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Cats in art

gatos%2Bri%C3%B1endo.jpg


goya - gatos riñendo
 
Yeah, the lack of good cats is a mystery of art history. There are however some nice sketches of cats which are hard to find online. As well as the Madonna with cat already posted, Leonardo did a sheet of cats all in different contorted positions, with (bizarrely) a dragon in the middle of them. Gericault too did a great sheet of sketches of a stripy cat, a real miniature tiger.

If we can include big cats, there are Delacroix's tigers, and Stubbs' lions for starters.
 
Donna Ferentes said:
One of my pet peeves about art (as you will have seen) is that cats are rarely rendered well, even by highly skilled artists. Dogs fare much better in the history of art.
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Do you know how difficult it is to get a cat to hold a pose for long enough?
 
edit- to ohmyliver

Sure but they can't be any harder than goldfinches or eagles, and there are plenty of those in medieval art. They symbolized things so they needed to be painted- cats, as far as I can see, weren't straightforward symbols so they didn't find a way to do them. Cats never really recovered from this slow start in art, I think.
 
Harold Shand said:
edit- to ohmyliver

Sure but they can't be any harder than goldfinches or eagles, and there are plenty of those in medieval art. They symbolized things so they needed to be painted- cats, as far as I can see, weren't straightforward symbols so they didn't find a way to do them. Cats never really recovered from this slow start in art, I think.
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Erm, wasn't the lion an important heraldric device? And after a quick google, the lion is quite well presented in medieval art as a whole.
 
Donna Ferentes said:
Yeah, but felix domesticus a little less, I think. Probably because it was regarded as a creature of the devil.
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Familiars? Didn't that kick in around the mid 1500's? Explains post (to a degree) but what about pre?
 
cesare said:
Familiars? Didn't that kick in around the mid 1500's? Explains post (to a degree) but what about pre?
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Maybe it was roughly contemporaneous with the developments in representational art that came with the Renaissance?
 
Donna Ferentes said:
Maybe it was roughly contemporaneous with the developments in representational art that came with the Renaissance?
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Yes. But I'm now intrigued by the lack pre-Renaissance except (as ohmyliver points out) in heraldic device. Unless you're suggesting that there was a lack of anything bar religious iconic 2D representation before then?
 
cesare said:
Yes. But I'm now intrigued by the lack pre-Renaissance except (as ohmyliver points out) in heraldic device. Unless you're suggesting that there was a lack of anything bar religious iconic 2D representation before then?
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Well, we haven't got a long period to play with here, have we? It's just a notion, anyway, but perhaps worth playing with.
 
....just found two more Gwen John cats...I was looking for a lovely pen and wash cat she did..no luck so far.....I bought a postcard of it when I went years ago to an exhibition of Gwen John paintings (at the Hayward iirc) called 'An Interior Life'....it was years and years ago

N05155_9.jpg


T00156_9.jpg
 
Donna Ferentes said:
Well, we haven't got a long period to play with here, have we? It's just a notion, anyway, but perhaps worth playing with.
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Depends on when you start to chart the human/feline domestic relationship? And where? Taking into account 'art' forms across the world.
 
cesare said:
Yes. But I'm now intrigued by the lack pre-Renaissance except (as ohmyliver points out) in heraldic device. Unless you're suggesting that there was a lack of anything bar religious iconic 2D representation before then?
Click to expand...

Am I misunderstanding? You already mentioned ancient Egyptian art. 21st Century replica, but I'm assuming it is a replica of something quite old.

I really don't like cats. Don't know why I'm posting here. A 'Dogs in Art' thread would be more my thing.


e2a; Huge - sorry. Link instead. http://egyptian-animal-statues.com/...l-Statue-Bast-Cat-2607_20_6_13_1_11_4_003.JPG
 
Dogs are more my thing as well, tbh, Stanley.

But there's a relatively huge temporal gulf between ancient egyptian art and more immediate European pre-Renaissance. I'm interested in that development.
 
cesare said:
Dogs are more my thing as well, tbh, Stanley.

But there's a relatively huge temporal gulf between ancient egyptian art and more immediate European pre-Renaissance. I'm interested in that development.
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Yes. Much of history seems a bit void through the dark ages. Maybe the cats killed all the writers, historians and artists?


e2a; There's also a huge void going back to the start of creative thought and the earliest art history theories. When were cats first domesticated?
 
Stanley Edwards said:
Yes. Much of history seems a bit void through the dark ages. Maybe the cats killed all the writers, historians and artists?


e2a; There's also a huge void going back to the start of creative thought and the earliest art history theories. When were cats first domesticated?
Click to expand...

Hmmmm

Are cats really important enough to research it a bit more? Jury's out.
 
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