Serafini
When it comes to collecting, I’m most persistent about tracking down artwork by Luigi Serafini. It has been a constant presence in my life for almost a decade, and I’ve spent hours digging and digging to find his work tucked away under rocks and in obscure corners - especially for an American who doesn’t speak a word of Italian.So, one of my alerts alerted me to this book series, about which I know nothing except that Serafini contributed illustrations. I contacted the publisher asking for more info, and in the course of emailing about my collecting habit, he asked if I wanted him to get Serafini to sign my copies. Lucky break, right? Well, what I didn’t expect was full-page inscriptions bearing my name, rendered in Serafini’s made-up language from the Codex Seraphinianus. I was literally short of breath when I opened these books and realized what I had. That’s pretty much the moment every collector lives for.
The books are very nice, too - the illustrations are printed on textured paper that is heavier than the rest of the pages, and most of these images are new to me, which is a bonus as well.
York Minster
Up close and personalI made these images today and they are quite special. The expressive medieval faces - and a pair of hands - are part of the stained-glass “Great East Windows” at York Minster and they date from 1408. Not many people have seen these details from this close, for the simple reason that they are normally positioned twenty meters or so above ground level. Except for now. They are presently being restored and thus taken down, one segment at the time, to be treated by experts. Visiting the cathedral gets you face to face - literally if you want - with these 700-year-old individuals. It is sensational to see them the way the artisans did when they made them, especially knowing they will soon be out of reach again, perhaps for centuries to come.
Pics (my own): York Cathedral, restoration exhibition.
Goethe, Chromatics
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Chromatics, Goethe’s Farbenlehre, 1810. Published by Cotta, Tübingen. The complete book: Via Linda Hall Library, Kansas.
[gallery] chancepress:
When it comes to collecting, I’m most persistent about tracking down artwork by Luigi Serafini. It has been a constant presence in my life for almost a decade, and I’ve spent hours digging and digging to find his work tucked away under rocks and in obscure corners - especially for an American who doesn’t speak a word of Italian.So, one of my alerts alerted me to this book series, about which I know nothing except that Serafini contributed illustrations. I contacted the publisher asking for more info, and in the course of emailing about my collecting habit, he asked if I wanted him to get Serafini to sign my copies. Lucky break, right? Well, what I didn’t expect was full-page inscriptions bearing my name, rendered in Serafini’s made-up language from the Codex Seraphinianus. I was literally short of breath when I opened these books and realized what I had. That’s pretty much the moment every collector lives for.
The books are very nice, too - the illustrations are printed on textured paper that is heavier than the rest of the pages, and most of these images are new to me, which is a bonus as well.
[gallery] erikkwakkel:
Up close and personalI made these images today and they are quite special. The expressive medieval faces - and a pair of hands - are part of the stained-glass “Great East Windows” at York Minster and they date from 1408. Not many people have seen these details from this close, for the simple reason that they are normally positioned twenty meters or so above ground level. Except for now. They are presently being restored and thus taken down, one segment at the time, to be treated by experts. Visiting the cathedral gets you face to face - literally if you want - with these 700-year-old individuals. It is sensational to see them the way the artisans did when they made them, especially knowing they will soon be out of reach again, perhaps for centuries to come.
Pics (my own): York Cathedral, restoration exhibition.
[gallery] goodmemory:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Chromatics, Goethe’s Farbenlehre, 1810. Published by Cotta, Tübingen. The complete book: Via Linda Hall Library, Kansas.
The real story is that modern technology and social media make us a much more oral society than we once were. Naturally poetry will be delivered more through the ear than through the eye—just as it was for most of human history, and still is in most of the world’s 6,000 languages, only about a hundred of which are written in any real way.And it doesn’t help that modern poetry is often intentionally something other than comfort food. Without rhyme or regular meter, embracing ambiguity and often deeply individualistic, much of it almost willfully transcends the bounds of popular taste. Lamenting that America doesn’t cherish poetry like this is like wondering why Milton Babbitt, Thomas Pynchon and Ornette Coleman aren’t common coin.
the traveler and the woodsman
“So long as the past and the present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the problems of the present. But suppose the past lives on in the present; suppose, though incapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active; then the historian may very well be related to the non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. ‘Nothing here but trees and grass’, thinks the traveller, and marches on. ‘Look’, says the woodsman, ‘there is a tiger in that grass’.”
- R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography