More specifically concerning: art
27 December 2000 – Rome
27 December 2000, around 19.49.
Saw a double herm of Epicurus and Diogenes the Cynic at the Museo Capitolino, which pleased me much in my soul. At the Palazzo dei Conservatori, saw a herm of Alcibiades, which I thought particularly appropriate and a Roman statue of a toga’d man holding a scroll, whose expression was wonderful, though ineffable. Later — […]
12.06.01
12 June 2001, around 8.17.
More and still more work in the library, reading about god and trying to comprehend Epidauros, which just leaves me muddled. I find it frightfully confusing that there were at least four different (?) artists called Polykleitos working in the Greek world during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE; it just shouldn’t be […]
Funerary
21 June 2001, around 12.31.
little bird
21 June 2001, around 12.32.
Improbable places (1)
20 November 2002, around 16.34.
The room of Chinese Paintings Ashmolean Museum, 1:26 p.m.
Loot
17 April 2003, around 16.18.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. —John Keats (‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’) Allow me to sound heartless for a […]
supranational blue
6 May 2003, around 8.03.
IKB # ?1 Link rotted; substitute information; and this might also be helpful or interesting [↩]
The Fourteenth Part
12 May 2003, around 8.05.
On the edge of a distant district, down an obscure boulevard, he kept a small studio crammed with charming antiques and valuable paintings. Though he did not much like to talk about it, he was extremely talented both at the exact replication of important pieces of art and the stealthy exchange of his copies for […]
Citation (12)
26 August 2003, around 17.42.
historical realities…
inquiry (8)
22 January 2004, around 9.33.
These people have excellent sculptors and professional designers. Their pipes, tomahawks, sticks, spoons carved out of horn, etc., embellish our ethnographic collections. —Marcel Mauss (2004.11, p. 43f.)
to the dogs
29 March 2004, around 19.26.
Artemis.
Raw Materials
19 September 2006, around 10.48.
The hand press printer should make his own ink, as the painter should make his own paints. Ink is not a raw material. Oils and pigments are the raw material of ink; patience in grinding is the only virtue required in the craftsman. Of patience there is this to be said. To be patient is […]
Curio (4)
4 May 2013, around 5.06.
‘Plate 28: two figures, one composed with a bell the other with a knife-grinder’ by Giovanni Battista Bracelli, in Bizzarie di varie figure … 1624
it would do beautifully
21 July 2013, around 5.05.
The inconstant reader. … I reminded him how often we had talked about my travels on the five continents and sixteen seas, and my inability to stay very long in one place. Although I was living peacefully in Pollensa, there was not guarantee it would be permanent. —Álvaro Mutis (Triptych on Sea and Land, p. […]
added too freely
8 June 2014, around 11.41.
In his ‘History of Ancient Art,’ of which the first edition appeared in 1764, Winckelmann gave to the study of the antique an impulse along a line which it has never wholly deserted; his theory of the ‘beautiful’ as manifested even in these Græco-Roman copies to which his imagination often added too freely the missing […]
Montaigne 1.24
26 June 2015, around 13.22.
Now, I say that not only in medicine, but in several more certain arts, there is a good deal of luck. Why should we not attribute the poetic flights which ravish and transport their author out of himself to his good luck, since he himself confesses that they exceed his power and ability, and acknowledges […]
amused
13 February 2020, around 5.42.
An arbitrary detail from ‘Portrait of the Comte De M.’ by Jérôme-Martin Langlois (1831). Just last Tuesday, I ended up at the art museum, although I hadn’t intended to go. It was after going to the dentist, you see, and my jaw was sore from a filling and the right side of my face was […]
the misanthrope
31 May 2021, around 23.53.
Laura Riding considers the tedium of the phallus.
norming
4 February 2024, around 19.07.
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, one cannot judge or admire this particular society by assuming that the language it speaks to itself is necessarily true. —Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, §202) I am in a book group or class (I suppose […]
cleanly
5 February 2024, around 12.48.
Orpheus running into a spot of trouble, cropped from Johann Wilhelm Baur’s illustrations to Ovid (ca. 1641) The hand that desires to cleanse the sores of other men must itself be clean, or the last state of the soul it touches may be worse than the first. —Eleanor Shipley Duckett (The Gateway to the Middle […]
de monstra demonstranda
22 February 2024, around 11.26.
Medea, bad mommy extraordinaire, engaging in a bit of light witchcraft, illustration by Johann Wilhelm Baur to Ovid (ca. 1640s) The school of Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings and the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing but an occasional roar of sarcastic laughter from […]
Adversaria (11)
29 February 2024, around 4.00.
‘…poetry, which is like modern dance for uncoordinated people’ —Claire Dederer (Love & Trouble, ch. 13) ‘…The Editor, an avuncular but testy figure who might send a few encouraging words written in a discouraging hand’ —Lavinia Greenlaw (Some Answers Without Questions, p. 99) ‘I read the letters but couldn’t understand them. I could understand the […]