Life-Tragedy (Erasmus)

Théodore Géricault
Head of a Guillotined Man
ca. 1818-19
oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago

Charles-Emile-Callande de Champmartin
Study of a Severed Head
ca. 1818-19
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Gabriel Ferrier
Scene of the Spanish Inquisition
1879
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Felice Ficherelli
Jonah emerging from the Whale
before 1660
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry

Henri Regnault
Study for the Head of Salome
ca. 1870
oil on canvas
(bitumine-based pigment degraded)
Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries

Cesare Dandini
Allegorical Figure
before 1657
oil on canvas
(formerly owned by Maria Callas)
private collection

Giovanni Battista Langetti
Tantalus Chained
before 1676
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Egidio Martini, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice

Ludolf Backhuysen
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee
1695
oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Eugène Delacroix
Shipwreck of the Don Juan
1840
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Giovanni Battista Benaschi
Personification of Time
ca. 1675-80
oil on canvas
Palazzo Buonaccorsi, Macerata

Stephen Conroy
Man of Vision
1987
oil on canvas
British Council Collection, London

Bartolomeo Guidobono
Sibyl
ca. 1690
oil on canvas
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

Giulio Aristide Sartorio
Study for Parliament Frieze
ca. 1908-13
oil on canvas
private collection

Johan Thopas
Post-Mortem Portrait of a Child
1682
oil on canvas
Mauritshuis, The Hague

attributed to Albert van Ouwater
Portrait of a Donor
ca. 1460
oil on canvas
(altarpiece fragment)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"As an intellectual type Erasmus was one of a rather small group: the absolute idealists who, at the same time, are thoroughly moderate.  They cannot bear the world's imperfections; they feel constrained to oppose.  But extremes are uncongenial to them; they shrink back from action, because they know it pulls down as much as it erects, and so they withdraw themselves, and keep calling that everything should be different, but when the crisis comes, they reluctantly side with tradition and conservatism.  Here too is a fragment of Erasmus's life-tragedy: he was the man who saw the new and coming things more clearly than anyone else – who must needs quarrel with the old and yet could not accept the new.  He tried to remain in the fold of the old Church, after having damaged it seriously, and renounced the Reformation, and to certain extent even Humanism, after having furthered both with all his strength."

– Johan Huizinga, from Erasmus of Rotterdam, translated by Frederik Hopman (1924)

Portraits of Unknown Sitters by Known Artists - 1600-1700

William Larkin
Portrait of a Young Lady
1617
oil on panel
Yale Center for British Art

Nicholaes Eliasz Pickenoy
Portrait of a Lady
ca. 1630-35
oil on canvas
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, West Midlands

Cornelis de Vos
Portrait of a Young Lady
ca. 1635-51
oil on panel
York City Art Gallery

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of a Man
ca. 1635-45
oil on canvas
Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London

Diego Velázquez
Lady with a Fan
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
Wallace Collection, London

from A Letter to Sir Robert Kerr

Your way into Spain was Eastward, and that is the way to the land of Perfumes and Spices; their way hither is Westward, and that is the way to the land of Gold, and Mynes.  The Wise men, who sought Christ, laid down both their Perfumes, and their Gold, at the feet of Christ, the Prince of Peace. If All confer all to his glory, and to the peace of his Church, Amen. But now I consider in Cosmography better; they and we differ not in East and West: we are much alike Easterlie. But yet, Oriens nomen ejus, the East is one of Christ's names, in one Prophet; And, Filius Orientis est Lucifer, the East is one of the Devill's names, in another; and these two differ diametrically. And so in things belonging to the worship of God, I think we shall, Amen. But the difference of our scituation is in North and South; and you know, that though the labour of any ordinary Artificer in that Trade, will bring East and West together, (for if a flat Map be but pasted upon a round Globe, the farthest East, and the farthest West meet, and are all one) yet all this brings not North and South a scruple of a degree the nearer. There are things in which we may meet; and in that wherein we should not, my hope is in God, and in Him, in whom God doth so evidently work, we shall not meet, Amen. They have hotter daies in Spain than we have here, but our daies are longer; and yet we are hotter in our businesse here, and they longer about it there. God is sometimes called a Gyant, running a race; and sometimes is so slow-paced, as that a thousand years make but a day with God; and yet still the same God. He hath his purposes upon our noble and vehement affections, and upon their warie and sober discretions; and will use both to his glory, Amen.

