Articoli di riviste sul tema "Sculpture bulgare"

Amongst exhibited fragments of carved stone decorations in the monastery of St Archangel Michael in Prevlaka, Boka Kotorska, situated on the ground floor of the monastery's accommodation quarters, there is a segment of stone liturgical furnishings which is, among other things, distinguished by its monumental dimensions, the high level of its craftsmanship, and the important artistic value of its carved decorations. This small stone column was found by chance as a surface-level find on the neighbouring island of St Gavrilo. This stone column is made from a monolithic piece of high- quality, light-grey marble. It is 96 cm in height, 20 cm wide at the front, 18.5 cm wide at the side, and 13cm wide at the rear. These dimensions indicate that the fragment has the form of an elongated hexahedron, with sides of unequal width. Only the front of this stone fragment is marked with relief decorations, comprising a regularly shaped two-part curled sprouting vine. Moving with its undulating rhythm, its arc defines a space in which is located the central motif of the decoration. This comprises the motif of a bud in the form of stylised crinoline flower, composed of two lateral leaves with a pronounced bulge in the middle. These tightly bent lateral leaves with sharp ends, together with the root of the formed shoot, leave an empty space filled with an offshoot in the form of a regularly formed volute. The left lateral side of the stone column is marked by a long but relatively shallow channel, created around its axis, with a width of 7.5 cm. Its rear side is divided by its own height into two vertical fields, of almost the same width - 6 and 7 cm respectively - one slightly elevated compared to the other. The right lateral side of the column is slanted and only lightly sculptured. On the upper surface of the pillar, a relatively shallow circular hole with a small span is visible, intended as a connection point for other segments that would have been placed on it. The material, size, characteristic shape, together with its special personal details, such as the channel around the whole height of its left lateral side, as well as the shallow hole on its upper surface, without doubt show that it was one of the original stone columns of a particular stone altar screen. Analysis of the motif's source, decorative forms, and the quality of its carving confirm that this segment of the altar screen represents one more parts of the same sculptors' workshop which produced one preserved part of the stone altar screen of St Triphon in Kotor, which received the same decorative and sculptural treatment, also undoubtedly originating from no before than the 11th century. The possibility of completely resolving the dilemma of which sacred complex the column originally belonged to will only be resolved when archaeological excavation and investigation of the site of the monastery of St Archangel Michael in Prevlaka, in whose treasury it stands, together with the neighbouring island of St Gavrilo, on which the pillar was found, takes place. The possibility of precisely dating this stone altar screen will only occur with the expected full understanding of the whole altar screen of the Cathedral church of St Triphon in Kotor. However, this segment of the stone altar screen also represents a reason to better comprehend the morphological characteristics and variety of stylistic expression present and specifically applied in the decorative elements of early-medieval sculpture on the southern-eastern Adriatic coast.

Se describe una nueva especie del género de Cyanobacterias, Anabaena Bory ex Born. et Flah. (Nostocales) de las montañas Ródope de Bulgaria. Anabaena rhodopensis sp. nova. tiene acinetas con paredes celulares esculpidas. Se dan los datos biométricos para el tamaño de las células vegetativas, heterocistos y acinetos.A new species of cyanobacterial genus Anabaena Bory ex Born. et Flah. (Nostocales) from Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria is described. Anabaena rhodopensis sp. nova. has akinetes with sculptured cell walls. Biometrical data for size of vegetative cells, heterocytes and akinetes are given.

The topic of prehistoric anthropomorphic sculpture, its presentation and interpretation are widely covered in the works of Marija Gimbutas. In her honor is the submitted paper, which presents a representative and very interesting vessel. It is a vessel in the shape of a human body, rare in the Eneolithic era.The vessel was found accidentally on the surface of a settlement mound. It is partially preserved, but the available fragments allow to restore its shape and ornamentation. The massive legs and long feet allow the vessel to be placed upright. It is one of the most impressive specimens among this type of finds which represents a female mythological image, probably the Mother Goddess. Specific shape and ornamentation of the vessel suggest representative functions, probably used in various rites associated with prayers for fertility.

Aphaenogasterillyricasp. nov., a member of the A.subterranea species group, is described from Dinaric Alps of Slovenia and Croatia, from Golešnica Mt. in north Macedonia, Osogovo-Belasica Massif of southwestern Bulgaria, and from Kerkini Mts. of Greek Macedonia. It is characterised by large body size, moderately sculptured head, elevated mesonotum, and long propodeal spines. Its habitat preferences are discussed. A key to the Aphaenogastergraeca complex is provided.

Belogradchik rocks figures (Belogradchik rocks) are located in Northwest Bulgaria covering an area of 50 sq. km. They belong to Belogradchik tectonic unit (anticlinorium). They are built from Lower Triassic coarse, red, terrigenous rocks – conglomerates and sandstones. Three morphologic types of rock figures are distinguished often forming different combinations. They are a product of erosional processes occurring after the main tectonic movements during the Eocene and up to the present day. The roles of some of the earlier geological controls in the formation of the rock sculptures - tectonic, sedimentological and palaeographic are also discussed.

