Re: Strange, Harsh and Unbearable, Moi?
The Sanity Inspector
just wrote!:
>There are many who maintain a thousand lies, and one is that eminent
>painters are strange, harsh, and unbearable in their manner, although
>they are really human and humane. And these fools, and not sensible
>persons, consider them fantastic and capricious and are loath to
>tolerate such characteristics in a painter. . . . But idle, unskilled
>persons are wrong to demand great ceremony from a busy, skillful man,
>since few persons excel in their work, and certainly none of those who
>bring such accusations.
> ~Michelangelo, in conversations with Vittoria Colonna
>
>For excellent painters are not unsociable from pride, but either
>because they find few minds capable of the art of painting or in order
>not to corrupt themselves with the vain conversation of idle persons
>and degrade their thoughts from the intense and lofty imaginings in
>which they are continually rapt.
> ~Ibid
Michael Angelo, the the famous painter, painting in the Pope's
chapel the portraiture of hell and damned souls, made one of the
damned souls so like a cardinal that was his enemy, as everybody at
first sight knew it; whereupon the cardinal complained to Pope
Clement, humbly praying it might be defaced. The Pope said to him,
Why, you know very well I have power to deliver a soul out of
purgatory, but not out of hell.
--Sir Francis Bacon, Apophthegms New and Old (1624)
Grant me an old man's frenzy...
A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds.
--W.B. Yeats, 'An Acre of Grass' (1936-9)
--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
-- The Jam