– John Donne (1623)

Cornelius Johnson
Portrait of a Lady
1633
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Adam Camerarius
Young Man in a Fur Cap
1649
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Giovanni Bernardo Carboni
Portrait of a Nobleman
ca. 1650
oil on canvas
Wallace Collection, London

Willem Drost
Young Woman in a Brocade Gown
ca. 1654
oil on canvas
Wallace Collection, London

Willem Drost
Portrait of a Young Man
1654
oil on canvas
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

Jürgen Ovens
Portrait of a Girl
ca. 1660-70
oil on canvas
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham

Caspar Netscher
Portrait of a Lady by an Orange Tree
1668
oil on canvas
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

Gerard Soest
Portrait of a Lady as a Sleeping Shepherdess
ca. 1670
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

David Teniers the Younger
Portrait of a Lady
before 1690
oil on panel
York City Art Gallery

Adriaen van der Werff
Portrait of a Lady by a Fountain
ca. 1693-97
oil on canvas
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

Lucky Us

Fall Arrives

Comes a day when we accept
the imperfection of our lives
and begin to hope
for a perfect death.
Goodbye, my illusions.
Anger of my hunger.

Seat-mates on trains, whose names
we never asked, carry away our secrets
and at the end of summer
comes that change in the light,
when the melancholy that underlies things
suddenly overlays them
like a quilt turned wrong side up,
the plain side with the stitching
there to stare us in the face,
there to be reckoned with.
What is this reckoning?

The flipped quilt of the world.

Then fall arrives, with glitter, with bustle,
like an auntie with a gold tooth.

ROBYN SARAH
– the TLS 

Villa

This small group of garden views represents the farthest distance I wandered from the purpose of the searching that led me to find these pictures in the first place. I was supposed to be looking for exampless of decorator-designed bookshelves (which I found, of course, in overwhelming abundance – books may in truth be on the way out as objects of use, but they thrive like never before as visual accessories).

John Saladino revised the landscaping of an old-world, hilltop villa. Then the magazines came and took pictures. Given those circumstances, these are notably uncluttered pictures, with the landscape itself permitted most unusually to occupy the role of foreground as well as background. Visions of refinement, visions of peace, visions of an army of bustling retainers behind the scenes.

Red Tower

Mabel started by laying the blocks out in a big, mostly horizontal color-pattern..

Then she suddenly decided to make a red tower.

Last picture shows the most embellished version of the Red Tower. Mabel came up with the idea of inserting the yellow triangles at a perpendicular to the plane of the rest of the structure. She insists on symmetry and order. That she loves order is paradoxical, because she also loves chaos.

Excuses

My downfall in photographing Mother's Day (postponed) Brunch was twofold, consisting first of tardiness and second of a bizarre indoor lighting situation. I made not nearly enough use of the brief interval before and/or during the walk to the restaurant (above) simply because my mind was not yet moving at sufficient speed.

Then once inside the East Bay brunch place, it turned out to be an extremely odd mix of colored spot lights and fixed lamps (both incandescent and fluorescent) with natural light leaking in around the edges. The "play area" (a dark corner with somebody's discarded carpet and two bins of broken plastic toys, all apparently dating from the 1980s) effectively lured Mabel into deeper shadow.

I had walked past this dump for decades on various East Bay visits but had not ever before found my planets in such unfortunate conjunction as to land me inside it. Since I also picked up the check, nobody will call me ill-mannered for reporting that the service and the food were both about as poor as I have ever encountered.

But Mabel had a lovely time. She can do that anyplace. It is like keeping company with Jesus, who had the same habit of turning unpromising social situations into epiphanies of glowing grace.

Glass Negatives

Ballet Students

Couple on Bench

Blocking the Curtain

Dancer

Dancers Rehearsing

Trampoline

Wrestler

Tea Time

Men With Penguin

Man With Monkey

Men With Sea Lion

Two Men

A "lost" archive of glass negatives appeared on E-Bay in 2007. They had been made early in the career of Hungarian innovator Martin Munkácsi (1896-1963). The International Center of Photography in New York acquired the collection and has digitized the negatives. They are now viewable alongside many of Munkácsi's vintage prints, mostly dating back to the late 1920s and early 30s. In a few cases, newly-made prints of the previously unknown negatives are also displayed. But the negatives on their own exert an enormous authority.

Back in 2006 Steidl published a striking book (still in print) of  Munkácsi's photographs. The small surviving amount of fame he can claim these days rests on the crisp, dramatic, spontaneous-yet-technically-polished black-and-white compositions featured in the Steidl book, but virtually its entire contents come from a later period than the work shown here.