Spencer Alley: Italy

Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts

Sunday, August 3, 2025

Fratelli Alinari

Fratelli Alinari
Giardino di Boboli, Florence
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Villa Lante, Florence
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Villa Aldobrandini, Frascati
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Villa Falconieri, Frascati
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Villa Torlonia, Frascati
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Borghese Gardens, Rome
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Villa Doria-Pamphilij, Rome
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Fratelli Alinari
Villa d'Este, Tivoli
ca. 1914
lantern slide
Archives of American Gardens,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

from The Art of Poetry

A mark of success in this painful discrimination

Is to find that the way you have used a familiar word

Has made it glitter like new. When what you are saying

Is so obscure as to need a novel expression,

It will be time enough for brilliant verbal inventions

– And I do not suppose that that will be very often.

But new-made words can flower, if they come from good roots

And are not allowed to run wild. For why should the reader

Allow to Sterne what he will refuse to Joyce?

And why should I not add something, however little,

To the language which Chaucer and Shakespeare made more pointed

By noticing something no one had noticed before?

It has always been right and it will always be right

To use the word that bears the stamp of the time.

As woodlands lose their leaf at the fall of the year,

The old words go in turn, while the young

Flower and grow strong. For we are promised to death,

And all our things. It may come, sometimes, in a gale

Which bursts inland to give the sea a rest

And a fen that bore nothing except the plashing of oars

May survive to grow good corn for a neighbouring town.

Elsewhere the crops may go and the river pass

To produce more crops after that: for nothing will stand,

Certainly not the repute and pleasure of words.

Many words will come back which seemed to be lost

And many now much in use will be lost again

For nothing but use determines the fate of words.

– Horace (65-8 BC), translated by C.H. Sisson (1974)

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Maiolica

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Dish
(Death of Samson)
ca. 1520
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Dish
(Capitanio Gintile on Banderole)
ca. 1525
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Plaque
(Virgin and Child enthroned with Saints)
ca. 1540
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Dish
(ornamental motif)
1544
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Plate
(Moses striking the Rock)
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Dish
(Pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela)
ca. 1600
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Drug Jar
(containing Sang. Lepor or Hare's Blood)
ca. 1620-50
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Plate
ca. 1650
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Sauce Boat
17th century
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Holy Water Stoup
17th century
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Tray
ca. 1690-1710
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Albarello
(drug jar with spout)
ca. 1700-1750
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Soup Plate
ca. 1750-60
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Albarello with Cover
(drug jar with spout)
ca. 1765-75
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Vase with Cover
ca. 1780
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Plate
(Allegory of Peace)
ca. 1870
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Italian Workshop
Kitchen Mold
19th century
maiolica
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

from Matinées

We love the good, said Plato? He was wrong.

We love as well the wicked and the weak.

Flesh hugs its shaved plush. Twenty-four-hour-long

Galas fill the hulk of the Comique.

Flesh knows by now what dishes to avoid,

Tries not to brood on bomb or heart attack.

Anatomy is destiny, said Freud.

Soul is the brilliant hypochondriac.

Soul will cough blood and sing, and softer sing,

Drink poison, breathe her joyous last, a waltz

Rubato from his arms who sobs and stays

Behind, death after death, who fairly melts

Watching her turn from him, restored, to fling

Kisses into the furnace roaring praise.

– James Merrill (1969)

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Northerners in Picturesque Italy

Hendrik Hondius the Elder after Pieter Stevens
Colosseum Interior, Rome
1600
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

François-André Vincent
Park of an Italian Villa
ca. 1774-75
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Simon Fokke
Italian Ruins with Cattle passing through an Arch
before 1784
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Franz Théobald Horny
Italian Country Life
ca. 1820
watercolor on paper
Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus, Lübeck

Franz Théobald Horny
Colosseum, Rome
ca. 1822-23
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Franz Théobald Horny
Italian Landscape
before 1824
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Thomas Fearnley
Pergola with Oranges
ca. 1834
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Flandrin
Oaks along the Appian Way near Albano
1834
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Paul Flandrin
Ruins of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill, Rome
1834
oil on card
Art Institute of Chicago

Hippolyte Flandrin
View of Rome by Night
1836
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Constantin Hansen
Group of Danish Artists in Rome
1837
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Thomas Fearnley
Lo Specchio della Diana
ca. 1838-42
etching
British Museum

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey
Escalier du Jardin, Villa Albani, Rome
1842
daguerreotype
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Calvert Richard Jones
Colosseum, Rome
1846
daguerreotype
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Frédéric Flachéron
The Colosseum, Rome
ca. 1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frédéric Flachéron
End View of the Arch of Constantine
with the Colosseum, Rome
ca. 1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Singer Sargent
Marble Fountain in Italy
ca. 1907
watercolor on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Pierre Gusman
Paysage en Italie
ca. 1910
wood-engraving
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario

from Saint

Below

Your hotel window, the piazza blackens

And hisses. You do not draw back,

You hold it all in your eye's mind. The women

Limp toward the chapel named for him.

Their gums water. They mumble hocus-pocus

Before the painted wood baroque

Sebastian. Already his left foot is missing.

The strong white ankle, kiss by kiss

Borne past the dyed breaths and the human acids,

Celebrates elsewhere its mass –

While the saint, trammeled not at all by worm-drilled drapery

In his ambition to escape

No least caress, studies the whole procedure

Exuberantly. He appears, indeed,

To dip himself into their unfathomable craving

As into a pure, upholding wave . . .

– James Merrill (1959)