"Find the love to unfold / in this broken world we choose"

[larryhammer]

This doesn't easily fall into verse, so I'll do the next best thing and turn it into a numbered list. Things I bought in the Basel Art Museum's gift shop:

1. Picture of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Hans Holbein the Younger (postcard print). One of the museum's two main focuses is 15th–16th century Germanic painters. They especially have a lot of Holbein, who lived in the city for 15 years, including three paintings of the University's most eminent professor, Erasmus. Judging by them, I think I would have liked the guy in person. The print is of my favorite of the three, a miniature a few inches across, in three-quarters profile, with a five-o'clock shadow and sly smile.
   
   
2. The Isle of the Dead, Arnold Böcklin (print). The other main focus of the museum is and mid-19th–20th century art, including a fair amount of Böcklin, and since I'd been looking at one of his paintings on the cover of my volume of Byron, I was particularly interested in checking him out. Halfway down a long gallery of frequently mythological paintings, suddenly, there was a remarkable familiar work: craggy rocks, dark cypresses, and a white-shrouded boatman. The Penguin designer had cropped it oddly, but it was recognizably the same painting. As in, woah. And in the museum shop, I found the postcard reproduction. Ha!
   
   But when I got back to our hostel to compare, I discovered that card and cover weren't the same. It wasn't just that the latter was cropped and flipped left-to-right, but they were different paintings. Careful scrutiny of credits gave the answer: the cover is a painting in the Berlin National Gallery, while the Basel painting is the "first version" -- something not noted in the gallery itself. And it turns out, there's more than those two.
   
   Ah well.
   
   
3. Hokusai: One Hundred Poets, Peter Morse. One of Hokusai's last projects, unfinished at his death, was woodblock illustrations for the classic Japanese anthology One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets. This book reproduces the prints and all the available drawings for the rest, leaving only 11 poems unillustrated. The commentary includes the poems with translation and explication. Yes, a heavy thing to lug about when traveling all-carry-on, but it was on the discount shelf. As in, heavily discounted to half the US$ list price.
   
   Which is how I now know that Sei Shonagon and Murasaki Shikibu are among the hundred poets. Go them.

Regarding said Byron collection, the 780 pages lasted until halfway through the flight home, after which I was forced to write my own verse. (I never did touch Watership Down.)

---L.

Comments

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

What a great selection. I have liked that Isle of the Dead painting for a long time. Now I know that I don't know which version I loved. I suspect the one in NY. May have seen it there. Mom had a lot of art books tho.

100 poets

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

We should do similar in English--the 100-poets, one-poem-each idea is a great one. You can play a game at New Year's where you try to match the poet with his or her poem.

Re: 100 poets

[larryhammer]

Or do like the Japanese, and do it as a memory card game, with part of each poem on one side.

---L.

Re: 100 poets

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's the one--that's how you play it :-) (I misremembered)

[kchew.livejournal.com]

I am a total Holbein geek. Durer and Holbein both did portraits of Erasmus and the great thinker liked Holbein's portrait because it was more like him--more human than the more idealized Durer version. True!

I have at least three Holbein books within twenty feet of my current location, and have spent a good deal of time staring at the portrait he did of Anne of Cleves in the Louvre. It really is lovely.

Holbein geek! Me!

[larryhammer]

You'd like this museum, then, as I lost count at two dozen paintings by him, scattered between various exhibits. Plus a couple by his father and brother, just for the contrast.

---L.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

It was a trip finding a Holbein hanging on a wall at Warwick Castle. I couldn't believe they just have it in a room with an open window. Don't those things rot, or something?

I've been an appreciator of Holbein since I first saw "The Ambassadors."

[kchew.livejournal.com]

It blew my mind to see that painting in person. First, I hadn't thought about how *large* it was. Also, seeing it, and realizing what sort of rooms it was meant to be hung in, suddenly made the more abstract comments about how the skull would would look make sense.

And then Anne of Cleves is so small, which makes sense since the painting would have had be have been shipped, and was done much more quickly for a political purpose.

As for the open window: ?!?!?!? With you there. Which painting was it?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Hey, I kept my hands off of it! I did not have sex with that painting!

It was Henry VIII. I recognized it right away because it was singing that song -- which, it turns out, has actual verses (http://www.archive.org/details/HarryChampion-ImHenryTheEighth1911). Coo.

I've always loved art that messes with perspective, or uses perspective to mess with me. The book Hidden Pictures has been a favorite of mine for as long as I've had a copy (complete with the mylar mirror you can roll up to see circular distortions). As we were finishing a visit to the Uffizi, I suddenly discovered a large exhibit on the birth of perspective, complete with illusionistic art, devices, illusion cabinets, and the works. I had to race through it, to my chagrin, because one of our party was ready to drop. I did manage to purchase a book of the exhibit, and hope one day to be able to understand more than a small percentage of the Italian.