Posts Tagged ‘Sackler Museum’

The Fire of Hephaistos

Wednesday, May 1st, 1996

These ancient bronzes, which have long since lost their gold­en gleam, are still numi­nous frag­ments of a van­ished world. One stat­ue of young man was recent­ly pulled out of a riv­er; his pale sea-green body is scratched and scarred; but he is still a love­ly appari­tion, remind­ing me of some lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suf­fer a sea change
Into some­thing rich and strange.”

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Fragments of Antiquity

Friday, June 21st, 1991

All that we know of Greece has come to us in ruins–armless, head­less, fad­ed, fall­en, bro­ken, bat­tered, lost in trans­la­tion. What we have are frag­ments, frag­ments that have lost almost everything–except their poet­ry. But, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion, that poet­ry has nev­er lost its thrilling, vision­ary gleam.

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Guercino

Thursday, March 14th, 1991

GUERCINO drew like an angel—his gor­geous line curls across the page; his brush forms shad­ows that sug­gest a sense of the round­ness and full­ness of life. His best draw­ings are more than drawings—they are bless­ings, exquis­ite expres­sions of those moments when Art and Faith are one.

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Barbizon

Monday, October 1st, 1990

Bar­bi­zon was a place and a style — and also a feeling—a mood—a time of day — dusk, when the forms of things soft­en and the edges blur, and a kind of hush falls over the world. The earth is solemn, soft, and ten­der, like a bed—and some­times like a grave. 

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Images of the Mind

Monday, May 19th, 1986

Tao Chi was a prince who became a wan­der­ing Bud­dhist monk. His “Melan­choly Thoughts on the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers,” cap­tures the mood of the end of autumn. A lone­ly fish­ing hut is half-hid­den by a few sparse trees; a flock of wild geese flies over a riv­er. The cal­lig­ra­phy echoes the flight of the birds and the quiver of the leaves. With­out under­stand­ing a word, we can feel the poetry.

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Claude Le Lorrain

Tuesday, April 1st, 1980

CLAUDE LE LORRAIN depicts the moment just before trans­fig­u­ra­tion — the moment just before women turn into god­dess­es, or girls turn into swans, or life turns into art. His light is dusk and twi­light — the dark­ling light that wash­es the phys­i­cal world in unearth­ly beau­ty and fills the heart with an intox­i­cat­ing sense of possibility.

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