…Despite its small size, the painting has a striking effect due to the interplay of the light with the Gothic architecture as it highlights solids and voids, strikes the subject, and then flows outwards through the windows, revealing the manicured landscape. The central perspective takes the gaze directly to the figure of the saint, who has taken off his shoes and is sitting on a cathedra. It then widens to the details of the study…Jerome’s patristic commentaries align closely with Jewish tradition, and he indulges in allegorical and mystical subtleties after the manner of Philo and the Alexandrian school.” (Wikipedia)
Image: File: Antonello da Messina – St Jerome in his study – National Gallery LondonFXD.jpg
Created: 1474
Uploaded: 9 January 2022
From Tiepolo Blue (2022), by James Cahill:
“’What have you been working on?’
Ben flips the sketchbook closed and smiles.
‘I’ve been stealing things, he says. ‘Stealing pieces of other works.’
‘What pieces?’
‘Anything, really. I’ve started making collages out of other people’s paintings. I take photographs. Sometimes I turn objects from paintings into pieces of sculpture. Like Francis Bacon’s warped mattress – you know, the one with a woman dissolving on top of it?’
‘I’m trying to remember it,’ says Don.
‘Or that amazing structure in Antonello da Messina’s painting of Saint Jerome, the desk and bookcase. I turn them into real objects, plaster casts, plywood models. Sculptural fictions, I call them.’
Don listens, ingesting these mysterious details. Bacon, Antonello, sculptural fictions.
‘I’ve been looking at this house for ideas,’ continues Ben. ‘It’s a strange place.’
‘Strange?’
‘It wasn’t made for living in. Everything’s been so – carefully placed. It’s a museum.’
Don casts his eyes over the furniture, the wallpaper, the closely packed spines of the books – bands of tan leather and gold tooling, a complete set of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes – and he marvels again at the fact that Val could have amassed all this. The paintings are good enough to be in a museum. The drawings, too – including that exquisite study of a dead cat by Chardin.
‘Val has some very fine pieces, if that’s what you mean.’
‘What I mean is, it seems like a set-up. The whole thing’s unreal. The only real part’s the garden…’…
…With a shock he sees, in the meticulously cut sections of paper, the silhouettes of bodies he knows. His eyes trace the profile of the flying horse Pegasus, and the contours of Venus sitting plumply on a cloud. The figures remain as outlines – ghosts – in the sea of blue pieces.
Only the skies – those missing skies from Don’s desk and bedroom floor – have been admitted to the picture.
He stares in amazement. ‘What have you done? My Tiepolo skies ..
‘I appropriated them,’ Ben says.
Don feels as if he is disappearing into the composition – so meticulous, perverse and purposeless. He tries to summon an appropriate reaction, a feeling of outrage.
‘I was going to call it Annihilating all that’s made in a blue heat haze,’ Ben says. ‘But that seemed too long – too clever.’ All Don feels is a strange buoyancy. The room around him – its noises and the people who come and go – recede into nothingness. Ben disappears.
There is no perspective – no point of unity. Just granular space extending in every direction. His eyes swim across the variegated colour and his whole body feels giddy. His mind tries to instil borders, but it’s as if the picture has streamed beyond its edges – as if those edges were only ever an illusion, there to assuage his intellect. Judgement, discrimination, the rulers and callipers of fine analysis, have all fallen away, just like the scalpelled details of the paintings, leaving – what?”
Julia Upton 