“Siena: the Rise of Painting” (a few photos)

I was lucky enough to take a few photos inside the exhibition, and despite the poor quality one still could appreciate the utter splendour of the paintings, frescos and sculptures.

“Siena: the Rise of Painting” (The National Gallery)

Before meeting with our friends, we had some time to finally attend a much anticipated exhibition that is still going on* at the National Gallery, “Siena: the Rise of Painting”: it was, without a doubt, absolutely splendid.

The exhibition covers one of my most beloved periods in Italian art, and mediaeval art in particular, the Trecento, when the traces of the mighty Byzantium empire are fading, starting to form what we call now a Western art canon. Duccio di Buoninsegna, the founder of the Sienese school, was the one who made— and established—that unmistakable golden hue on tempera to look simultaneously divine and vigorously alive; his apprentices and followers, Simone Martini (the one whom Petrarch asked to create the portrait of his Muse, Laura), the Lorenzetti brothers and others, continued and developed his art ethos.

One of the lamest drawbacks of getting old is a declining crave for chocolate and ice cream, which is kinda sad.

Sunday wanderings: Fulbourn (photos)

 And as usual a few photos  illustrating the previous post:

Sunday wanderings: Fulbourn

Oddly enough, I haven’t managed to visit the grand metropolis of Fulbourn during these almost 13 years I’ve lived in England until today, but finally mischief was managed. It took us under four hours (if to include lunch in Fulbourn’s central pub on the High St, The Six Bells) and plenty of sun, which, as I found out later in the evening, was strong enough to give me that unmistakable red face.

The actual road was dull at places (same identical housing from the late 70s here and there), but the closer our destination the better the views became: a flat land, patchy with agricultural fields and wildflower meadows full of the usual cow parsley and dandelions, looking strikingly lovely. There was an old windmill on the horizon, too.

Fulbourn itself seemed prosperous enough to have listed buildings with thatched roofs at every cul-de-sac, and the front gardens were full of lilacs, wild roses and very first peonies: it was evident that the residents were competing with each other on whose terrace looked better. I have no idea, as they all were beautiful.

One simply cannot get tired of pomegranate-shaped little vases, I guess:

“Night visions: fantastic gloomth: Victor Hugo the artist” by James Hall (TLS)

Fuseli? Walpole? Hugo!

The drawings of Victor Hugo (1802–85), of which about 3,000 survive, mark the smouldering confluence of night scenes and night drawing. Hugo began making caricatures c.1830, then drew landscape views and architecture for his own amusement and as a kind of spiritual exercise. Technically daring and courting accident, they were made on his travels, at home with his wife and children, during seances, but mostly on the dining-room table of his lifelong lover, the actress Juliette Drouet, who followed him into exile in Jersey and Guernsey (1852–70). Only a handful of the seventy-seven drawings in an impressively lugubrious show at the Royal Academy look as though they were made during the day. They are early travel sketches, tremulously wiry architectural bits and bobs, gothicky but insufficiently picturesque to be “ye olde” or “pre-loved”. Daylight strips them down to “poor, bare, forked” things, vivisections revealing shameful dilapidation and structural nervous exhaustion. The author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was a pioneering advocate of preserving and restoring gothic buildings, but artistically he was half in love with their decline and death. ©

День Победы: 80 лет

Я сегодня не успею к памятнику Неизвестному Солдату, который воздвигнут у нашего Ботсада — на него падают длинные тени сикомор и акаций, — но мысленно я там. И надеюсь, что английский паренек, ушедший на фронт прямо со студенческой скамьи лучшего университета мира, там, в раю, передаст привет всем нашим родным и близким, павшим на той войне. Потому что там они все говорят на одном языке.

С Праздником! С Днем Победы и Днем Памяти! Царствие им всем Небесное, вечный покой.

VE Day-2025

In Retrospect

The world asks a great deal of the poppies,
insists they carry the wounds of war
and shoulder the weight of remembrance.
Such flimsy, wavering plants;
we painted their flowers the colour of blood
and punched dark holes in their heads
as if bullets had passed through,
then trimmed them with green sprigs of hope.
And from deep in the seeds we concocted
the essence of sleep and dreams and resting-in-peace.
Almost weightless even in full bloom
we made them souls, the poppies, souls
of those who we lost, and – let it be said –
those who we killed.

 Три года, как нет моего мальчика. Помню и скорблю.

“A Deleuzian Conversion” by Claire Colebrook (EUP)

Yet it feels at times that their works have become obsolete (they aren’t, but the feeling remains).

It was in this post-1990s context that reading Deleuze and Guattari was remarkably transformative (despite being contemporaneous with the other French philosophers who had been taken up in a supposed general textualism, anti-realism or anti-essentialism). Things perhaps started with a little too much of a market correction, as if Derrida had said everything was text, Foucault had said everything was discourse, and the feminists had erased the body. Reading Deleuze and Guattari as if they provided the cure for linguistic idealism or textualism not only fails to recognize the ways in which they were part of a milieu attempting to think forms of difference beyond signifying systems, but also misses the subtle but revolutionary practice of philosophical intuition: we may always be asking questions from a distinct political formation, but those formations invite the creative and speculative endeavour of exploring their actual conditions of genesis. ©

Burwish Manor: a long-ish walk (a few photos)

 And a few photos to illustrate the previous post:

Burwish Manor: a long-ish walk (a brief recap)

The weather was somewhat challenging today, but it didn’t affect our plans for the day: to visit Burwash Manor in Barton, which is about 4/4,5 miles south-west from Cambridge (centre) via Grantchester.

Boy oh boy, is Cambridgeshire buzzing with bloom! Despite a chilly spell (temperatures dropped from feverishly high +26 to more or less normal +15), everything is blossoming and fragrant—lilacs, wisteria, cherry flowers, rhododendrons, etc, etc, etc.

Burwash Manor is as traditional as one could imagine for spending desperately middle class leisure time—ridiculously overpriced sourdoughs and fancy butters, cheeses and chutneys, biscuits, locally sourced honey, chocolates and jams. Their cafe is heavenly, and the walk back was pleasant and soothing. 14 km — checked!

“Empire’s fall: The shifting boundaries of Russian literature” by Boris Dralyuk (TLS)

I should ask Prof. Franklin about this volume next time I see him.

The first of the strands is organized around “Movements”, in which the contributors subtly challenge and revise the traditional scheme of periodization favoured by Moser, acknowledging from the outset, for instance, that the texts of the “Age of Devotion” – treated with supreme nuance by Franklin – are the shared inheritance of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian cultures, not merely the first stage in the development of Russian literature [...] ©

it took me literally 13 years to finally reframe these precious (to me) artworks from my past. Quite happy with the result:

May is the best month to get these two neat gems (god only knows when I’ll manage to go through them: let’s hope it happens in the near future):

Merry May!
***
Pink, small, and punctual,
Aromatic, low,
Covert in April,
Candid in May ©