March 25, 2007

• Quite the roister-doister then, Caravaggio. I like how the Hungarian site had suggested listenings to go with some of the pictures; I know about as little of the music of the time as the visual art, so I appreciated that. Thanks Bob.
• Why does it look like the monkey is on a cell phone? My first impression of the image was "Hey, can I call you back? I have to finish mauling this dude I'm attacking... What? Yeah, I'm sitting on him right now, that's where the screaming is coming from..."
• Very nice. We like monkeys. And painting. And paintings of monkeys.
• Fascintatin, expecially the X-rays. Great article, Boggy! "Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures" sounds like the first Elizabethan action hero.
• The movement in the painting is quite something, with that swoop of Peter's arm leading right to Christ's Finger. So there's that movement away to the right, complemented with the tension between Christ's and Peter's line of sight. In that way, it has a lot of the same tension as the Fortune Teller, although that seems to be more balanced. Maybe it comes across better in person...
• Caravaggio and James Brown fistfight in heaven. Good stuff, thanks bobboggis!
• The Fortune Teller, for anyone who was wondering about the Captain's excellent analysis.
• Article on that exhibition, which makes mention of 'the Caravaggista' Artemisia Gentileschi. Site includes a gallery of her painting. (Worth investigating, I'd say. Here and here are the two mentioned in the article.)
• Fra Angelico altar masterpieces found in spare bedroom fetch £1.7m. The pictures in question.
• I like stories like this, unexpected windfalls of art. I just hope that they'll be available to the public somehow. As for the paintings themselves, they're typical of his work, but don't really add to our knowledge of it, stylistically. But I'm glad they're back again and known to us.
• And they are quite lovely.
• Indeed. They'll be lovely in the front room.