Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels. Toby Ferris

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ week before our Antwerp visit I get word that Anna Keen’s Amsterdam studio and home has burned to the ground. The shed next to hers, the one with the yachts or speedboats, caught fire around breakfast time; both it and Anna’s shed were flammable subsystems, wood and canvas and paper and gallons of volatile chemicals, boats and easels, sailcloth and packets of economy food. The whole lot went up in a plume of blue smoke so high it made the local TV news.

      Anna got out in her pyjamas but lost everything else. Her studio was a workshop and a home for much of her life. In Rome, she would pick through skips for furniture, curiosities, would sketch endlessly with thick black soft charcoals and snub-nosed pencils and sometimes in pen and wash.

      And now it was all gone. All her paints and painting equipment, unsold paintings and work in progress, rolls of canvas, stretchers, a lifetime’s sketchbooks, her library, her computer, her clothes, her documents, her electrostats (as she called them) and amplifier. Everything except her pyjamas, her bicycle and a small wooden dinghy she had bought in Venice. Nothing was insured. She had pressing debts, no income, and was several months pregnant with the child of a man who might or might not intend to stay around.

      The next morning, she was out in the biblical wreckage of her life, sketching the twisted forms, picking over corners of vanished books, documenting the carnage. What else can you do? Habit will see you through.

      I speak to Anna on the phone and suggest she come down to Antwerp, or meet us in Bruges or Brussels. Or we could come up to Amsterdam. But she has appointments to replace her passport and deal with legal problems of rent and deposits.

      So I am in Antwerp, alone, waiting for my brother. Next to Dulle Griet hangs Twelve Proverbs, an early work, essentially twelve separate representations of proverbs in roundels, set within one frame on which the relevant proverbs (My endeavours are in vain; I piss at the moon – Ill-tempered and surly am I, I bang my head against the wall – I hide under a blue cloak, the more I conceal the more I reveal – He whose work is for nothing casts pearls before swine) are inscribed. There is a marbled decorative element and the backgrounds to the figures are a uniform red. The handwriting of the inscriptions dates the assembly to between 1560 and 1580.

      It is, in fact, a set of apotheosized placemats. It was a popular format. Teljoorschilders, or plate-painters, were recognized as distinct craftsmen in the Antwerp painters’ guild between 1570 and 1610. Their plate-format paintings were usually set off against red backgrounds and had diameters of roughly 20 centimetres. They came in sets of six or twelve or twenty-four. Proverbs were an appropriate adornment, connected as they were with domestic wisdom.

      A search for Bruegel proverb-placemats on Google throws up nothing. A missed opportunity, for someone.

      What do you do in front of such an object (assuming you are not eating your dinner off it) if not read each proverb in turn, moving from the wall-plaque to the painting and back again?

      Bruegel thought in proverbs. The proverb had pedigree as a rational device, formalized in Erasmus’s collection of adages, first published in 1500 and added to, revised, expanded for the next three decades. By the end of his life, Erasmus had collected 4,151 proverbs and adages and dicta, a list parodied by Rabelais’s parallel version in Gargantua of (mostly scatological) proverbs and mirrored by countless other collections through the sixteenth century.

      We like to think we have left proverbs behind. We demonstrate our intelligence by sharply differentiating ourselves, picking out the anomalous, the noteworthy, the untoward in the world around us; we hunt out the discrepancy on the untidy fringes of knowledge because it is here that we will locate the telling detail, pull at the loose thread, which will in turn explode the commonplace that threatens to engulf us. ‘Insignificance is the locus of true significance,’ said Roland Barthes; ‘this should never be forgotten.’

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAu4AAARtCAIAAACFi1fRAAAACXBIWXMAAC4jAAAuIwF4pT92AAAA IGNIUk0AAHolAACAgwAA+f8AAIDpAAB1MAAA6mAAADqYAAAXb5JfxUYAD/MuSURBVHjajP3HkiVJ lqYJnsOYBVygWA1jdzfHER44MjIjM6ubpnsx7zWLeYB5hUHURdRT1ZWgsiIzgHtEODLobthMTbFe JIgxz0KjhmZXKQtdKNFVkSsqxHL4P9//H1zfKCdro5///KfWuH/6x9+aPiKQDz66MV1Tn3/+xYXd W8cHJ7abffTJh9sXNr/6+uHxyZBSqMbkg/c/fv7s1fHxQYb0gx/f3bk4Cc57G5Zn9unjPWN8hiQV R4rOustXLm3vVDdu3nnw7fN7959WVVmWZLCrsqhzkqtVJwUtK6V1aUzftk2MabUMlIpbH9T1uNRi M3r69Omz129eC413796+eu1KVWkkabVYvf7+6PhotVz0OSVdolKcS37p0nRtoySoH3779vF3Lz/5 wc0771xrmtV8vuCs3tisRlPyr//tq751P/7JjygNL168mEwmV69dGXr37TfPXr44kiJPp/Vq6b13 jKd33rty5+btf/qn38znhgsdwAkFP/3ZR5cv73RdjwBcCMoYY/j02bMYMXh88fLNpQuXxhM9KtfO jpuv/vx19JYz5jy58+72rXe3X716/fLp2c7uNT3iZ2eLWzffoVT87ndfmLZTJFZrtYNIgMUmGdfc uXs5heqb+9++/8mVv/rrn/aN/S//+Z9/8fOfL5fN55//iQC7fuPai5cvf/rzH7575/YXX3z7zVdP U/KXrmzc/eBmXZfOwn/5L

СКАЧАТЬ