Tea with Louisa May Alcott

Some blog posts are, well, a little more "mature" then others. With that in mind ... the Huntington Library here in greater Los Angeles is staging an event that is sure to be exciting.

To celebrate the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of the publication of Little Women, the Huntington is hosting a tea with Louisa May Alcott featuring noted "impressionist" Suzan Gallerito as the author. A little research tells me that Ms. Gallerito regularly performs as other noted women of the past including Susan B. Anthony and Betsy Ross.



Never to be outdone, we here at the Digby Institute of Serious Studies have a counter-offer! We've recently struck up a relationship with Gunther von Hagens of Bodyworlds fame.



Using his patented Plastination process, Dr. von Hagens has turned his replicating attentions to the beloved author of Little Women. Thus, we can offer you the unique and exciting opportunity of taking tea with none other than a hauntingly life-like replica of Louisa May Alcott's corpse! Huntington, eat your heart out!

Tintoretto Study

Sometimes it's necessary to do some painting. But maybe you want to just do what it called a "study." So, you take a great painting and copy it, inevitably varying some things here and there.



Having just recently seen it in the flesh, Old Ken thought he'd have a go at Tintoretto's Saint George, Saint Louis and the Princess (Venice, ca. 1550). I was really blown away by this painting when I saw it in the Rivals in Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto show at the MFA in Boston; especially awesome is the reflection of said princess in the black, reflective armor of Saint George and the wonderful modulation of tones in her dress. Just awesome!



So, I took the catalogue, cut a piece of cardboard to the same dimensions as the reproduction of the painting and started sketching it in acrylic paint. Obviously working in acrylic is a disadvantage when trying to reckon with Tintoretto and friends who were masters of oil paint.

Putting aside the general crappiness of my picture, what I thought was really interesting was the strong graphic structure of image. To say it a little differently, a familiar story about Venetian painting is that it's all about color and that these guys like Titian, Tintoretto and so on couldn't draw. So, while drawing came to be associated with Florence and ideas of the supremacy of disegno in art, Venice became linked with a definition of art as a sensuous, colorful enterprise.



So, because I couldn't get the paint to do some of the smooth blending of the original, I found myself emphasizing the outlines. What I was doing was not bending the paint "around" the edges of forms (as it were) by blending it together—highlights of white dragged across dark to suggest the gleam of a highlight or smudging up a light-colored field to suggest shadow. Instead, as I think is particularly clear with my depiction of the princess, I had to exaggerate a complex range of tonal variations into a composition of blocky graphic chunks aggregated together.



What struck me about this is that it seemed to me that, if allowance can be made for his incredible painterly powers, we can see something like a continuity between the way that I was rendering Tintoretto and the work of eighteenth century master Tiepolo. Also a Venetian, Tiepolo would have painted an image like this almost two hundred years after Tintoretto and did so with this incredibly virtuosic graphic style that feels worlds away from the fast and loose manner of his sixteenth century predecessors. But, to make a long story short, what I found myself locating in painting after Tintoretto was how Tiepolo's manner seemed to follow from it. To paraphrase Nietzsche, we can see the birth of Tiepolo from the spirit of Tintoretto.

The Business of Business Art

A report on knowledge from Southern Vermont! The thing I love most about this story is the ingenuity of the detective work by which the police were able to apprehend this clever criminal ...



Springfield man charged with passing homemade $20

By Josh O'Gorman STAFF WRITER - Published: April 18, 2009

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — A Springfield man is facing 14 years in prison after he allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes and beef jerky.

Charles F. Wolfenbarger, 20, pleaded innocent Tuesday in White River Junction District Court to a felony charge of counterfeiting paper money. He was released without posting bail on conditions he not use a printer, scanner, copier or any other duplicating equipment.

According to an affidavit filed with the court, March 13, police responded to Williams Country Store in Cavendish and spoke with Arlene Willis, who told police Wolfenbarger had come in that morning to purchase cigarettes, soda and beef jerky.

