Plafond met engelen en leeuwen 1670 - 1678

Curator: Standing here, I can't help but feel like I'm about to ascend. It feels grand but intimate, like a whispered secret in a palace. Editor: Absolutely! What you're responding to is a drawing entitled "Plafond met engelen en leeuwen," or "Ceiling with Angels and Lions," by Jean Berain, created between 1670 and 1678. Curator: Berain... rings a baroque bell, doesn't it? The detail in this engraving— the way those angels tumble and the lions roar, it feels like a celestial circus. Editor: It's pure Baroque excess, and precisely conceived. Berain was deeply involved in the decorative arts, which situates him in a specific social and political context. Louis XIV favored highly ornate displays of power and wealth. How do you read the interplay of angels and lions in that light? Curator: It strikes me as a visual power play, celestial blessing combined with earthly strength. The angels perhaps represent divine right, legitimizing the lions’, or rather, the monarchy’s rule. It’s also strangely harmonious. I keep thinking, "What does this space *sound* like?" Maybe organ music... trumpets? Editor: Consider the philosophical underpinnings, too. Baroque art often wrestled with ideas of illusion and reality. The decorative scheme, in its attempt to transform the architecture, can be seen as a metaphor for social transformation— a gilded cage, perhaps? How does that complicate your reading? Curator: It deepens the melancholic aspect, that sense of beauty tinged with unease. Now that I'm thinking about that transformative act you pointed out, it sort of feels like being caught between heaven and earth, luxury and limitation. It is, I suppose, perfectly, poetically, Baroque. Editor: Precisely, the visual rhetoric reflects and reinforces hierarchies, yet there's this undeniable creative energy—the mark of an artist grappling with powerful ideologies, maybe? Art as both celebration and subtle critique, even then. Curator: I'll take that potent complexity over any simpler story any day. Editor: Absolutely. An image to lose oneself in, while never losing sight of the systems at play. A true encapsulation of its time, don’t you think?