You are tempted by a dive in the workshops of Venetian painters of the Renaissance Back then? So this album as atypical as thrilling is for you. "The Vision of Bacchus", which has just appeared in the Mirages collection published by Delcourt, is an amazing historical and cultural journey to which we invite the French cartoonist and writer Jean Dytar, only this is the second album after "Smile Marionette" , published in 2009. The central theme of "The Vision of Bacchus", this is the search for absolute grace and eternal beauty through painting. This is even become lobsession Giorgio Castelfranco, Giorgione said, in Venice in 1510. Suffering from the plague, which will soon lemporter, he is desperate to "find léclat his first pictorial emotion" and come to attach to a wood panel presence as vibrant and bright as the woman in the painting by Antonello da Messina for his father years before. A work that has since disappeared in a fire, which adds to the mystery. This prologue is the opportunity to bring the reader Dytar in 1475, when the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina arrived in Venice, a little on tiptoe. But thanks to his sublime paintings, the little man will soon become the darlings of the moon city. What fascinates home, this is his mastery of amazing new technologies, including the "camera obscura" and oil painting. Suddenly, the orders flow and ends necessarily by competing with other Venetian painters, especially Giovanni Bellini, the magician of dautels paintings for churches. Until then, no real problem: the two men are certainly rivals but they sapprécient. Antonello, the real trouble begins when the wealthy banker Filippo Barbarelli asked, in the greatest secrets, dimmortaliser beauty of his young wife before it will sétiole. "Would you be able dincarner by the powers of the absolute grace of a painting be?" Asked the banker. "Make an image so just and so strong that lon could feel the warmth of his body, the breath of his breathing" Obviously, he finds out the right words to convince the fiery Sicilian, who agrees to "fix for léternité" beauty Danna , the wife of Barbarelli. The problem is that this quest for perfection will gradually switch to do in the madness, all the more that it does not take long to fall in love with that which now poses naked all night for him Truffé sublime pictorial reproductions doeil winks to the great Renaissance painters (Van Eyck, Mantegna, Titian), "The Vision of Bacchus" managed the feat to teach us many things but never side of history in the course of art or museum visit. Although the book is particularly well documented (as evidenced by the website author, full and interesting informaTION danecdotes behind the scenes of the creation of the album), Jean Dytar manages indeed to forget this documentary aspect with a true story and a delicate design and control, which blends perfectly with the style of the Renaissance painters. A passionate and thrilling tale about the secret behind the great paintings.
More critical comics on my blog "André Georges, Edgar and the others" (matvano.wordpress.com).