 |
| Fra Bartolomeo Job ca. 1516 oil on panel Gallerie dell' Accademia, Venice |
 |
| Andrea Previtali Memento Mori before 1528 oil on panel Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan |
 |
| Il Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) Allegory of Celestial Love ca. 1530-45 oil on canvas Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Siena |
 |
| Hans Holbein Allegory of Passion ca. 1532-36 oil on panel Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
 |
| Pierre Reymond The Bad Shepherd 1537 enamel on copper Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
 |
| Daniele Crespi The Last Supper ca. 1629-30 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
 |
| Cavaliere d'Arpino Self Portrait 1640 oil on canvas Accademia di San Luca, Rome |
 |
| Salvator Rosa Philosophy ca. 1645 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
 |
| Padovanino Vanitas before 1649 oil on canvas Accademia di San Luca, Rome |
At Least Two Types of People
There are at least two types of people, the first for whom the ordinary worldliness is easy. The regular social routines and material cares are nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from the creation and maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat them as alien. And also, from them, the efforts toward the world, and to them, the fulfillment of the world's moderate desires, flow. They are effortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand, being hired, being paid, cleaning up, spending, playing, mating. They are in an ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them.
Then there are those over whom the events and opportunities of the everyday world wash over. There is rarely, in this second type, any easy kind of absorption. There is only a visible evidence of having been made of a different substance, one that repels. Also, from them, it is almost impossible to give to the world what it will welcome or reward. For how does this second type hold their arms? Across their chest? Behind their back? And how do they find food to eat and then prepare this food? And how do they receive a check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of love or being loved, its expansiveness, the way it is used for markets and indentured moods?
And what is this second substance? And how does it come to have as one of its qualities the resistance of the world as it is? And also, what is the person made of the second substance? Is this a human or more or less than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human whose arms do not easily arrange themselves and for whom the salaries and weddings and garages do not come?
There are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only to the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance, and having, at its end, a second, and almost blank-faced, reward.
– Anne Boyer (2015)
 |
| Anthonius Leemans Still Life 1655 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
 |
| Evert Collier Letter Rack ca. 1698 oil on canvas Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
 |
| Anton von Maron Portrait of sculptor Vincenzo Pacetti ca. 1780-90 oil on canvas Accademia di San Luca, Rome |
 |
| Benjamin West Apotheosis of Nelson 1807 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
 |
| Johan Fredrik Höckert The Poster ca. 1851-57 oil on panel Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
 |
| John Frederick Peto The Poor Man's Store 1885 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
 |
| John Haberle The Slate ca. 1895 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |