Hints and tips:
...Thomas Adès’s radical, disturbing The Exterminating Angel, based on Buñuel’s film of a bourgeois party descending into savagery, has its French premiere at the Bastille Opera next month....
...His cousin sprites, joyous little “Spiritelli”, are bizarre fusions, derived from the pagan putto, adapted as celebratory figures associated with Christian baptism....
...The pagan beauty of this coast has inspired artists and designers the world over, foremost among them the filmmaker and activist Derek Jarman, who cultivated his ethereal garden here in the 1980s....
...In the Pacific, Gauguin inter-related Christian angels, Buddhist poses and Polynesian figures....
...Because of its hallucinogenic powers and human-like shape, the knobbled plant (also known as Satan’s apple) has long been a stalwart of magic rituals, pagan ceremonies and horror stories....
...Wenceslaus’s mother was born a pagan and his father a Christian....
...A five-day-long festival of pagan origin, it may have started as a fertility ritual, though no one can be sure....
...Despite his fascination with the secular, magical and pagan, Piero nevertheless earnt much of his living making Christian paintings....
...In pagan Roman stories, a former consul, Valerius Corvus, was said to have continued to work on his farm until he was at least 100 years old....
...Angels in any form — paint, plaster or wood — had Dowsing foaming at the mouth and calling for the mallets....
...Yet the classicism remains; his cherubs are from a pagan era; his figures enjoy Hellenistic substance....
...Yet the angel’s billowing robe hints at the wilder sentiments which will make the later Annunciation a tornado of smoky, swirling light....
...The play is set on Assumption Day, August 15, which started as a pagan celebration at the beginning of harvest....
...SA An angel. JO A succession of angels....
...He conflated Christian reverence with pagan references, depicting Adam and Eve in the manner of Venus and Mars....
...The madonna and child are the epitome of demure modesty, the half-naked angel is a coy cousin to the languid Bacchi....
...His painstaking translations of colour and texture – cruelly jagged masonry, frost-blue mountains, the iridescent wings of an angel – reveal the immanence of the sacred within the material world....
...A glass and gold mosaic head from Ravenna, dated 545, depicts a beardless, youthful Christ in an iconography that evokes pagan antecedents – notably the figure of Hermes surrounded by a halo, represented...
...As the popularity of this grew, so the pagan origin was lost....
...One glance at the galaxy of models of Christs, Madonnas and pagan gods that are still the bread and butter of most marble studios reminds you that sculptures such as “Anatomy of an Angel” are the fruit of...
...No hint of the secular or pagan ever infiltrated his work; he painted neither allegorical scenes nor portraits. His unwavering Christian devotion is manifested in his images of the Madonna....
...But he is not without support: an “angel” of a lessee who now runs the goods yard; and a man known as “the invisible gardener” who for a while lived in a caravan on the site and tended a temporary garden...
...Poussin may have been known for his exaltation of reason but his final landscapes pulse with a wild, elemental, almost pagan energy....
...The Christian Christmas originated, most people believe, in a pagan custom of celebrating the birth of sun gods at the time of the winter solstice, which fell on December 25 according to the Roman calendar...
...David Flusfeder is author of ‘The Pagan House’ (Fourth Estate)...
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