Art and Music

Since I started to recover from arguably bad influence some years ago, I have, for the most part, turned my back on contemporary art and music. Though my preferences in humanism are decidedly secular, I take instinctive pleasure, comfort and interest in the sacred art of any tradition and format, possibly because the dedication and devotion of the artist is at its highest there even in the case of commissioned works outside his own faith. Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows at Zurich’s Fraumünster are just one case in point. Art – and music – can be viewed as a tool to connect with experiences and esthetics across boundaries of time, culture, language, class and other superficially divisive notions.

Art

I am particularly interested in the art of the Italian Renaissance

Sandro Botticelli

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Leonardo da Vinci

Fra Filippo Lippi

Andrea del Sarto

Piero della Francesca

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi

Raffaello Sanzio

Tiziano Vecelli

Paolo Veronese

.... and its far-reaching influences

Domenikos Theotokopoulos

Caravaggio

Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Albrecht Dürer

Pieter Breughel

Hieronymus Bosch

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes

Gustave Moreau

Pre-Raphaelites

Ernst Fuchs

Salvador Dali

Music

My musical taste runs a bit heavily to the sacral, not because of being consumed by spirituality but because I feel that occidental tradition has found its most comprehensive manifestation in some of its legacies. A few links here are an indication but perhaps altogether less than a fraction of one percent of what may distract my mind from only seemingly important tasks.

Th. Aquinas
Adoro te devote