February 14, 2014
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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490 years ago
490 years ago Italian artist Lorenzo Lotto produced a drawing which now feels very modern.
The design is a representation of chaos, entitled Magnum Chaos (1524), an intarsia made for a church choir.
It's a nice example of the eye as independent body part, carried forth by two legs and feet and in control of two arms and hands.
It is also an example of a what we call in Dutch 'kopvoeter' (lit. headfooter) or 'koppoter' (lit. headlegger), a style of drawing made by children from about age three people in which people are drawn without a body and with arms emerging directly from the head. The eyes are often drawn large, filling up most of the face, and hands and feet are omitted. (see Child_art#Pre-symbolism, belly face and body image.)
Apparently, Rudolf Steiner says something about child art and 'bodyheads' in Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, 1919, but I have been unable to find out what.
The Magnum Chaos reminds me of the André Masson acéphale illustrations.
And other grotesques of course.
The image shown above is upside down from the original at Bergamo.
Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic[1] on chaos magnum
