The Sphinx of San Michele

...This Alma-Tadema painting awoke a memory of San Michele, Axel Munthe's villa atop Anacapri. It is possible Alma-Tadema visited Munthe there, that sphinx is unmistakable.

Drawings after the Skeleton

In the lull between Summer Program and Fall Quarter, we set up the skeleton for study.

Florentine Frames

Scenes from our May 2011 Exhibition at the Academy of Classical Design, showing student work from the course on compositional design, and some snapshots of our adventure water-gilding the Florentine frames.

Translations

Compositional Design Course 

This year brings a new focus on quick ink-wash copies from the masters - copies of wash drawings and ink drawings after paintings and frescos.  I very much like what Boris Pasternak wrote about the work of "translations" (writing) or copies (art).

Excerpted from the introduction of "Pasternak; Selected Poems," translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France.

"Boris Pasternak's views on literary translation were based on his own immense experience as a translator. Circumstances were such that for long periods of his life translation was his only source of income. [He] compared it with the work of an artist copying classical models in an art gallery, and preferred it to all other ways of earning a living.

"The translation must be the work of an author who has felt the influence of the original long before he begins his work. It must be the fruit of the original, its historical consequence.

"More than this; we have said that translation is inconceivable because the principal charm of a work of art lies in its unrepeatability. How then can a translation repeat it? But translation is conceivable, because ideally it too will be a work of art; sharing a common text, it will stand alongside the original, unrepeatable in its own right. And translation is conceivable because for centuries before our time whole literatures have translated one another. Translation is not a method of getting to know isolated works, it is the channel whereby cultures and peoples communicate down the centuries."

Sargent Hall, Boston Public Library.

Here's a wonderful book research site if you have an e-reader or don't mind reading on a computer screen. While it's great for general literature ("Varney the Vampire," E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Cremona Violin," Goethe's "Italian Journey," and numerous others that must be read before turning out the light,) the site's breadth for art research is impressive:

The Training of Memory in Art, Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran

Remember to change the search criteria from "American Libraries" to "Texts."

Libro d’Arabeschi

A wonderful discovery, exhibit and catalog for those interested in the history of master drawings: Libro d'Arabeschi The drawing above is a detail from the restored book, and the snapshot, taken in Rome's Palazzo Massimo last fall, offers testimony to just how heavily the invenzione of the Renaissance borrows from Antiquity.

Piazza di Spagna 26, 00187 Rome

The Keats-Shelley House, Piazza di Spagna 26, Rome.

Was most interested to discover Axel Munthe's (physician, author of the wonderful "The Story of San Michele," among others) journey landed him briefly as tenant in an apartment at 26 Piazza di Spagna, the apartment where poet John Keats died of consumption in 1821.

Byron's degenerate friend John Polidori, author of "The Vampyre," also spent time here.

At the top of the steps, Chiesa Santissima Trinita dei Monti holds some lovely frescos by Michelangelo's friend and colleague, Daniela da Volterra: