Seen via del.icio.us, the Web Gallery of Art, a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the 12th-18th centuries. I went immediately to Vermeer and Caravaggio; and then to Canaletto to compare his paintings with my photos. I expect to be considerably enhancing my familiarity with Renaissance art in the next few months.
The Web Gallery’s a free resource, not linked to any museum or gallery and doesn’t receive any public funding. The marvellous people responsible for it will accept donations, though, and advice from professionals. It’s a salutory contrast to certain other very costly and less successful online galleries.
Detail of Icarus from Bruegel’s painting
Helen wanted to see Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
because she’d done the Auden poem, Musee des Beaux Arts
for GCSE O-Level. The teacher didn’t bother to show the kids the picture. Read it and then see the Bruegel . Isn’t this Interweb thing the greatest?
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