В статье проанализированы женские скульптурные изображения из кургана Улан Харам Шороон бумбагар в Баяннуур сомоне Булганского аймака Монголии. В погребении обнаружены в том числе и женские фигуры из терракоты. В настоящее время все материалы находятся на хранении в музее г. Хархорин. Характеристика керамической микропластики дана согласно апробированной автором схеме описания вотивных скульптур, с учетом гендерных различий. Цель публикации — введение в научный оборот сведений об особенностях женских средневековых изображений тюркского времени, выполненных их современниками. Дана характеристика 13 керамических фигур, выполненных в полный рост. В описании дана характеристика материала изготовления; приводятся инвентарные номера и размеры согласно документации музея; отмечается степень сохранности фигур; дано описание костюма, причесок, деталей макияжа; характеризуются антропологические особенности скульптурных изображений; дана расовая и, по возможности, этническая идентификация прототипов изображений. В статье отмечена схожесть находок (керамическая микропластика) из исследуемого погребения с изученными ранее материалами из кургана Шороон бумбагар в Замар сомоне Центрального аймака Монголии (хранящихся в Музее изобразительных искусств им. Г. Занабазара, г. Улан-Батор, Монголия). Кроме того, по всей видимости идентичные скульптурные изображения обнаружены при раскопках на северо-западе Китая погребения, датируемого периодом правления династии Тан, у деревни Яньцунь района Сисянь провинции Шэньси. Усыпальница принадлежит Сюэ Шао, первому мужу принцессы Тайпин, дочери императора Гаоцзуна. Исследование скульптурных материалов из баяннурского кургана позволило зафиксировать внешний облик знатных женщин эпохи средневековья из центральноазиатских степей. Компаративный анализ подтвердил уточненную датировку кургана последней четвертью VII в. н. э., что соответствует тюркскому времени в период господства империи Тан. Анализ статуэток позволил сделать вывод о возможном присутствии как южносибирского (тюркского), так и восточноазиатского (китайского) компонентов среди прототипов женских изображений. Новые данные позволили расширить знания о населении центральноазиатских степей в эпоху гегемонии империи Тан. The article analyzes female sculptural images from the Ulaan Haram Sharoon Bumbagar barrow in the Bayannuur Somon of the Bulgan aimag in Mongolia. Among other things, female figures made of terracotta were found in the burial. All materials are currently stored in the Kharkhorin museum. The characteristics of ceramic microplastics are given according to the author's approved scheme for describing votive sculptures, taking into account gender differences. The purpose of the publication is to introduce the scientific circulation of information about the features of female medieval images of the Turkic time, made by their contemporaries. The characteristics of 13 ceramic figures made in full growth are given. The characteristics of ceramic microplastics are given according to the author's approved scheme for describing votive sculptures, taking into account gender differences. The purpose of the publication is to introduce the scientific circulation of information about the features of female medieval images of the Turkic time, made by their contemporaries. The characteristics of 13 ceramic figures made in full growth are given. The description provides the characteristics of the manufacturing material; inventory numbers and sizes are given according to the museum's documentation; the degree of safety of the figures is noted; a description of the costume, hairstyles, makeup details is given; the anthropological features of sculptural images are characterized; the racial and, if possible, ethnic identification of the prototypes of the images is given. The article notes the similarity of finds (ceramic microplastics) from the investigated burial with previously studied materials from the Shoroon bumbagar mound in Zamar somon of the Central aimag of Mongolia (stored in the G. Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts, Ulan Bator, Mongolia). In addition, apparently identical sculptural images were found during excavations in northwestern China of a burial dating from the Tang Dynasty, near the village of Yancun, Xixian District, Shaanxi Province. The tomb belongs to Xue Shao, the first husband of Princess Taiping, daughter of Emperor Gaozong. The study of the sculptural materials from the Bayannur burial mound made it possible to record the appearance of noblewomen of the Middle Ages from the Central Asian steppes. The comparative analysis confirmed the updated date of the mound to the last quarter of the 7th century AD, which corresponds to the Turkic time during the reign of the Tang Empire. The analysis of the statuettes made it possible to draw a conclusion about the possible presence of both South Siberian (Turkic) and East Asian (Chinese) components among the prototypes of female images. New data made it possible to expand knowledge about the population of the Central Asian steppes during the era of hegemony of the Tang Empire.

On the base of typical hypothetical reconstructions according to the stages of the development of the attire upon archaeological material the comparative history of attires of two states is restored. At the end of the 11th – in the beginning of the 12th century and later, the features of heavy metal attire were preserved, in Volga Bulgaria – of Finno-Ugric and nomadic, in Old Rus’ – mainly of Slavic one. At the end of the 11th – the first half of the 12th century noisy attires of different designs were formed. In the first half – the middle of the 12th century filigree, niello, openwork weaving were combined in Bulgarian jewelry. Adornments were complemented with bead pendants of new shapes. In Rus’, enamel attire of the sacred-ascetic style created innovations, the niello one was distinguished with a variety of ornamentation (wide bracelets), the filigree retained Slavic traditions. At the end of the 12th – the first third of the 13th century the best jewelry was created. In Bulgaria the temporal rings were complemented by a miniature filigree sculpture, necklaces and chains with pendants presented. Original filigree bracelets with oval endings were famous. In Rus’, enamel and black attires were made in exaggerated and lush styles; luxurious frames of jewelry with filigree technique were used. Filigree attire changed constructively, moving away from folk traditions. In Bulgarian attire the traditions of local and eastern jewelry combined; in Russian attire – of local and Byzantine jewelry.