Willis said Wolfenbarger paid for the items with a counterfeit bill, which the cashier immediately recognized as fake. Police said the bill was obviously counterfeit because it was too dark, too thick and one of the corners had started to peel apart.

Police later learned the bill was made on a computer scanner, using two pieces of paper that were glued together, affidavits state.

Records state Willis followed Wolfenbarger out of the store and confronted him about the funny money, and he reportedly told her he had gotten the bill from a bank in Ludlow.

Willis was able to give police Wolfenbarger's name and directions to his house because he had filled out a job application at the store several weeks before.

The next day police interviewed Wolfenbarger, who told police he went into the store, paid for his items, asked about the status of his job application and left. Wolfenbarger told police he had gotten the bill from a bank in Springfield.

On March 19, police and a Secret Service agent conducted a follow-up interview, in which Wolfenbarger admitted knowing the bill was fake. According to Wolfenbarger's own sworn affidavit, a friend gave him the bill and asked him to spend it.

"I needed food so figured why not," Wolfenbarger wrote.

Wolfenbarger told police he intended to pay back the $20 he owes. In addition to prison, Wolfenbarger is facing a $1,000 fine if convicted.

Gorgon Fun

In an essay from 1999 entitled "Cellini's Blood," art historian Michael Cole offers a fascinating reading Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa (c 1550, Florence). Among the numerous interesting observations made in this award-winning article, Cole notes how the bronze blood streaming from Medusa's severed head and neck seem to have been referred to in period inventories as "gorgoni." And while seemingly related to the Greek word Gorgon that often designates Medusa herself, Cole argues that in the sixteenth century, gorgoni meant coral. Therefore, by understanding why these spurts of bronze blood would be likened to coral helps us to apprehend what period viewers thought of Cellini's sculpture and the narrative it represents. Cole then goes on to relate how, in period Italian translations of Ovid's "Metamorphoses", a mythical origin story of coral is told by the dripping of blood out of the head of Medusa as Perseus frees Andromeda.

Now, setting aside the various difficulties that may apply to Cole's reading of Cellini's bloods as corals, Old Ken was fascinated to see this 1679 depiction of the Perseus and Andromeda story in the Louvre. As Andromeda is being unchained by a cherub at right, Perseus strikes a pose at the center of Pierre Mignard's massive canvas, bloody sword by his side.

Here is the relevant story from Ovid as Cole gives it:

"Having killed the dragon, Perseus came down from the rock and sat on the bank of the sea to wash himself, for he was soaked with the dragon's blood. As he did this, the head of the Medusa got in his way, so he set it on the ground. So that the head did not crack, Perseus gathered some seaborne sticks of wood to set it on, and put them on the ground. Immediately those sticks hardened as stone does, and from the blood of the head they became vermillion. It is thus that coral is made, and this was the first coral."

Now, at Perseus' left foot in Mignard's painting is the severed head of Medusa, which still seems to wriggle with serpentine life. Moreover, as can be perceived even in this lousy detail, red sprigs of coral are clearly emerging from beneath the head, presumably from contact with the leaking blood (or perhaps just from contact with the head itself, depending on your version of Ovid).




In any case, what's interesting about Mignard's clear knowledge of this root-of-coral-from-the-severed-Medusa-head story is the light it sheds on a very disturbing painting now in the National Gallery in London. Known as "The Marquise de Seignelay and Two of her Sons" (1691), this painting shows (so we are told) the seated marquise "as the marine deity Thetis, and the elder child as Achilles, the son of Thetis." Fair enough - - and we could probably go through the iconography of Thetis and find the place of coral in it.





So, what I like about the connection with the Louvre painting is that it allows us to read this London portrait in another way. That is, perhaps we are to see the marquise as a kind of Medusa figure who is turning the green leaves in her hair into corals, gorgoni, right before our eyes. Implicitly, she would be having a similarly stiffening effect upon us ... but that's a story for another day.