ikono

View Plans Create Account Login

Something Vast Approaches

Something Vast Approaches

The Colossus, long attributed to Francisco de Goya and still debated by scholars, shows a giant risen above the hills with his fists raised. This slow art journey descends from that enormous figure to the plain below, where carts, cattle and tiny human figures scatter in every direction at once. One donkey stands still, oblivious. Nothing explains the giant, and the film does not try to. The panic and the silence hold together. This work can be seen at The Museo Nacional del Prado.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Everything the Body Knows

Everything the Body Knows

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens worked on these pictures together, Brueghel painting the objects and the settings, Rubens the figures. This slow art encounter runs the full cycle of the five senses, then the two large Sight and Smell canvases that treat two of them at once. Each is packed to its edges with flowers, armour, instruments, glassware, animals and food. Looked at slowly, the abundance stops being a list and becomes a world. These works can be seen at The Museo Nacional del Prado.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Where the Stream Is Wine

Where the Stream Is Wine

Titian’s The Bacchanal of the Andrians is a painting about wine and what it does to an island. This slow art journey moves through the dancers and drinkers on Andros, past the sheet of music held up among them, down to the sleeping nude stretched out in the foreground, oblivious to all of it. Colour does the work here: deep blue sky, red and white drapery, flushed skin. Titian paints pleasure without tipping it into comedy. This work can be seen at The Museo Nacional del Prado.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

What Rome Left

What Rome Left

Hubert Robert made ruins his subject for a lifetime, and The Colosseum is one of the grandest. This slow art experience climbs the tiers of broken arches, over stone worn soft at the edges and plants rooted in the gaps, while small figures at the base give the scale away. Warm light falls through the wall’s breaks. Robert paints the ruin not as loss but as something still standing, and still being looked at. This work can be seen at The Museo Nacional del Prado.

Duration : 3m
Maturity Level : all