brushed with whiter shades
the shadowed sketch,
quickening the
flight ----------------------------Paphos Shores
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quarternities sent into southern night
pink madnesses this air too
scant in bluish fold
to deputize a
gold

Titian/Madonna Pesaro, 1519-26
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sacra conversazione - A grouping of the Madonna, Child, and saints in the same spatial setting, so that they appear to be conversing with one another. Italian, literally for "holy conversation." She is often shown as radiating an aura called variously a halo, a gloriole or glory,or a mandorla
Pietà or pietà - An Italian word meaning pity, compassion, and sorrow, it is strongly associated with works of art portraying the Virgin Mary holding and mourning over the dead body of Jesus. Although the term derives from the Latin word pio, which means pious, pietà does not itself mean pious or piety
Background: The azure sky headers above and below were created in Photoshop by slipping the four-stanza poem sideways and then crystallizing its form resulting in an image that leaves some sense for a city skyline (a polis). The day sky has been washed in a blue pastel while purple stars have been added to form the night sky. The fourth stanza background is a photograph of the Southern hemisphere's aura or The Southern Lights.
On Caeruleum: Kurt Badt reveals the history of blue in the Art of Cézanne (p 62-86)"...the ancients are familiar with four different blue paints...caeruleum or sky blue...is natural ultramarine manufactured from lapis lazuli." Badt confirms blue was little used anywhere in the murals of Pompeii and even as Greek painters avoid the use of blue altogether or introduce blue shades in subordinate positions in composition, blue does not play a decisive rôle and artisans avoid paint made from this natural form of true blue. Early Christian frescoes employ an equally scanty use of blue according to Badt, until the end of the sixth century when a "schedule of religious values of colours is drawn up in Rome" and blue's symbolic function is established (historically preferencing religious thinking, I cannot help but add.) Now blue signifies heaven. "Thus blue (the aquamarine blue of the lapis lazuli) signified heaven," writes Badt, "not the atmospheric picture of it or the sky, but—the heavenly Creation, or that which had come to pass and had been brought about by heaven, divine wisdom operating from heaven, or divine omnipotence, the miracle of heavenly glory. Blue, the true blue, maintains such symbolic function in art. Namely, blue deputizes the symbol of divinity and ITS eternal light which cannot speak and so must build up ITS shapes through the sleepy power of words & their images) This heavenliness that 'contains' symbolic potencies expresses a psycho-physical non-localized dimension (a chora) what in soul-making reveals as aurum non vulgi ( uncommon gold), a luminositas sensus naturae. (Paracelsus) |
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