Season of the witch...

a heap of broken images....

Chi son io tu non saprai

I'm in the south of France.....

How to relax....

No....  Wait a sec.....  I'm back.  Back in the RA.....

Or maybe that wasn't me....?

Damn it! Where am I? And who's that I'm with?

It's all a bit blurry.....

Paul Signac - The Quay at Saint-Tropez, 1899

When I look out of my window.....

Henri Matisse - Interior at Nice, c 1919

What do you think I see?   

Henri Matisse - Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window, c 1922

When I look out of my window.....

Pablo Picasso - Côte d'Azur, 1962

Many sights to see.....

Raoul Dufy - Open Window, Nice, 1928

And when I look in my window

So many different people to be

That it's strange

So strange

Yves Klein - Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 104), 1960

But, that's not me....

Where the hell am I?

When I look over my shoulder

What do you think I see?

Some other cat lookin' over 

His shoulder at me

And he's strange

Nicolas de Staël - Seagulls, 1955

Sure is strange

You got to pick up every stitch

Play it again, Sam....

You got to pick up every stitch, yeah

Oh no, must be the season of the witch....

Just to remind us that we are all Europeans....

And then within next to no time, [Next to when?  Ed.] I find myself in Japan.....

Where, thanks to Lafcadio Hearn, Alan Watts, R H Blyth et al, I find myself almost at home.....

It's a world within a world, like so many others, where the bewitching is just part of the seasoning....

Even if the topsy turvy world is hard to ignore.....

So I wander, wondering..... 

The world of today so cosmopolitan, so confusing:

So unlike those days of yore, when T S Eliot had the naivety to say, My mind may be American but my heart is British, as if, intellectually speaking, you can either differentiate or categorise.....

What is living? I hear you cry....

And so I find myself again transported, lost in the ozone, transmuted, transposed, and transplanted to the everlasting present of Mozart.....

And back to the Veneto, where I think I was last week.....

And to Vicenza, where I may have transgressed:

Aaaah.... Those Palladian Villas, those masks and costumes.....

Two rabbits runnin' in the ditch.....

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.....

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land 

The Burial of the Dead

(Peace)

Georges Braque - Landscape at L'Estaque, 1906

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With thanks to the Royal Academy, T S Eliot and Donovan, and to all those who made me what I might have been and where I will be....

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Là ci darem la mano,

Là mi dirai di sì.

Vedi, non è lontano;

Partiam, ben mio, da qui.

*******

Too many Madonnas....

Tricks of the light....

Hi there.... Mi chiamo Pennyfeather. Richard Paul Pennyfeather. And, subsequent to a rather sticky start to an academic career, here I are in north-east Italia, intending to compose a book about Italian art and its history.

People in boxes, with a baby in the middle

Please don't ask why..... Margot wouldn't want you to know.....

She has always been quite reserved about her business, but she does dress well, and her son has grown now.... Anyway, here I am in Verona,

Where the air is full of Madonnas, with their bambinos.....  though some have been scribbled on.  I understand that this is a sign of affection.....

Which makes me wonder why some don't seem to have been autographed....

Meantime I am amazed how many of these young women there are....  They are all over the place, yet they all seem different.  Could there have been thousands of Marys, all at the same time?  Or are they just inaccurate portraits?  And how - forgive me - did they all give birth to such big babies with their heads in bubbles? 

They are so popular, however, that people come from all over the world to see them.  And in this museum, where I was hoping to view the very best, the interest was so intense I couldn't even get near......

So I went back in time.  To the Romans.  Who apparently loved opera.  Here in Verona, even now, people flock to worship the memory of the Casta Diva, that goddess of chastity - once the norma in those distant giorni bellini......

My education was, sadly, perforce, cut short - an excess of Bollinger affecting my trousers and causing me to take up a position at Arnold House, where things were not really as they seemed.  It was, if you like, a window that opened before me, the drapes billowing ineffectually around me.....

And so, briefly, and superficially, I attached myself to the Beste, and studied a bridal room, Mantegna's 15th century Camera degli Sposi, which Harold had recommended to me, all finery and servants:

What I didn't appreciate, however, was the eye of heaven, where - don't look - little children with bare bottoms play carelessly above your head:

This was Mantova - Mantua to you - a city plagued by market stalls and people who sit and talk over spritzes.....  

I repaired to a quiet palace for some Te, 

Only to find it chaotic in unexpected ways.  As a student of Art History all I can say is, WTF?

Not that I wasn't impressed. Giulio Romano done good, and the giants are good fun. 

But I seek tranquility, so journey to Arquà Petrarca to pay my respects to Petrarch, and the Euganean hills. Aaah..... With delicious wine, local porchetta and fresh jujube fruits (giuggiole dei Colli Euganei) it isn't hard to imagine why the poet wasn't in love here - this is the view from his house:

But we have to move on.  Padova awaits.  More madonnas....  Giotto et al.  

More madonnas (though these are real.....)......

Even in three dimensions, though we are restricted to a frontal view of Giovanni Pisano's seven-hundred-year-old girl-mother and child:

Then from Padova, it is but nothing to Venice for a fishy lunch at da Romano on Burano, in amongst the pastel shaded houses and the lace......

Refreshed, back in Padova, multi-domed S Antonio excites:

Not just from the outside, but also with its various contents, like this street scene (has someone  been hit by a passing ox-cart?):

And these, where a bystander becomes part of the theatre:

I am becoming sated.  Art is all over the place, and it doesn't stop at pictures, or statues.  Near Vicenza there is the Villa Caldogno Nordera which is attributed to Andrea Palladio, the sixteenth century stone mason who became one of the world's most influential and celebrated architects......

In its own right, this villa is not that exciting,(despite a speleological exhibition in the basement) but it was used by the German army as a hospital between 1941 and 1944, and they built a Bunker here:

Which is a maze of spooky concrete corridors and chambers, 

Which then surprises with bold and graphic information on the effects of the war on Italy and on the locality:

Complete with a facsimile of the cockpit of an American bomber:

I begin to feel out of my depth and wonder what Gibbons and Spengler would make of it.  So, we retreat to the predictable, the well-known, the obvious. The Villa Rotonda never fails to inspire, whichever way you look at it:

And the neighbouring Villa Valmarana ai Nani isn't much less impressive:

And then, in Vicenza itself, there is the Teatro Olimpico, the first ever enclosed stone-built theatre, designed by Palladio and constructed between 1580 and 1585:

And, if you climb to the Santuario della Madonna di Monte Berico you get a wonderful view back over Vicenza, with the vast copper-clad roof of the Basilica Palladiana in the middle of the city.... 

But that's enough Madonnas. My yen to become an Art Historian is flagging.  

I think I shall grow a moustache and change my name to Scone.....

Too many Madonnas.....  

I'll take the light as it declines and falls......

And what is the use of knowing many things if, when you have learned the dimensions of heaven and earth, the measure of the seas, the courses of stars, the virtues of plants and stones, the secrets of nature, you still don’t know yourself?

Francesco Petrarca

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For those who travel with me......

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