07

Feb

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Song of the Harper

WHO never ate his bread in tears,
Who never through the mournful night
Sat weeping on his bed with fears—
He knows not, heavenly powers, your might!

You plunge him into life amain,
You lead him into sin from dearth,
Then leave the poor man to his pain—
For all sin is revenged on earth.

From Wilhelm Meister (1795). Translation by Margarete Münsterberg, first published 1916.

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Poetry

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06

Feb

Zarah Leander sings the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria in a German melodram of the same name, directed in 1953 by Alfred Braun.

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Movies/Music

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06

Feb

Rudyard Kipling: To the Unknown Goddess

WILL you conquer my heart with your beauty; my soul going out from afar?
Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious shikar?

Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking and blind?
Shall I meet you next session at Simla, O sweetest and best of your kind?

Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West,
Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my breast?

Will you stay in the Plains till September—my passion as warm as the day?
Will you bring me to book on the Mountains, or where the thermantidotes play?

When the light of your eyes shall make pallid the mean lesser lights I pursue,
And the charm of your presence shall lure me from love of the gay “thirteen-two”;

When the peg and the pig-skin shall please not; when I buy me Calcutta-built clothes;
When I quit the Delight of Wild Asses, foreswearing the swearing of oaths;

As a deer to the hand of the hunter when I turn ’mid the gibes of my friends;
When the days of my freedom are numbered, and the life of the bachelor ends.

Ah, Goddess! child, spinster, or widow—as of old on Mars Hill when they raised
To the God that they knew not an altar—so I, a young Pagan, have praised

The Goddess I know not nor worship; yet, if half that men tell me be true,
You will come in the future, and therefore these verses are written to you.

First published 1886 in Departmental Ditties.

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Poetry

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06

Feb

Rubens: Equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma (1603)

In 1603, Rubens traveled to Spain for the first time, on a diplomatic mission from Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. There, he painted Francisco Goméz de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma, a favorite of the Spanish king, the “king’s shadow” with unprecedented power. Was it the genius loci? Did he cater to the tastes of his patron? In any case this portrait is very Spanish in its coloring and atmosphere, probably more so than any other work by the artist. Fittingly, it never left Spain and is now located at the Prado.

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Paintings

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06

Feb

Peter Paul Rubens: Self-portrait with his wife Isabella (c. 1609)

Rubens married Isabella Brant, the daughter of an important city official in Antwerp, in October 1609. He was thirty-two, had returned from his long trip to Italy half a year earlier and had just been appointed court painter by Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, sovereign of the Low Countries, with special permission to base his studio in Antwerp instead of at the court in Brussels, and to also work for other clients. She was eighteen. In this life-size double portrait now in the Alte Pinakothek, often known simply as The Honeysuckle Bower, he celebrated his new marriage.

Isabella sat for several portraits by her husband and his student Anthony van Dyck before she died of the bubonic plague, not yet thirty-five.

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Paintings/Portraits

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05

Feb

Plato: Love Asleep

WE reached the grove’s deep shadow and there found
Cythera’s son in sleep’s sweet fetters bound;
Looking like ruddy apples on their tree;
No quiver and no bended bow had he;
These were suspended on a leafy spray.
Himself in cups of roses cradled lay,
Smiling in sleep; while from their flight in air,
The brown bees to his soft lips made repair,
To ply their waxen task and leave their honey there.

Translation by Charles Neaves.

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Poetry

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05

Feb

The magical ritual shown here by an anonymous artist from the lower Rhine in the 1470s is not supposed to incite love, but to reveal to the maid her future husband, shown here as entering the door. Rituals like these were common at the time and place and not considered witchcraft. Dozens of recipes have survived. The plants on the floor, the contents of the box, the nakedness of the caster, and maybe some of the other items in the room are all part of the spell.

The anatomy is remarkable in being so completely off. The girl looks like two broken statues glued together. Both the part above and below the elbow are fine on their own, but they don’t match. Compare the three graces in the Palazzo Schifanoia. They are contemporaries, but Francesco del Cossa got it, mostly, right. Correct anatomy is an art that was rediscovered south of the Alps first, the same is not necessarily true for realistic portraiture.

Of course, what we are looking here is an early pin-up, one of the first. It is a small painting, about the size of a book (24×18cm), meant to be enjoyed in private, not shown off. This type of picture gained popularity in the North, about the same time Florence and Ferrara rediscovered ancient mythology.

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Paintings

05

Feb

Powder becomes, like petticoat,
A gray and wrinkled noddy;
So I sit naked on my goat,
And show a strapping body.

Antoine Wiertz, La jeune sorcière, 1857, Wiertz Museum, Brussels. The quote is from Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s Faust, in the translation by Bayard Taylor.

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Paintings

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04

Feb

Sappho: Song of the Rose

IF Zeus chose us a King of the flowers in his mirth,
He would call to the rose, and would royally crown it;
For the rose, ho, the rose! is the grace of the earth,
Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it!
For the rose, ho, the rose! is the eye of the flowers,
Is the blush of the meadows that feel themselves fair,
Is the lightning of beauty that strikes through the bowers
On pale lovers that sit in the glow unaware.
Ho, the rose breathes of love! ho, the rose lifts the cup
To the red lips of Cypris invoked for a guest!
Ho, the rose having curled its sweet leaves for the world
Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,
As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the west.

Translation by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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Poetry

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03

Feb

This picture had long hung in the Prado without receiving much attention. The landscape in the background had been covered with black paint at some point, and the picture was considered a much later copy of the Mona Lisa with little significance. Only recently it was noticed that the panel was made of walnut, a detail that suggests cinquecento origin. Infrared revealed the hidden background landscape, which is identical to the original in the Louvre. It has now been fully restored and is considered an early copy by one of Leonardo’s students.

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Paintings

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