Just Another Person Who Thinks She Knows Something
(We had some issues beginning December 16, and lost all content tables between the 16 and the 23, so I’m beginning to repost beginning the 23rd of December.)
This painting reminds me of science fiction novel covers from the 1970s and early 1980s, or at least the backgrounds thereof. There is something both abstract and comforting about it in a context like that, even though it is slightly disconcerting in other ways.
So… fun times. Religious art again. Because, ya know, Bible Belt and all. I am not a massive fan, but hey, it’s a huge part of our world heritage and so on and so forth. Whatever, it’s a thing. What bothers me about this is the descriptive plaque being completely ignorant about the fact that Mary would likely not have owned a Torah, and likely she would not have been reading even had she been a wealthy Jewish woman of the time, let alone marrying a carpenter – but yeah, let’s creatively fudge the facts to fit the Jesus mythos.
*waves from the cheap seats* I want to prop my papers on this and lecture like a bitch for hours at a time and make people miserable for… Oh wait, isn’t that like talking into the internet void about art?
Finding singles of these plates is common, finding pairs is rare, finding a full set or sequential pieces of the set is basically the holy grail. To have a matching pair in sequence from the same set is pretty much like having a low winning lottery ticket. It’s exciting in a heart-pounding kind of way that brings a shit-eating grin to your face, but it’s not as blissful as having a complete set would be. However… man, it proves that I’m a nerd that I know the entire verse that goes on the plates.
What is a merry man/ Let him do what he can / To entertain his guests / With wine and merry jests / But if his wife do frown / All merriment goes down.
I feel like this is a study of everything I dislike so much in 17th Dutch painting: it’s a monochromatic study in browns of the interior of a church in a hyper-realistic psuedo-photographic style. It’s too much of a muchness. It’s the world duplicated in an exactness that is depressingly real, but in monochrome brown. (And to me, brown is the antithesis of color: it is all colors mixed together, so it isn’t really a color at all, but rather a lack of color.)
I can see how this would have looked 100% different brand new, before urban blight and icon worship set in. It would have been a glorious thing; now it’s just kind of sad, really. I mean, it’s still beautiful and a super high level of craftsmanship, but it just looks like it’s been used and abused for a few hundred years.
It’s crazy to go into a museum and walk up to artwork and go, “My ancestor made that.” I do that every time I come to this painting. It’s a surreal feeling.
If you know me at all, you know that religion is not my thing. I mean, yeah, I know the tenants of Christianity and I can recite a bunch of blah blah blah because I was brought up in it, but I’ll still always call this the ‘pretty Jesus box’ because I’m a sacreligious cow. And it is the pretty Jesus box.
What I really like about this is that you can tell it’s super experimental in form and style. They aren’t afraid to make mistakes and screw it up because they’re testing how it all works! This style of enameling is what would eventually become the master styles of Faberge in the last 19th and early 20th century, but, again, it took centuries of experimentation to get that far.
I’d hate to have these dudes serving on the board of my apocalypse. But, to be fair, they aren’t exactly Crowley and Aziraphale, are they?