Man bitch-slaps God

I found this painting by Sir Edwin Landseer in one of my artbooks last night. Man Proposes, God Disposes was painted in 1864, when shipwreck paintings were all the rage round Europe, about 5 years after Darwin's Origin of the Species crashed head on into the opiate of the masses leaving said masses a trifle insecure.

My fetish for shipwrecks stirred and i was reminded of this image on the cover of Time near 150 years later...

Still two polar bears, but now one is merely a reflection, looking a bit more desperate than ravaging. The giant jagged glacier forms in Landseer's painting are a bit more watered down. The perspective has changed, as we now survey the damage from above. The shipwreck is still there... the bear is standing on it. And what once was an image of tragic romanticism, conjured up in the imagination and translated to canvas with vivid earthly pigments, is now light translated to numbers organized into a numbing vision of "reality".

And for the time being it seems God has done the proposing and man has done the disposing.