In 2022, we are approaching 125 years since the birth of Dmitry Alekseevich Arapov, a prominent domestic surgeon, scientist, experimenter, organizer of the military medical services. Dmitry A. Arapov, one of the most prominent representatives of the S.S. Yudin scientific school, worked at the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine from 1929 till 1984. He quickly proved himself not only as an excellent doctor and a skilled surgeon, but also as a researcher, and soon became one of the closest students and associates of S.S. Yudin. Dmitry A. Arapov drafted as a field surgeon during the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-1940, from the first to the last day he went through the Great Patriotic War, being the Head of the surgical service of the Northern Fleet in Polyarny. In this position, he significantly improved the system for providing emergency surgical care on ships and in naval hospitals, based on the experience gained over the years of work at the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine. From July 1950 Dmitry A. Arapov was Chief Surgeon of the USSR Navy, from May 1953 he was Deputy Chief surgeon of the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Defense, and from May 1955 again Chief Surgeon of the USSR Navy, until his retirement in October, 1968. At the same time, Dmitry A. Arapov did not leave his work at the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine until the last days of his life. Dmitry A. Arapov is the author of more than 200 research papers, including 14 monographs. Scientific interests of Dmitry A. Arapov went far beyond emergency surgery, to which he naturally paid most attention. His works are devoted to various issues of military and emergency surgery of the abdominal and thoracic organs, topical issues of burn injuries, surgical site infections, reconstructive surgery, neurosurgery, treatment of endocrine disorders, and anesthesiology and resuscitation. Also Dmitry A. Arapov successfully dealt with the problems of autotransfusion, blood reinfusion from the chest and abdomen, transfusion of fibrinolytic blood. The main directions of scientific research, laid down by Dmitry A. Arapov, are currently being continued at the Scientific Department of Emergency Surgery, Endoscopy and Intensive Care of the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine. Memory of Dmitry A. Arapov has been preserved to this day. To the 100th anniversary of the birth of D.A. Arapov, a scientific conference was held at our Institute. The naval hospital in the town of Polyarny, Murmansk region, was named after Dmitry A. Arapov, and in honor of D.A. Arapov, a memorial plaque was installed on its building. In the 70s of the twentieth century, People’s Artist of the USSR L.E. Kerbel created a sculpture of Dmitry A. Arapov, which was stored in the local history museum of the town of Polyarny. His bust portrait (by artist T.S. Smagina) is exhibited at the Scientific Department of Emergency Surgery, Endoscopy and Intensive Care of the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine. In addition, the N.V. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine owns an earlier portrait of Dmitry A. Arapov by artist F.S. Bulgak. We introduce these portraits into scientific circulation for the first time. We are confident that they will be able to tell contemporaries a lot about this scientist, surgeon and man who made a great contribution to surgery and military medicine, and rightfully entered the history of Russian medicine.

Boyan Rainov is born in 1921 in a family of which almost every member is dedicated to art. He himself is not well known in Bulgaria because of the fact that from 1946 he lived and worked in Paris, France. His work took place in the fields of drawing, illustration, relief and easel sculpture, but at the time of his stay in the French capital he managed to produce a number of outdoor monumental sculptural compositions. They are typical examples of one formal tradition in modern sculpture that refers its characteristics to organic and nonorganic natural objects. That tradition, often called biomorphic, is familiar to us from the work of Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and Henry Moore.

New idea bearers during the first two decades after the Liberation became foreign artists among whom are standing out the names of Ivan Mrkvička, Yaroslav Veshin and Boris Schatz – who binded a decade of his life with Bulgaria. And this life is filled with difficulties, unexpected twists and noble ambitions. The remarkable personality of Boris Schatz as a talented sculptor, organizer and pedagogue stands out in the context of the artistic life of his time, where no major cultural event occurs without his energetic interference. It is his efforts to promote modeling as one of the most important disciplines of the artistic education that leads to the creation of the Sculpture specialty at the National Academy of Art. When Schatz dies in 1932, the Bulgarian art has already passed a long way of development, of change of ideas and conflicts between trends and generations. The academism of the “realistic school”, which has earned the artist`s particiality, has long ago been rejected, but his personality remains among the most prominent representatives of the new Bulgarian sculpture.

The report compares the form-formation principles, key to the architecture of the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (1983/89) Columbus, Ohio – of the American Peter Eisenmann – with some of the techniques used in the spatial – compositional solution of the destroyed Sofia monument “1300 Years Bulgaria” (1980/81–2017). The text refers to the 80’s of the twentieth century and the creative approaches, distinctive for some of the lastest „large-scale monuments“ realized in Bulgaria. These approaches are considered in the light of one opened architectural theory, absolutely oppositional to the one typical to our country at this time. The comparison aims to are to expand, within this date, the scope of the spatial-artistic analysis, committed to the relationship between the architecture, sculpture and the surrounding environment.

В статье рассматриваются скульптурные материалы из кургана Шороон бумбагар в Баяннуур сомоне Булганского аймака Монголии. В захоронении с элементами кенотафа обнаружено 90 деревянных и керамических антропоморфных скульптур. В настоящее время, все материалы находятся на хранении в музее г. Хархорин. Основываясь на результатах исследований скульптурных изображений в отечественной и зарубежной историографии автором предложена своя схема описания и характеристики антропоморфной микропластики. С целью ознакомления широких научных кругов с уникальными изображениями средневековых кочевников Центральной Азии тюркского времени, выполненных их современниками, дана характеристика 9 керамических фигур из фондов музея. Пять из них представляют фигуры, выполненные в полный рост, четыре – всадников. В описании дана характеристика материала изготовления; приводятся инвентарные номера и размеры согласно документации музея; отмечается степень сохранности фигур; дано описание костюма (верхняя и нижняя одежда, головной убор, обувь); характеризуются антропологические особенности скульптурных изображений и степень развитости растительности на лице (брови, усы, борода); дана расовая и, по возможности, этническая идентификация прототипов изображений. Кроме того, приведено описание лошадей и их сбруи. Новые материалы были сопоставлены с полученными ранее аналогичными скульптурными изображениями из кургана Шороон бумбагар в Замар сомоне Центрального аймака Монголии (хранящихся в Музее изобразительных искусств им. Г. Занабазара, г. Улан-Батор, Монголия). Отмечена технологическая и стилистическая схожесть керамической микропластики из обоих курганов, кстати, находящихся недалеко друг от друга. Характеристика новых материалов и проведенный сопоставительный анализ позволили датировать находки из кургана в Булганском аймаке второй половиной VII в. н.э., т.е. тюркским временем в период господства империи Тан. Анализ статуэток позволил сделать вывод о присутствии значительного восточноазиатского (китайского) компонента среди прототипов изображений. Другая часть несомненно принадлежит к тюркам - теле и относится, по –видимому, к южносибирской расе.The article discusses the sculpture materials from the Sharoon Bumbagar barrow in the Bayannuur Somon of the Bulgan aimag in Mongolia. The burial with the elements of kenotaph contained ninety wooden and ceramic anthropomorphic sculptures at present kept in the Museum of Harhorin. The author took into consideration the results achieved in the Russian and world historiography of studies in sculpture and proposes his own scheme of description and characteristics towards anthropomorphic microplastics. Presented in the paper nine ceramic figures from the Museum funds introduce to the wide scientific community the unique images of

