Monday, May 21, 2018

Non-Italians Painting Italian Scenes (Seventeenth Century)

Adam Elsheimer
St Lawrence prepared for Martyrdom
ca. 1600-1601
oil on copper
National Gallery, London

Pieter Lastman
Christ and the Woman of Canaan
1617
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Pieter Lastman
Baptism of Christ
1629
oil on panel
National Galleries of Scotland

Nicolas Poussin
Mystic Marriage of St Catherine
ca. 1628-29
oil on panel
National Galleries of Scotland

Nicolas Poussin
Bacchanal before a herm of Pan
1631-33
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Nicolas Poussin
Dance to the Music of Time
ca. 1638
oil on canvas
Wallace Collection, London

Dora Williams

When Reuben Pantier ran away and threw me
I went to Springfield. There I met a lush,
Whose father just deceased left him a fortune.
He married me when drunk. My life was wretched.
A year passed and one day they found him dead.
That made me rich. I moved on to Chicago.
After a time met Tyler Rountree, villain.
I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate
Went mad about me – so another fortune.
He died one night right in my arms, you know.
(I saw his purple face for years thereafter.)
There was almost a scandal. I moved on,
This time to Paris. I was now a woman,
Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich.
My sweet apartment near the Champs Élysées
Became a center for all sorts of people,
Musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles,
Where we spoke French and German, Italian, English.
I wed Count Navigato, native of Genoa.
We went to Rome. He poisoned me, I think.
Now in the Campo Santo overlooking
The sea where young Columbus dreamed new worlds,
See what they chiseled: "Contessa Navigato
Implora eterna quiete."

– Edgar Lee Masters (1915)

Claude Lorrain
Pastoral Landscape with Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo
1639
oil on tin
painted for Pope Urban VIII Barberini
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Claude Lorrain
Landscape with Apollo and the Muses
1652
oil on canvas
Claude's largest landscape, painted for Cardinal Pamphili
National Galleries of Scotland

Willem Romeyn
Landscape with woman milking a goat
1649
oil on canvas
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Jacob Pynas
Jupiter and Io 
before 1650
oil on panel
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Johannes Lingelbach
Peasants Dancing
1651
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gaspard Dughet
Landscape (with figures by Jan Miel)
before 1663
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Gaspard Dughet
Classical Landscape
before 1675
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Cornelis van Poelenburgh
Landscape with the Finding of Moses
before 1667
oil on panel
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Frederik van Frytom
Italianate Landscape Scene
ca. 1670-1700
faїence plaque
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Blue China Doorknob

I was haunted by the image of a blue china doorknob.  I never used the
doorknob, or knew what it meant, yet somehow it started the current of images.

                                                                                                Robert Lowell

Rooms may be
using us. We
may be the agents
of doorknobs'
purposes, obeying
imperatives china
dreams up or
pacing dimensions
determined by
cabinets. And if
we're their instruments –
the valves of their
furious trumpets,
conscripted but
ignorant of it –
the strange, unaccountable
things we betray
were never our secrets
anyway.

– Kay Ryan (2004)


– poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)