"Lewis Carroll In The Victorian Era: Other Alice Stories" by Katia Canton and Adriana Peliano

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"Lewis Carroll In The Victorian Era: Other Alice Stories" illustrated by Adriana Peliano @adriana_peliano written by Katia Canton @katia_canton_arteseescritos published by DCL in 2010

This lovely little book is part of the "Art Tells Stories Collection". It examines the artistic creation of Alice by looking at the creative influences in the Victorian times.

 

 

1: Cover: Tea Party with Adriana Peliano's signature visual amuse-bouches

2: Cheshire Cat in Salvador Dalí's "Persistence of Memory" painting 

 

3: The Victorian Era shown through various pictures of Queen Victoria, juxtaposed with the Queen of Hearts who resembles her very much

 

4: Caterpillar is in Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights". At the bottom the audience applauds the first performance of Amilcare Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda" at the Teatro Amazonas on January 7, 1897. This opera house is in Manaus, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. It was featured in Werner Herzog's brilliant "Fitzcarraldo" film, & in the wonderful novels by Eva Ibbotson: "Journey to the River Sea" & "A Company of Swans"

5: Humpty Dumpty sits on Bosch's Fountain of Life. White Rabbit hides in the hole at the bottom, instead of the usual owl (owls in paradise are reminders that the devil's temptations are hiding everywhere). On the left an adult Alice writes "sic transit gloria Mundi" (Thus passes the glory of the world) a traditional phrase used in the ritual of papal coronation, first used for the Antipope Alexander V

6: With his multiple Boschian legs, Humpty is Saint Vitus, the Christian martyr persecuted by the Romans. His feast was celebrated with dancing before his statue. This dancing became popular & "Saint Vitus Dance" is the neurological disorder Sydenham's chorea, characterized by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements. Vitus is the patron saint of dancers, he also protects against lightning strikes, animal attacks & oversleeping.

Here he holds the famous "9 Objekte" of the German artist Gerhard Richter

7: At the Tea Party, the hourglass of Father Time blasts off into space like a rocket, "to boldly go where no man has gone before". The metrome is the famous 1923 "Indestructible Object/ Object to Be Destroyed" by the American artist Man Ray. It has a photograph of his lover's eye attached:

 

"Cut out the eye from the photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome & regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow."

 

 

 

 

8: Tweedledum & Tweedledee are Lewis Carroll as White Knight. Alice climbs on Giuseppe Arcimboldo's famous "Librarian" painting, a triumph of 16th century abstract art, & a parody of "materialistic book collectors more interested in acquiring books than in reading them." (Hint, hint, Instagrammers)

 

 

 

 

9: "Rosy Dreams & Slumbers Light" - a photograph of sleeping Alexandra "Xie" Rhoda Kitchin, notable 'child-friend' & favourite photographic subject of Lewis Carroll

 

 

 

10: A fantastic mishmash of elements from Bosch & Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Notice the rabbit cutting a slice of the roasted piglet

 

STORIES

 

 

 

 

Semper Lux is an enigmatic entity, witty collector and presenter of precious and supercalifragilistic illustrated books, with a great  research and full of unsuspected references, who travels inside illustrations and brings us fun, curiouserism and dispair for buying books.

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