The Bulgarian ceramic art has its deep traditions. This paper examines its historical development from the First Bulgarian Kingdom to present. After the Liberation, the ceramic art has passed through various development stages and has been established not only as an utilitarian art, but also as a craftsmanship of clearly defined and proven artistic qualities.

Abstract After the fall of the socialist regimes in South and Eastern Europe socialist statues and monuments were either removed, dislocated, or resignified. Several performance practices have been employed to engage with these statues and monuments. Focusing on the role played by artistic memorialization in the processes of dealing with the communist past, this article uses the concepts of “performative monuments” (Widrich) and “memory events” (Etkind) to analyze several examples of what can be called “performative monuments events.” As many statues were removed, the statues witnessed performative practices in the process of their elimination. The monuments that were conserved were dislocated and exhibited as part of “sculpture park museums” and observed nostalgic, ironic practices of tourists that perform the memory of communism by interacting with the monuments. This article analyzes several examples in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania of socialist monuments that have remained in place or that have been dislocated and resignified by contemporary artists using performative practices of memory events that engage monuments. This exploratory research argues that artists, through their “performative monuments events,” try to bring the people back to replace the statues with “living statues” and to question the absurd megalomaniac monuments using metaphorical, material instruments.

In this short article I will try to outline the problematic use of the concepts of “realism“ and “modernism“ in Bulgaria during the twentieth century, and especially in two concrete moments – in the 1930s and in the 1960s. The main example is the artist Ivan Nenov (1902–1997) – one of those names that are associated with modernism in the canonical narrative of Bulgarian art from XX century. In the late 1920’s, when Nenov appeared on the art scene, the peak of the Native Art Movement had already passed. The return to the picture in the early 1930’s in Bulgaria was related to the association of the New Artists, to retrospective interest in Cézanne and introduction of the concept of “New Realism”. Nenov was one of the protagonists of this movement. In the same decade, in 1932–1933 and 1936–1937, he stayed in Italy – in Turin and Albisola Marina – with his friend, the artist Nicolay Diulgheroff. Diulgheroff was part of the second Italian Futurism and introduced Nenov to these circles. In Nenov’s works from that time – paintings, drawings, and sculptures – we recognize his enthusiasm for Fillia, Carlo Carrà, Enrico Prampolini, and Diulgheroff himself. After World War II, under the Communist rule in Bulgaria, Nenov initially found a “refuge“ in the field of ceramics. In 1950 he was forced to leave his teaching post at the Academy of Arts. Later, his work, along with the work of other central artistic figures from the 1930s, was appropriated by the invented genealogy of (Socialist) Realism in a broader, liberal understanding. Nenov himself wrote in support of figurative art. Thus, in the case of the artist Ivan Nenov, the concepts of futurism, valori plastici, new realism in the 1930s – at one moment of his career, and socialist realism, realism, figural art – during the Communist rule, paradoxically intertwine with each other and hold relation to phenomena elsewhere in Europe.

Abstract Citizen science, a practice of public participation in scientific projects, is popular in Western countries, however, it is still a relatively novel approach in Southeast Europe. In this region, citizen science can be a useful tool for increasing the understanding of alien species. One such species is the sculptured resin bee, Megachile sculpturalis, a putatively invasive alien pollinator native to East Asia. It was introduced to France in 2008, from where it quickly spread across West and Central Europe. However, our knowledge of its eastern distribution is scarce since it is based mostly on isolated findings. We combined citizen science and data extraction from online sources (e.g., naturalist’s databases and social media) covering 6 years, and 3 years of targeted floral resource monitoring in the search for M. sculpturalis across regions of southeastern Europe. We collected presence data and information on M. sculpturalis abundances across an urban-rural gradient from eight countries: Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, and the region of the Crimean Peninsula. We present the first country records for Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, identify the dynamic expansion front in southern Serbia and provide new southernmost occurrences in Southeast Europe. We also collected data on species ecology (e.g., phenology, pollen/nectar sources, nest characteristics) and gathered evidence of reproducing populations of this species across the studied region. Citizen science data provided a five times larger spatial coverage, including recordings from remote locations, than the data collected by expert field surveys and provided critical additional data about the species biology, thanks to exceptionally engaged participants. We emphasize the importance of close collaboration between regional scientist teams and citizen participants and the benefits of this approach for monitoring a species with a continent-wide spread potential.

