Thursday, March 9, 2017

Reading in Europe 1633-1882

Rembrandt
Portrait of Johannes Wtenbogaert
1633
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Gerrit Dou
Man smoking a pipe
ca. 1650
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"This is a mightie point, and requireth the care of a quicke and cleare braine: it is not enough that a man intending to build, should bring lime, stones, and other materials together, unlesse he take further care that all the congested stuffe might be well and orderly digested by a skilfull hand: even so in picture, the plentifull copiousnesse of a most rich and fertile argument shall be nothing else but an unpleasant heap of wildly scattered figures, unlesse Disposition tie them together by a good and decent order.  Let all the joynts and members of a brasen figure be readie caste, yet shall they never make up a statue, not being fitted to their peculiar places; and if then any one part chance to be misplaced, if an eare standeth in place of the nose, if a leg be put where the arme should be, the whole figure will presently seem monstrous and prodigious: all the parts of our bodie, being but lightly put out of joynt, doe instantly lose they use they had before: so do disordered Armies most commonly feele the want of order.  Nature it selfe seemeth to be upholden by order: and as it is certain that nothing, which wanteth this support, can subsist; so must Picture needs run at random, roving and wandering without any guide, after the fashion of those who straying in unknowne and dark places cannot tell where to beginne and where to end their journey, suffering themselves rather to be guided by chance than counsell: whosoever on the contrary hath but once framed in his minde a disposition of the conceived matter, the same, if he be but a tolerable Artificer, shall dispatch the rest with a wonderfull ease: "The matter being considered of aforehand," sayth Horace, "words use to follow with an unconstrained facilitie."  The ancient Commentator instancing upon these words of the Poet, "Menander," sayth he, "having made the disposition of a fable, though he had not yet trimmed it up with verses, was wont to say that he had alreadie accomplished it."

– from Book Three (chapter five) of The Painting of the Ancients by Franciscus Junius, first published in English in 1638  edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl & Raina Fel for University of California Press, 1991

Anthonius Leemans
Still Life
1655
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

N L Peschier
Vanitas Still Life
1660
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jan Luyken
Imperial Library and Cabinet of Curiosities
1682
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Bernard Picart
Interior of a Library
1724
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Bernard Picart
Playing Badminton in the Library
1714
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Cornelis Troost
Portrait of Joan Jacob Mauricius
1741
pastel and gouache
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Giovanni Battista Polanzani
Portrait of Giovanni Battista Piranesi
1750
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

François-André Vincent
Portrait of a man
ca. 1795
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Charles Howard Hodges
Portrait of Cornelis Apostool,
1st Director of the Rijksmuseum
ca. 1816
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum,  Amsterdam

Jan Adam Kruseman
Portrait of Alida Christina Assink
1833
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Hendrik Jacobus Scholten
Sunday Morning
ca. 1865-68
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacobus Ludovicus Cornet
Scholar in his Study
before 1882
etching
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"There is a providence for impotent old men, to the end. And when they cannot swallow any more someone rams a tube down their gullet, or up their rectum, and fills them full of vitaminized pap, so as not to be accused of murder. I shall therefore die of old age pure and simple, glutted with days as in the days before the flood, on a full stomach. Perhaps they think I am dead. Or perhaps they are dead themselves. I say they, though perhaps I should not. In the beginning, but was it the beginning, I used to see an old woman, then for a time an old yellow arm, then for a time an old yellow hand. But these were probably no more than the agents of a consortium. And indeed the silence at times is such that the earth seems uninhabited. That is what comes of the taste for generalization."

 from Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett, originally published in French in 1951, translated by the author and first published in English in 1956