Marineros y otros - photographs by Gregorio Prieto and Eduardo Chicharro Briones, circa 1929-31

 

Marineros.

The two young Spaniards, Prieto and Chicharro Briones, met as colleagues at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, became friends, and collaborated on a series of experimental photographs. Prieto devised the scenes and was the primary model for the images, while Chicharro Briones worked the camera and handled the technical side of the endeavor. Prieto had a particular fascination with sailors at the time, apparently identifying so strongly with the archetype that he wandered the streets and towns of Italy dressed as one.

Deukalion.

El péndulo.

Recuerdo de Roma.

Marinero durmiendo.

Herida por la belleza clásica.

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Gregorio Prieto Muñoz (2 May 1897, Valdepeñas - 14 November 1992, Valdepeñas), Spanish painter associated with the Generation of '27, an influential group of avant-garde Spanish poets and artists that gradually formed between 1923 and 1927. The eighth son of a cabinet-maker, he started drawing and then painting at the age of four. When he was seven, the family moved to Madrid. At eighteen he entered the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and, after being awarded several scholarships, he moved to Paris in 1925 where he had his first contact with Cubism and the Surrealists. Three years later, he received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome - Real Academia de España en Roma - where he remained until 1932.

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Eduardo Chicharro Briones (13 June 1905, Madrid - 15 March 1964, Madrid), Spanish painter and poet, founder and one of the main theorists of Postism, an avant-garde movement that emerged in Spain in the mid-1940s. The son of Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, who had been court painter to King Alfonso XIII, when he was seven his family moved to Rome; he remained there until the age of twenty. In 1925, after completing his military service in Spain, he returned to Rome on a scholarship granted by the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome. He remained there until 1935.

Rome, 1929. Depending on the source, this portrait is captioned as being Prieto and Chicharro Briones, or merely the former and an amigo. 

Die young, live forever - Marcus Claudius Marcellus as Hermes Logios, circa 20 BC

 

Marcellus as Hermes Logios - formerly known as Germanicus - is a life-sized marble funerary monument and portrait of Marcus Claudius Marcellus, nephew of the Roman emperor Augustus. Created some three years after the model's death, Marcellus is portrayed as Hermes Logios, the god of eloquence.

The pose of the idealized figure exemplifies what later became known as the Hermes Ludovisi type, and was based on a popular and much copied 5th century BC Greek prototype, with the addition of a portrait head. 

The statue is signed - carved into the figure of a tortoise at the base of the cloak - "Cleomenes (Kleomenes) the Athenian."

The tortoise on the plinth below the drapery alludes to Hermes' invention of the lyre, for which the tortoise shell served as sounding board. Hermes/Marcellus appears to hold a plectrum in his right hand, a plectrum being a small, flat tool used for the plucking or strumming of a stringed instrument.

By 1590 the statue was in the collection of the Villa Montalto-Negroni, Pope Sixtus V's villa on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. It was purchased from the papal collections by Louis XIV in 1664 and placed in the gardens of Versailles; later it was moved to the château itself and installed in the galerie des Glaces. Napoléon had it transferred to the Louvre in 1802, where it remains to this day.

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Marcus Claudius Marcellus (42–23 BC), the eldest son of Gaius Claudius Marcellus and Octavia the Younger, sister of Augustus. He was educated with his cousin Tiberius and traveled with him to Hispania where they served under Augustus in the Cantabrian Wars. In 25 BC he returned to Rome where he married his cousin Julia, the emperor's daughter. As Augustus' nephew and closest male relative, he would enjoy an accelerated political career. Marcellus and Augustus' general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa were the two popular choices as heir to the empire. In 23 BC an unidentified illness spread through Rome and both Augustus and Marcellus were infected. Augustus barely survived, but the illness proved fatal to Marcellus; he was only twenty years-old. He would be the first member of the imperial family to have his ashes placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus.

In Silber gekleidet, aber ohne Pferd - Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia "als Amazone", by Antoine Pesne

 

Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia in riding costume (or more likely fancy dress), by Antoine Pesne, before 1757.

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Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, studio of Antoine Pesne, after 1744.

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Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia (9 November 1723, Berlin – 30 March 1787, Berlin), daughter of Frederick William I of Prussia and sister of Frederick the Great, a composer and music curator, who served as princess-abbess of the Free Secular Imperial Abbey of Quedlinburg. She was a princess of Prussia as the twelfth child and seventh daughter of King Frederick William I and his wife, Princess Sophia Dorothea of Hanover. She had thirteen siblings, ten of whom survived infancy. She was musically inclined, like her brother Frederick, but her formal instruction was only possible after the death of their emotionally and physically abusive father. Secretly, though, she was first taught by her brother - with the support of their mother - and learned to play the harpsichord, the flute, and the violin. She was sixteen when her father died and her brother succeeded him. Three years later, she and her elder sister Louisa Ulrika were put forward as possible brides for the heir to the Swedish throne; her sister was chosen and she would remain unmarried. In 1755, at the age of thirty-two, she was elected princess-abbess of the Quedlinburg Abbey - Kasierlich Freie Weltliche Reichsstift Quedlinburg - which made her a wealthy and influential woman with the right to sit and speak in the Imperial Diet. She was known for her intelligent and disciplined leadership, managing the abbey's finances, overseeing its estates, and protecting the abbey’s independence during political disputes. Apparently, though, she still spent most of her time in Berlin devoting herself to music, becoming known as a composer, but also as a great patron. She achieved modest contemporary fame in the former role and was best known for her chamber music. Only a few of her works have survived, though, as she described herself as very self-critical, and is believed to have destroyed many of her own compositions. She was also an important collector of music, preserving over six hundred volumes by Bach, Handel, Telemann, Carl Heinrich Graun, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, among others. Her library was split between East and West Germany after World War II, but reunited after the German reunification. Today it is housed in the Berlin State Library. She died at the age of sixty-three and was buried in the Berlin Cathedral.