Introduction The conference is organized by the Faculty of Power Engineering and Power Machines at the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. This is the 28th annual edition of the event, part of the “Days of Science” activities at the Technical University of Sofia. For the past 28 years, this conference has become a traditional annual scientific forum for the meeting of Bulgarian and foreign experts and industry representatives in the field of energy and renewable energy technologies, thermodynamics, heat engineering, building efficiency improvements and HVAC systems, environmental engineering and protection, hydraulics and pneumatics, textile and sewing production. All received publications are peer reviewed and traditionally, the highest quality scientific papers are further submitted for publishing in referenced partnering journals. Based on recent years of experience, the conference offers on-site and online possibility for attendance. The program includes keynote lectures from selected popular topics in the presented areas, as well as oral presentations of the papers by the participants. It became a tradition, for some of the main sponsors, to organize special demonstration stalls in the conference area, where they can expose their latest innovative products and have a closer meeting with the audience. This year, three exhibitions were organized and performed as side events, during the conference days. The first one is called “EcoSynthetic”, and it is an exposition of nine woodcrafter sculpture artists, developing the “energy concept” in their work. The second exposition presented students’ design ideas for devices or technologies for green and sustainable energy utilization. And finally, a small textile exhibition with textile products, developed with sustainable and zero-waste technologies, was demonstrated during the conference days. List of Organizers, Venue, Conference topics, Committees, Editors, Sessions, Participants, Sponsors, Contacts, Conference pictures, Conference Program, Conference Agenda are available in this pdf.

