Question of the Day
How did the above Excellent Personage
Become the Excellent Personage below, fixing us with an enigmatic gaze:
And, here, staring winsomely from behind the family’s newly acquired Excellent Canine:
This Excellent Personage, aka Etta Lin, will be entering middle school in the fall.
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And coming right behind her, Little Brother Welles (also an Excellent Personage, doubt not), who has gone from infancy (seen here with his beautiful Mom):
with seemingly lightning speed to ace softball player:
And possessor of an ever-growing collection of Matchbox Cars:
The Summit of Beauty in Art
On my art-cluttered coffee table, this gorgeous volume currently takes precedence. It is a birthday gift from Ron – my most splendid husband.
Giotto’s O is about the great painter Giotto de Bondone. His genius pointed the way forward from the art of the Middle Ages to the triumph of the High Renaissance.
From Andrew Ladis’s Introduction:
The tale of Giotto’s O is a story of magical technical mastery and the most unassuming interpretive intelligence, an extraordinary combination of hand and mind. The painter transforms himself into a human compass, but in addition to mechanical precision there is a diagnostic dimension behind the mark that is equally astonishing, an idea that informs and elevates the painter’s manual dexterity….
The murals by Giotto in the Arena Chapel…constitute the greatest pictorial cycle of fourteenth-century Europe. Above all, what elevates them to the realm of the universal and timeless is their profound humanity. In a series of images whose subtlety, truthfulness, and dramatic range anticipate Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Giotto explored the world of the human heart and mind in such a way that, as the nineteenth-century English critic John Ruskin put it, he “defines, explains and exalts every sweet incident of human nature; and makes dear to daily life every mystic imagination of natures greater than our own. He reconciles, while he intensifies, every virtue of domestic and monastic thought. He makes the simplest household duties sacred, and the highest religious passions serviceable and just.”
Recently, I’ve taken a Lifelong Learning class entitled The Giotto Revolution. I’ve had this instructor before, but this time she really outdid herself. The course was not only about Giotto; several other great artists were covered. Among the most notable, Duccio di Buoninsegna. ( I love his name):
Books to the Ceiling 