David and Abishag
by Pedro Americo
Title
David and Abishag
Artist
Pedro Americo
Medium
Digital Art - Digital Reproduction
Description
According to the Old Testament, Abishag (Hebrew Avishag אבישג) was a young woman of Shunem, distinguished for her beauty. She was chosen to be a helper and servant to David in his old age. Among Abishag's duties was to lie next to David and keep him warm; however, David did not have sexual relations with her (1 Kings 1:4).[1]
The Interpreter's Bible [2] notes that "the Hebrews...believed that the fertility of the soil and the general prosperity of the people were bound up with the fertility of the king. David by this time was old and decrepit and his sexual vigor is called into question. Attempts are made to remedy the situation. The first cure is to heap clothes upon his bed in order to secure such physical heat as might render him capable. When this fails a search is made for the most beautiful woman in the land. great emphasis is placed upon her [Abishag's] charms. the LXX supports this by translating in vs. 2, "and let her excite him and lie with him." The fact that the king did not have intercourse with her is decisive in the story. If David was impotent he could no longer be king."
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Pedro Amrico de Figueiredo e Melo ( Areia , April 29 of 1843 - Florence , October 7 of 1905 ) was a novelist , poet , scientist , art theorist , essayist , philosopher , politician and teacher Brazil , but is most remembered as a of the most important academic painters of Brazil, leaving works of national impact.
Early showed inclination towards the arts, being considered a child prodigy . Still very young designer participated as a dispatch of naturalists in the northeast, and received support from the government to form the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts . Made his artistic development in Paris , studying with renowned teachers, but also dedicated to science and philosophy. Soon after his return to Brazil began teaching at the Academy and initiated a successful career, achieving projection with large paintings of character civic and heroic, inserting the civilizing and modernizing the country program fostered by Emperor Dom Pedro II , which the Imperial Academy was the governor and executive branch in the artistic sphere.
His style in painting , in line with the major trends of his time, blended elements neoclassical , romantic and realistic , and their production is one of the first major expressions of Academism in Brazil in its peak phase, leaving works that remain active today in collective imagination of the nation, as the Battle of Avai , Speech from the Throne , Independence or Death! , and quartered Tiradentes , played to millions of textbooks nationwide. In the second half of his career focused on Orientalia themes allegorical and biblical , rather than personally and whose market was booming, but this part of his work, in his very popular time, quickly went out of fashion, has not received attention from experts recent times and remains little known.
He spent his career between Brazil and Europe, and in both places his talent was recognized, receiving great favors from critics and audiences but also raising passionate polemics and tenacious opponents. For new vanguards Pedro Am�co was undeniably a painter of rare endowments, but above all has become one of the main symbols of everything the academic system had allegedly conservative, elitist and distant from the national reality. Although the modernists have tried to overshadow his star mercilessly - as all academics - his great artistic merits surely make him one of the greatest painters in the country has ever produced, and his immense fame and influence in life, burning that sparked debates in its institutional and political action, cultural, at a critical time for the articulation of a new system of symbols for a country just emerging from colonial status and consolidation of a new system of art on modern methodological and conceptual bases, the stand as a the most important names in the history of Brazilian culture of the late nineteenth century.
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December 1st, 2013
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