IntroductionAccording to Friedrich Nietzsche, the death of Man follows the death of God. Man as a concept must be overcome. Yet Nietzsche extends humanism’s jargon of creativity that privileges Man over animal. To truly overcome the notion of Man, one must undercome Man, in other words go below Man. Once undercome, creativity devolves into a type of building and unbuilding, affording art the ability to conceive of the subject emptied of divine creation. This article will examine how Man is unbuilt in three works by three different artists: Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon” (1953), Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989), and Patricia Piccinini’s “The Young Family” (2002). All three artists evoke the animalistic in their depiction of what could be called the sub-subject, a diminished agent. Unbuilding the subject becomes the basis for building the sub-subject in these depictions of the human remainder. Man, from this vantage, will be examined as a cultural construct. Man largely means human, yet the Renaissance concept favoured a certain type of powerful male. Instead of rescuing Man, Bacon, Švankmajer and Piccinini, present the remnants of the human amidst the animal rather than the human subject detached from the animal. Such works challenge humanism, expressed in Giorgio Vasari’s analysis of art and creativity as indicative of Man’s closeness to the divine, which in a strange way, is extended in Nietzsche’s writings. These artists dismantle and build a subhuman form of subjectivity and thereby provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of creativity that historically favour Man as the creator beneath only God Himself. In the course of this article, I explore the violence of Bacon’s painted devolution, the deflationary animation of Švankmajer and Piccinini’s subhuman tenderness. I do not argue that we must abandon humanism altogether as there are a multiplicity of humanisms, or attempt to invalidate all the various posthumanisms, transhumanisms and antihumanisms. Rather, I attempt to show that Nietzsche’s posthumanism is a suprahumanism and that one possible way to frame the death of Man is through undercoming Man. Art, held in high esteem by Renaissance humanism, becomes a vehicle to imagine and engage with subhuman subjectivity.What Is Humanism? Humanism has numerous connotations from designating atheism to celebrating culture to privileging humans above other animals. The type of humanism I am interested in is not secular humanism, but rather humanism that celebrates and conceptualises Man’s place in the universe and does so through accentuating his (and I mean his given humanism’s often sexist, masculinist history) creativity and intellectual power. This celebration of creativity depends in part on a type of religious view, where Man is at the centre of God’s design. Such a view holds that Man’s power to shape nature’s materials resembles God. This type of humanism remains today but usually in a more humbled form, enfeebled by the scientific realisations that characterised the Enlightenment, namely the realisation that Man was not the centre of God’s universe. The Enlightenment is sometimes characterised as the birth of modern humanism, where the human subject undergoes estrangement from his surroundings through the conceptualisation of the subject–object division, and gains control over nature. A common narrative is that the subject’s autonomy and power came to extend to art itself, which in turn, became valued as possessing its own aesthetic legitimacy and yet also becoming an alienated commodity. Yet Cary Wolfe, in What Is Posthumanism?, echoes Michel Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment could be viewed in tension to humanism (“Introduction” n.p.). Indeed, the Enlightenment’s creation of modern science would come to seriously challenge any view of humanity’s privileged status in this world. In contrast, Renaissance humanism conceived of Man as the centrepiece of God’s design and gifted with artistic creation and the ability to uncover truth. Renaissance HumanismRenaissance humanism is encapsulated by Vasari’s preface to The Lives of the Artists. In his preface, Vasari contends that God was the first artist, being both a painter and sculptor: God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting. (3)Interestingly, God discovers creation, which is a type of decoration, where the skies are decorated with bright lights—the stars. Giving colour, light and shade to the world and heavens, qualifies God as a painter. The human body, according to Vasari, is sculpted by God, which in turn inspires artists to depict the human form. Art and design—God’s design—is thereby ‘at the origin of all things’ and not merely painting and sculpture, though the reality we know is still the product of God’s painting and sculpture. According to Vasari, God privileges Man not for his intellect per se, but by bestowing him with the ability of creation and design. Indeed, creativity and design are for Vasari a part of all intellectual discovery. Intellect is the mode of discovering design, which for Vasari, is also creation. Vasari claims “that divine light infused in us by a special act of grace which has not only made us superior to other animals but even similar, if it is permitted to say so, to God Himself” (4). God is more than just a maker, he is a creator with an aesthetic sense. All intellectual human endeavours, claims Vasari, are aesthetic and creative, in their comprehension of God’s design of the world. Vasari’s emphasis on design became outmoded as Renaissance humanism was challenged by the Enlightenment’s interest in humans and other animals as machines. However, evolution challenges even some mechanistic understandings of the human subject, which sometimes presupposed that the human-machine had a maker, as with William Paley’s watchmaker theory. As Richard Dawkins put it in The Blind Watchmaker, nature “has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If [evolution] can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (“Chapter One: Explaining the Very Improbable” n.p.). No longer was God’s universe designed for Man’s comprehension and appreciation, foretelling humanity’s own potential extinction.Man and God’s DeathThe idea that humanity was created by blind processes raises the question of what sort of depiction of the human subject is possible after the death of God and the Enlightenment’s tendency toward disenchantment? An art and self-understanding founded on atheism would be in sharp distinction to Vasari’s characterisation of the nature as an artwork coloured by the divine painter and sculptor in the heavens. Man’s creativity and design are, for the Renaissance humanist, part of discovery, the embodied realisations and iterations of the Platonic realm of divine forms. But such designs, wondrous for Vasari, can be viewed as shadows without origin in a post-God world. In Vasari, Platonism is still present where the artist’s creation becomes a way of discerning the origin of all forms, God himself. Yet, without divine origin, these forms are no longer discoveries and the possibility emerges that they are not even creations, emptied of the divine meaning that gave Man’s creative and scientific work value. Nietzsche understood that the loss of God called for the revaluation of all values. This is why Nietzsche claims that God’s death signifies the death of Man. For Nietzsche, the last Man was such an iteration, a shadow of what man had been (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 9-10). The Post-Man, the Übermensch, is one who extends the human power of creation and evaluation. In Vasari, Man is a model created by God. Nietzsche extends this logic: Man is his own creation as is God Man’s model. Man is capable of self-construction and overcoming without the hindrance of the divine. This freedom unlocked by auto-creation renders Man capable of making himself God. As such, art remains a source of sacred power for Nietzsche since it is a process of creative evaluation. The sacred is affirmed against secular profanity. For Nietzsche, God must be envisaged as Dionysus, a God that Nietzsche claims takes on a human form in Greek festivals dedicated to creation and fecundity. Mankind, in order to continue to have value after God’s death, “must become gods”, must take the place of God (The Gay Science 120). Nietzsche, All-Too HumanistNietzsche begins a project of rethinking Man as a category. Yet there is much in common with Renaissance humanism generated by Nietzsche’s Dionysian belief in a merger between God and Man. Man is overcome by a stronger and more creative figure, that of the Übermensch. By comparing Nietzsche with Vasari we can understand just how humanist Nietzsche remained. Indeed, Nietzsche fervently admired the Renaissance as a rebirth of paganism. Such an assessment of the rebirth of pagan art and values can almost be found in Vasari himself. Vasari claimed that pagan art, far from being blasphemous, brought Man closer to the divine in a tribute to the creativity of God. Vasari’s criticism of Christianity is careful but present. Indeed, Vasari—in a way that anticipates Nietzsche’s view that