Pietro

Bacchante

Boreas

Drawings by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), prolific artist and architect of the Roman Baroque.

Satyrs supporting ornamental architecture

Eagle & Serpent

Design for the artist's own tomb

Arms of Taddeo Barberini

Below, two engravings by others based on paintings by Pietro da Cortona.

Diana (later engraving)

Allegory (later engraving)

Finally, the high heroic manner of the ceiling frescoes (this one in Florence) for which the artist was much in demand.

Hall of Mars
Palazzo Pitti

Dawn Tower

 Another early walk – with dramatic light effects as the sun came up.

The photos below were all taken  at the beginning of the walk – daylight still dim and diffused. The little streets and alleys around Folsom – the part that is more or less in the Mission – have proved a happy hunting ground on several recent days.

Thanksgiving Diamond

There must surely be cities that swell up with visitors on major holidays, but San Francisco is not one of them. Or at least not in my neighborhood. The streets in the Mission appeared to be completely deserted this morning. And this makes sense. The local population is skewed, after all, toward the young end of the bell curve – kids who leave town to see their distant families (and thus make sure the streams of money from back home keep flowing unimpeded). Good to find the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association memorial mural (middle photo, above) – an exceptional piece of work recently completed by Lindsay Marie and Mongo Crust. WE THE MESSENGERS OF SAN FRANCISCO REMEMBER THOSE WHOSE SACRIFICES INSPIRE US TO PRESERVE THE ANCIENT CALL OF MESSENGER.
  

Thanksgiving Numerals

House numbers or hand-lettered business signs look like easy and passive subjects. But that is not always true, because people get suspicious when they see some stranger taking pictures of their property. Early on Thanksgiving morning, however, there was hardly anyone around and I only had to placate one slightly hostile resident in the course of gathering in all these wonderful vernacular numerals. Which (in addition to its intrinsic fascination) was a good way not to dwell too much on the remoteness of Mabel Watson Payne, traveling with her parents.  

Honor the Game

At dawn on Sunday the streets in the Mission were wet and the sky looked dangerous, though no rain was actually falling when I went out.

A few days earlier I had seen the soldered numerals below at the entrance to an old apartment building off Folsom, but had no camera with me. Documenting them was, in my opinion, well worth an early morning expedition. And of course I found other things, too.

The painted images below are from an eye-level mural ornamenting one long windowless wall of a Mexican restaurant in the same neighborhood (one of the borderlands between the Mission and SOMA). 

It did not rain. The sky (as below) began to clear, in fact, and the sun even became partly visible. Looking up, I vainly longed for the illustrated book given to me some years back by my daughter about identifying categories of clouds (especially those streamer-like ones making faint vertical stripes in the picture's upper left corner) but as usual I was not carrying it when needed. 

HONOR THE GAME reads the lettering on the retaining wall. The view above happens to be of the playing field at Mission High, but all high schools have similar admonitions painted in big letters somewhere or other. Even as a child I was so put off by their hortatory tone that I always instantaneously rejected the message, whatever its merits. And my reflex remains exactly the same, all these decades later. Unevolved.

Bright & Cold

When there was a chance to be outside in the bright cold Friday afternoon air, I took it and at the same time took these pictures. Which originated in various small streets around Folsom between 12th and 15th in the Mission. There seemed to be several alleys I had never seen before. In one way that was a surprise after so many years of wandering the same territory, but in another way it was no surprise at all because my wanderings are resolutely unsystematic.

Today's was a cooler, bluer sunlight in San Francisco than the golden October version that (until recently) was lavishing its glow over the worthy and the unworthy, all alike.

Recent murals in this part of the Mission looked to me as if the building owners had sponsored them. And this newest crop of aerosol artists have busied themselves in producing extremely polished work, confined to approved spaces. But bland. They have all stayed inside the lines of their coloring books. Happily mainstreamed.