Caritas
| Elisa Kay Sparks Caritas Fall 2004 --------------------------------------- This color-reduction woodcut with silkscreen over printing was part of a print exchange on virtues and vices. The image is taken from Giotto's fresco of Charity in the Arena Chapel in Padua. I had particularly liked this image when I saw it because it so perfectly illustrated the neoplatonic doctrine of exchange that I had learned about in reading Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, a long time ago in an undergraduate art history class. The sentences surrounding the wood cut refer to this idea: that there is a cycle of giving and receiving that constitutes love. Wind describes this rhythm of exchange as being the iconography behind the linked figure of the three Graces in Botticelli and other renaissance artists, including Pico Della Mirandola whose medallion is silk screened below the woodcut. Wind explains: The triple rhythm of generosity consists of giving, acceptance, and returning. . . The three phases must be interlocked in a dance as are the Graces, otherwise called Charities. |