secular sacrilege was merely an extension of Christian sacrilege—attacks Christian iconoclasm, noting that barbarians and Christians worked together to destroy sacred forms of art: not only did [early Christianity] ruin or cast to the ground all the marvellous statues, sculptures, paintings, mosaics, and ornaments of the false pagan gods, but it also did away with the memorials and testimonials to an infinite number of illustrious people, in whose honour statues and other memorials had been constructed in public places by the genius of antiquity. (5) In this respect, Vasari embodies the values Nietzsche so praised in the Italian Renaissance. Vasari emphasises the artistic creations that enshrine distinctions of value and social hierarchy. While Vasari continues Platonic notions that ideals exist before human creation, he nevertheless holds human creation as a realisation and embodiment of the ideal, which is not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s notion of divine embodiment. For Nietzsche and Vasari, Man is exulted when he can rise, like a god, above other men. Another possibility would be to lower Man to just another animal. One way to envision such a lowering would be to subvert the mode by which Man is deemed God-like. Art that engages with the death of Man helps conceptualise subhumanism and the way that the subject ceases to be raised above the animal. What follows are studies of artworks that unbuild the subject. Francis Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”Francis Bacon’s work challenges the human subject by depicting nonhuman subjects, where the flesh is torn open and Man’s animal flesh is exposed. Sometimes Bacon does not merely disfigure the human form but violently abandons it to focus on animals that reveal animal qualities latent in the subject. Bacon’s “Study of a Baboon”, expresses a sense of human devolution: Man devolved to monkey. In the work, we see a baboon within an enclosure, sitting above a tree that simultaneously resembles a gothic shadow, a cross, and even a smear. The dark, cross-like tree may suggest the conquering of God by a baboon, a type of monkey, recalling the old slander of Darwin’s theory, namely that Darwinism entailed that humanity descended from monkeys (which Darwin’s theory does not claim). But far from victorious, the monkey is in a state of suffering. While the baboon is not crucified on or by the tree, suffering pervades the frame. Its head resembles some sort of skull. The body is faintly painted in a melancholy blue with smudges of purple and is translucent and ghostly—at once a lump of matter and a spectral absence. We do not see the baboon through the cage. Instead we see through the baboon at the cage. Indeed, its very physiology involves the encountering of trauma as the head of the baboon does not simply connect to the body but stabs through the body as a sharp bone, perhaps opaquely evoking the violence of evolution. Similarly, the baboon’s tail seems to stab through the tree. Its eye is an enlarged void and a pupil is indicated by a bluish white triangle splitting through the void. The tree has something of the menacing and looming quality of a shadow and there is a sense of wilderness confronted by death and entrapment, evoked through the background. The yellowy ground is suggestive of dead grass. While potentially gesturing to the psychical confusion and intensity of Vincent Van Gogh or Edvard Munch, the yellowed grass more likely evokes the empty, barren and hostile planes of the desert and contrasts with the darkened colours. The baboon sitting on the cross/tree may seem to have reached some sort of pinnacle but such a status is mocked by the tree that manages to continue outside the fence: the branches nightmarishly protrude through the fence to conquer the frame, which in turn furthers the sense of inescapable entrapment and threat. The baboon is thereby precluded from reaching a higher point on the tree, unable to climb the branches, and underscores the baboon’s confines. The painting is labelled a study, which may suggest it is unfinished. However, Bacon’s completed works preserve an unfinished quality. This unfinished quality conveys a sense in which Man and evolution are unfinished and that being finished in the sense of being completed is no longer possible. The idea that there can finished work of art, a work of art that preserves an eternal meaning, has been repeatedly subject to serious doubt, including by artists themselves. Indeed, Bacon’s work erases the potential for perfection and completion, and breaks down, through devolution, what has been achieved by Man and the forces that shaped him. The subject is lowered from that of human to that of a baboon and is therefore, by Vasari’s Renaissance reasoning, not a subject at all. Bacon’s sketch and study exist to evoke a sense of incompletion, involving pain without resolution. The animal state of pain is therefore married with existential entrapment and isolation as art ceases to express the Platonic ideal and aims to show the truth of the shadow—namely that humanity is without a God, a God that previously shed light on humanity’s condition and anchored the human subject. If there is a trace or echo of human nobility left, such a trace functions through the wild and violent quality of animal indignation. A scream of painful indignity is the last act approaching (or descending from) any dignity that is afforded. Jan Švankmajer’s Darkness, Light, DarknessAn even more extreme case of the subject no longer being the subject, of being broken and muted—so much so that animal protest is annulled—can be witnessed in Jan Švankmajer’s animated short Darkness, Light, Darkness. In the animation, green clay hands mould and form a human body in order to be part of it. But when complete, the human body is trapped, grotesquely out of proportion with its environment. The film begins in a darkened house. There is a knocking of the door, and then the first green hand opens the door and turns on the light. The hand falls to the floor, blindly making its way to another door on the opposite side of the house. The hand opens the door only for eyeballs to roll out. The eyes look around. The hand pushes its clay fingers against the eyeballs, and the eyeballs become attached to the fingers. Suddenly with sight, the hand is able to lift itself up. The hand discovers that another hand is knocking at the door. The first hand helps the second hand, and then goes to the window where a pair of ears are stuck together flapping like a moth. The hands work together and break the ears apart. The first hand, the one with eyes, attaches the ears to the second hand. Then a head with a snout, but missing eyes and ears, enters through the door. The hands pull the snout until it becomes a nose, suppressing and remoulding the animal until it becomes human. As with Bacon, the violence of evolution, of auto-construction is conveyed indirectly: in Bacon’s case, through painted devolution and, in the case of the claymation, through a violent construction based on mutilation and smashing body parts together.Although I have described only three minutes of the seven-minute film, it already presents an image of human construction devoid of art or divine design. Man, or rather the hands, become the blind watchman of evolution. The hands work contingently, with what they are provided. They shape themselves based on need. The body, after all, exists as parts, and the human body is made up of other life forms, both sustaining and being sustained by them. The hands work together, and sacrifice sight and hearing for the head. They tear off the ears and remove the eyes and give them to the head. Transcendence is exchanged for subsistence. The absurdity of this contingency becomes most apparent when the hands attempt to merge with the head, to be the head’s feet. Then the feet actually arrive and are attached to the head’s neck. The human subject in such a state is thereby deformed and incomplete. It is a frightened form, cowering when it hears banging at the door. It turns out that the banging is being produced by an angry erect penis pounding at the door. However, even this symbol of masculine potency is subdued, rendered harmless by the hands that splash a bucket of cold water on it. The introduction of the penis signifies the masculinist notions implicit in the term Man, but we only ever see the penis when it is flaccid. The human subject is able to be concluded when clay pours from both doors and the window. The hands sculpt the clay and make the body, which, when complete is oversized and barely fits within the house. The male subject is then trapped, cramped in a foetal position. With its head against the ceiling next to the light, breathing heavily, all it can do is turn out the light. The head opens its mouth either in horror or a state of exertion and gasps. The eyes bulge before one of the body’s hands turns switch, perhaps suggesting terror before death or simply the effort involved in turning off the light. Once completed and built, the human subject remains in the dark. Despite the evident quirky, playful humour, Švankmajer’s film reflects an exhaustion with art itself. Human life becomes