Joymie D.

Cabansag BSNED 2 HUM 101 TTH 7:30 – 9:00 am

MARIA MAGDALENE

Among all of the sculptors, this Maria Magdalene statue made me

impressed because the statue is not marble, is not bronze but it is a wood. It looks
so frail. Mary Magdalene is shown as a hermit with her hands about to be clasped
in prayer and she is old and wrinkled. Her body is exposed to us. She got muscular
arms. The skin on her chest, neck and her face look like the skin of an old woman.
I think it is difficult to look at because there is a whole series of contrast that were
not used to be being shown in sculpture. She has a body that clearly was once very
beautiful. She got high cheek bones. She is tall and graceful. The body has
weathered. This life has taken its tool and it is almost as if she is wasted away. All
that’s left is a pure spirituality. The kind of pure faith. She is clothed only in her
very long hair which is one of her attributes. There is a look on her face which is so
intense and yet at the same time almost as if she has left this earth already.
 GUSTAV KLIMT’S THE KISS FROM 1908

This painting made me impressed because it is a very large and there is so

much gold that it is hard not to think of a religious icon. I think in some ways
Klimt was trying to create a modern icon, something that suggested a sense of
transcendence. There is a way that the patterning especially around the faces
becomes a kind of halo, as well. There is this sense of the male figure of patterns
that are direct of linear in contrast to the curvilinear to the circles and the ovals that
we seen in the female form. The spiritual is so powerful in this painting. The
darker gold ground seems so much as if the figures are somehow being dissipated
into the cosmos that there are so lost in the intensity, the eternity of the kiss. The
way that the bodies really aren’t present in the painting and are cloaked in these
decorative forms, reminds us how much Klimt, although he was exploring this
kind of sensuality was also disguising it or covering it with kind of decorative
patterning. The female figure is completely full frontal but horizontal. So that there
is this beautiful sense of here passivity receiving that kiss, but also a kind of deep
interior feeling with her eyes closed. Her fingers just delicately touching his as he
holds her head and his neck reaches out and round, and we get a sense of his
physical power through the strength of that neck but also the intensity of his desire.