Marsyas

Mm

... you write about how the art historical precedents for Eleven Silicones are things like paintings of Marsyas being flayed alive.

How that myth, and indeed those pictures, lead to super famous paintings such as Annibale Carracci's, uh, Great Butcher's Shop at the Kimbell.

Do you think Nauman was or is interested in those precedents? And if so, why?

For Maunders' criticism was so very superior, even for The Academy, of which the trade motto was, "Stop here for criticism," superior to anything in the literary market.

Maunders flayed and excoriated Marsyas till the world accepted him as Apollo.

What Maunders was most down upon was novel writing.

Not having to follow them himself, he had high ideals of art, and woe to the unfortunate author who thought he had literary and artistic instinct when he had only pen and paper.

Through the midst of the park flows the river Maeander, the sources of which are within the palace buildings; and it flows through the city of Silene.

The Great King also has a palace in Silene, a strong place on the sources of another river, the Marsyas, at the foot of the Acropolis.

This river also flows through the city, discharging itself into the Maeander, and is five and twenty feet broad.

Here is the place where Apollo is said to have flayed Marsyas when he had conquered him in the contest of skill.

He hung up the skin of the conquered man in the cavern where the spring wells forth, and hence the name of the river Marsyas.

It was on this site that Xerxes, as tradition tells, built this very palace, as well as the citadel of Silene itself, on his retreat from Hellas after he had lost the famous battle.

Here Cyrus remained for thirty days, during which Clearchus the Lacedaemonian arrived with one thousand hoplites and eight hundred Thracian peltasts and two hundred Cretan archers.

Rapture of meeting, departing woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference.

He may experience them all, but attenuated, and as if he saw them in a dream, as if, indeed, he were Heine's god in dream on a mountainside.

Let the drowsy deity awake, and all these puppets, emanations of his dream, will vanish into the nothing whence they came.

And these emotions may be renewed each morning.

The loafer knows not nor cares.

His is now an astral body, and through golden spaces of imagination his soul is winging her untrammeled flight.

And there he really might remain forever, but that his vagrant spirit is called back to earth by a gentle but resistless very human summons, a gradual consuming pantagruelian godlike thirst.

A thirst to thank heaven on.

For Maunders' criticism was so very superior, even for the Academy, of which the trade motto was, "Stop here for criticism," superior to anything in the literary market.

Maunders flayed and excoriated Marsyas till the world accepted him as Apollo.

What Maunders was most down upon was novel writing.

Not having to follow them himself, he had high ideals of art, and woe to the unfortunate author who thought he had literary and artistic instinct when he had only pen and paper.