clay comically finding its own form. For Vasari, the ideal of the human form is realised first by God and then by Man through marble; for Švankmajer it is green clay. He demotes man back to the substance for a God to mould but, as there is no God to breathe life into it and give form, there is just the body to imperfectly mould itself. The film challenges both Vasari’s humanism and the suprahumanism of Nietzschean spectacle. Instead of the self-generating power and radical interdependence and agency of Übermensch, Švankmajer’s sub-subject is Man undercome—man beneath as opposed to over man, man mocked by its ambition, and with no space to stand high. Švankmajer thereby realises the anti-Nietzschean potential inherent within cinema’s anti-spectacular nature. Antonin Artaud, who extends the aesthetics advanced by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, contrasts the theatre’s sense of animal life with cinema. Artaud observes that movies “murder us with second-hand reproductions […] filtered through machines” (84). Thus, films murder creative and animal power as film flattens life to a dead realm of reproduction. Continuing Jacques Derrida’s hauntological framing of the screen, the animation theorist Alan Cholodenko has argued that the screen implies death. Motion is dead and replaced by illusion, a recording relayed back to us. What renders cinema haunting also renders it hauntological. For Cholodenko, cinema’s animation challenges ontology and metaphysics by eschewing stable ontologies through a process that entails both presence and absence. As Cholodenko points out, all film is a type of animation and reanimation, of making images move that are not in fact moving. Thus, one can argue that the animated-animation (such as Švankmajer’s claymation) becomes a refinement of death, a Frankesteinian reanimation of dead material. Indeed, Darkness, Light, Darkness accentuates the presence of death with the green clay almost resembling putrefaction. The fingerprints on the clay accentuate a lack of life, for the autonomous and dead matter that constructs and shapes a dead body from seemingly severed body parts. Even the title of the film, Darkness, Light, Darkness reflects an experience of cinema as deflation rather than joyous spectacle. One goes to a darkened space, watches light flicker on a screen and then the light goes out again. The cartoonish motions of the hands and body parts in the film look only half alive and therefore seem half-dead. Made in the decaying Communist state of Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer’s film aptly acknowledges the deflation of cinema, reflecting that illumination—the light of God, is put out, or more specifically, switched off. With the light of God switched off, creation becomes construction and construction becomes reconstruction, filtered through cinema’s machine processes as framed through Cholodenko. Still, Švankmajer’s animation is not unsympathetic to the plight of the hands. We do see the body parts work together. When a vulgar, meaty, non-claymation tongue comes out through the door, it goes straight to the other door to let the teeth in. The teeth and tongue are aided by the hands to complete the face. Indeed, what they produce is a human being, which has some sense of coherence and success—a success enmeshed with failure and entrapment. Piccinini’s “The Young Family”Patricia Piccinini’s sculptural works offer a more tender approach to the subject, especially when her works focus on the nonhuman animal with human characteristics. Piccinini is interested in the combinations of the animal and the machine, so her ideas can be seen almost as transhuman, where the human is extended beyond humanism. Her work is based on connection and connectedness, but does not emphasise the humanist values of innovation and self-creation often inherent to transhumanism. Indeed, the emphasis on connection is distinct from the entrapment of Bacon’s baboon and Švankmajer’s clay human, which half lament freedom’s negation.The way that Piccinini preserves aspects of humanism within a framework of subhumanism is evident in her work “The Young Family”. The hypperrealistic sculpture depicts a humanoid pig form, flopped, presumably exhausted, as piglet-babies suckle on her nipples. The work was inspired by a scientific proposal for pigs to be genetically modified to provide organs for humans (“Educational Resource” 5). Such a transhuman setting frames a subhuman aesthetic. Care is taken to render the scene with sentiment but without a sense of the ideal, without perfection. One baby-piglet tenderly grasps its foot with both hands and stares with love at its mother. We see two piglets enthusiastically sucking their mother’s teat, while a third baby/piglet’s bottom is visible, indicating that there is a third piglet scrambling for milk. The mother gazes at us, with her naked mammalian body visible. We see her wrinkles and veins. There is some fur on her head and some hair on her eyebrows humanising her. Indeed, her eyes are distinctly human and convey affection. Affection seems to be a motif that carries through to the materials (carefully crafted by Piccinini’s studio). The affection displayed in the artwork is trans-special, emphasising that human tenderness is in fact mammalian tenderness. Such tenderness conflates the human, the nonhuman animal and the material out of which the humanoid creature and its young are constructed. The sub-agency brings together the young and the old by displaying the closeness of the family. Something of this sub-subjectivity is theorised in Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche, where he contrasts Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch with the idea of the subhuman. Bull writes that subhumanism involves giving up on “becoming more than a man and think[ing] only of becoming something less” (n.p.; Chapter 2, sec. “The Subhuman”). Piccinini depicts vulnerability and tenderness with life forms that are properly speaking subhuman, and reject the displays of strength of Nietzsche’s suprahumanism or Vasari’s emphasis on art commemorating great men. But Piccinini’s subhumanism preserves enough humanism to understand art’s ability to encourage an ethics of nurturing. In this respect, her works offer an alternative to Bull’s subhumanism that aims, so Bull argues, to devalue art altogether. Instead, Piccinini affirms imagination, but through its ability to conjure new ways to perceive animal affection. The sub-subject thereby functions to reveal states of emotion common to mammals (including humans) and other animals. ConclusionThese three artists therefore convey distinct, if related and intersecting, ways of visualising the sub-subject: Bacon through animal suffering, Švankmajer through adaptation that ultimately leads to the agent’s entrapment, and Piccinini who, instead of marrying anti-humanism with the subhumanism (the procedure of Švankmajer, and Bacon), integrates aspects of transhumanism and Renaissance humanism into her subhuman vision. As such, these works present a realisation of how we might think of the going under of the human subject after Darwin, Nietzsche and the deaths of God, Man and the diminishment of creativity. Such works remain not only antithetical to Vasari’s humanism but also to Nietzsche’s suprahumanism. These artists use art’s power to humble—not through overpowering awe but through the visible breakdown of the human agent, speaking for and to the sub-subject. Such art, by unbuilding and dismantling the subject, draws on prehuman trajectories of evolution, and in the case of Piccinini, transhuman trajectories. Art ceases to be about the grandiose evocations of power. Rather, more modestly, these works build a connection between the human with other mammals. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge Daniel Canaris for his valuable insights into Christianity and the Italian Renaissance, Alan Cholodenko for providing copies of his works that were central to my interpretation of Švankmajer, and Rachel Franks and Simon Dwyer for their invaluable assistance and finding very helpful reviewers. References Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove P, 1958.Art Gallery of South Australia. “Educational Resource Patricia Piccinini.” Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia. 11 Dec. 2016 <https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Learning/docs/Online_Resources/Piccinini_online_resource.pdf>.Bacon, Francis. “Head I.” 1948. Oil on Canvas. 100.3 x 74.9cm. ———. “Study of a Baboon.” 1953. Oil on Canvas. 198.3 x 137.3cm. Bull, Malcolm. Anti-Nietzsche. New York: Verso, 2011. Cholodenko, Alan. “First Principles of Animation.” Animating Film Theory. Ed. Karen Beckman. Duke UP, 2014. 98-110.———. “The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema.” Cultural Studies Review 10.2 (2004): 99-113. Darkness, Light, Darkness. Jan Švankmajer, 1990. 35mm. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.Piccinini, Patricia. “The Young Family.” 2002. Silicone, Polyurethane, Leather, Plywood, Human Hair, 80 x 150 x 110cm. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of Artists. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.