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| Limoges plate - Boys with Sticks ca. 1550 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"An important aspect of art in the provinces was the revival of the technique of enamel at Limoges in the second half of the fifteenth century after an interruption of nearly a hundred years. The technique of painted enamel made it possible to produce new effects with greater ease than in the old method of champlevé enamel, though the results were less brilliant. . . . The middle of the sixteenth century also saw the flowering of the school of painted enamels at Limoges which in the person of Léonard Limosin produced an artist of a high order."
– from notes by Anthony Blunt in Art and Architecture in France (1953)
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| Limoges plate - Cupid with Celestial Globe ca. 1540-45 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Dancing Boy 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Dancing Boy 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Dancing Boy 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Dancing Boy 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Dancing Boy 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Dancing Boy 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges salt-cellar - Labors of Hercules ca. 1550-1600 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges salt-cellar - Mythological characters ca. 1550 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Portrait of unknown woman 17th century enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Portrait of unknown man ca. 1690 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Portrait of unknown woman ca. 1690 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Limoges plate - Diana and Actaeon ca. 1550 enamel on copper Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"Beckett completed the step begun by the realists in the nineteenth century. That is, everyday life had long before been introduced on the stage by writers like Zola, Ibsen and Hauptmann. But that everyday life was still written as noble tragedy. As Susan Sontag recently pointed out, Beckett's radical gesture was to portray the 'microstructure', the triviality of the way we in fact experience everyday life from moment to moment – bereft of any playwright's grand designs and momentous themes: Beckett has actually discovered a new dramatic subject. Normally people on the stage reflect on the macrostructure of action. What am I going to do this year? Tomorrow? Tonight? They ask: Am I going mad? Will I ever get to Moscow? Should I leave my husband? Do I have to murder my uncle? My mother? These are the sorts of large projects which have traditionally concerned a play's leading characters. Beckett is the first writer to dramatize the microstructure of the action. What am I going to do one minute from now? In the next second? Weep? Take out my comb? Sigh? Sit? Be silent? Tell a joke? Understand something?"
– from Greenwich Village 1963 by Sally Banes, with italicized quote from Susan Sontag (Duke University Press, 1993)