'He goggled like a fool at the shrieking paullo-post-Expression of the Last Supper hanging on the wall fornenst him, livid in the restless yellow light, its thirteen flattened flagrant egg-heads gathered round the tempter and his sop and the traitor and his purse.' 2/6 https://t.co/jF3xj5Lr0K
As a watchman I can use this picture in something like the way it was intended to be used, and for that I am grateful. An artist in the fourteenth century wouldn’t have dreamed that one day there would be art connoisseurs and textbooks dedicated to something called art history. In Bernardo Daddi’s mind the painting must have been a kind of machine
... See moreBut the third, and largest of the three, was the coup. It was a pastoral scene, depicting classically garbed shepherds standing, in awe, before a tree in the trunk of which a human face was visible. ‘Would you know it from a real Poussin?’ ‘Is it still wet?’ Gentle asked. ‘Such a wit.’
There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labelled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His garme
... See moreI sympathize with our unhappy customer. But, though I’m not a Christian, I adore the Jesus pictures. Pacing these galleries is like paging through a family photo album of a grim but exceptionally intimate kind. There are the baby pictures: Adorations, Holy Familys, Virgin and Childs. There are moments of transition in a young man’s life: Baptisms,
... See moreOf brains (if brains they had) he them beguiled, And turn’d a nation’s shallow joy to gloom.