Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia

59문장 98% 스페인어 번역 1명 참여 출처 : 칸아카데미
번역 0%

Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia발음듣기

We're in Tate Britain and we're looking at John Everett Millais's Ophelia.발음듣기

This is the quintessential Victorian and quintessential Pre-Raphaelite painting.발음듣기

It is.발음듣기

And the Victorians painted Shakespeare quite a lot and they even painted Ophelia quite a lot.발음듣기

But this is the painting that everybody remembers.발음듣기

It's that moment after Hamlet has murdered Ophelia's father, and she has let herself fall into this river and is letting herself drown.발음듣기

She goes mad after Hamlet murders her father and allows herself to drown.발음듣기

And Shakespeare describes the place where that happens.발음듣기

He describes the flowers and the willow tree.발음듣기

Millais picks up on that interest in the botanical setting and expands on it.발음듣기

On the botanical specificity.발음듣기

This is an artist who is really taking Ruskin seriously.발음듣기

Ruskin advised artists to go into nature with a "singleness of heart, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing."발음듣기

That is that Nature itself has some kind of spiritual power.발음듣기

Who are artists to mess with God's work?발음듣기

That's right.발음듣기

But that was the academic tradition, to take from Nature and improve on it and to idealize it.발음듣기

That was what Reynolds had advised, that's the foundation of academic tradition.발음듣기

Millais is completely rejecting that.발음듣기

He's going into nature and he's trying to be as true to what he sees as possible.발음듣기

It's interesting, because when we think of painting in plein air, that is, when we think of painting outside, we often think of late 19th century, French painting.발음듣기

We think of the Impressionists, but off course, the Pre-Raphaelites in England were taking this seriously mid-century.발음듣기

Millais found a spot that was very much like the one that Shakespeare described.발음듣기

But it's not as picturesque as it sounds.발음듣기

Painting outside is full of frustrations and difficulties.발음듣기

You have insects, you have weather variations, you have animals, and Millais speaks about this with a wonderful sense of sarcasm in a letter that he wrote.발음듣기

Millais wrote: "I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay.발음듣기

I am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water, and becoming intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that lady sank to muddy death."발음듣기

This is the funniest part, I think.발음듣기

There are two swans that not a little add to my misery by persisting in watching me from the exact spot I wish to paint.발음듣기

My sudden perilous evolutions on the extreme bank, to persuade them to evacuate their position, have the effect of entirely deranging my temper, my pictures, brushes and palets.발음듣기

Certainly, the painting of a picture under such circumstances, would be a greater punishment for a murderer than a hanging.발음듣기

So we have Millais really clearly at the end of his rope, trying to paint this image.발음듣기

The Pre-Raphaelites often show us images of solitary women, expressing feelings of longing and frustration and, in this case, madness.발음듣기

The model for this is the woman who'll become Rossetti's wife, who was his model and muse, Elizabeth Siddal.발음듣기

She apparently posed for him in a bathtub they kept warm with some candles underneath.발음듣기

Although she did get sick as the water did eventually get cold.발음듣기

I know he was quite proud of the dress he had bought for her to wear.발음듣기

It was already an antique and was heavily embroidered with silver, and is beautifully rendered here as it floats.발음듣기

It almost becomes like the water reeds that we see around.발음듣기

In fact, this painting was really praised in its day for being perhaps the most faithful to nature in terms of its botanical accuracy.발음듣기

We can see clearly not only a large willow tree that has fallen and then has regrown.발음듣기

It's actually wonderful to look at the way that those upturned roots mimic the pose of Ophelia's arms.발음듣기

And we see lots of flowers that we can identify very specifically.발음듣기

And that have symbolic purpose.발음듣기

We see forget-me-nots and poppies, which are a symbol of death, and violets, which are a symbol of faithfulness.발음듣기

In fact, she's got a chain of violets around her neck, which, I think, comes directly from the Shakespearian play.발음듣기

The symbolic meaning of all the flowers would have been understood by the Victorian public.발음듣기

And interestingly, links all the way back to Shakespeare, who, as you said, is very specific as well about some of the flowers that are mentioned.발음듣기

Ophelia floats with her palms upturned.발음듣기

She's not dead yet, her eyes are open and she seems to be floating down the river.발음듣기

But there are lovely passages when you look closely, not only at the flowers, but especially in the lower left, where we see the light moving through those weeds that are growing up in the water.발음듣기

The intensity of the colors and the specificicity - both of those things, I think, would have been really new and rather shocking to the Victorian public.발음듣기

Part of that was achieved because the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the traditional mode of painting, that is painting on a dark ground.발음듣기

Instead, they painted on a brilliant white ground and some of that luminosity really comes through.발음듣기

In addition, some of these artists actually painted not on a dry white ground, but on a ground that was still wet, which meant that that white was picked up by the colors and really creates this vivid luminousness.발음듣기

So the Pre-Raphaelites really were revolutionary.발음듣기

We love them now and they seem very familiar to us, but they seemed really radical back in the late 1840s and 1850s.발음듣기

Top