Miscellany

This week I've been reading some wierd and wonderful things at some ghastly hours of the morning. Here are a couple of tidbits I've found in my early morning trawlings:

Art (in How to Read a Painting, Patrick De Rynck (2004))

That the Old Masters (Europeans pre-1800) depicted many religious scenes. Derr, and? Well, I was struck by how graphic some of them are, how well they took me into the scene, and got me imagining what was going on in the hearts and minds of their subjects.

For example, Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus, in which Jesus is eating with two of his disciples after his resurrection. The disciples' alarm -- their master is alive! -- is palpable. The disciple to Jesus' left (James?) has outstretched arms, one of them almost touching the painting's border, and, so it seems, reaching out to the viewer.

The memento mori is also new to me. Two took my interest: the first, a skull on the desk of a wafer-thin Jerome, working away at his translations; the second, a highly distorted skull at the feet of two stately-looking men in Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'. Rather than shamelessly paraphrasing, I'll quote De Rynck on this skull's significance:

When we position ourselves so that we can see the skull as a skull, the other, supposedly realistic objects are in turn distorted. The moral is that death is everywhere and always, but we do not recognize it. And wnen we do finally make out its shape, life in turn becomes twisted and blurred (ibid. p. 164).

More early morning trivia to come soon.