Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Evening reading at the end of the semester

Found a wonderful web site put out by the Morgan Library of its holdings, a nice digital resource.  They give ordinary websters the opportunity to leaf through rare Flemish art works.  Tonight I am perusing a Book of Hours by Simon Bening, an early sixteenth century miniaturist from Ghent-Brugges.


For those of us unschooled in Flemish art history, it is easy to spot the connection to Vermeer through the way in which domestic spaces are depicted.  One main room is shown with people engaged in ordinary household activities and in the background there is a doorway opening into another lighted room in the back.  The eyes movement from this room to the one in the back uses perspective without relying on a natural landscape.



Then another page shows the connection between Flemish painting and Albrecht Dürer.  Bening’s sad-faced Salvator Mundi reminds me of Dürer’s intense self portrait.  From one face to another the internet lets you slide, and as more archival and rare book material becomes available on the web, the easier it becomes to more from one visual memory to the other.  The connection between Dürer and Salvator Mundi is of course a familiar one, but how easily we can confirm it now.




In the midst of this late night contemplation comes an email announcing the death of Richard Sheirich, a German professor at Pomona, 84 years old, did not know him but he looks a bit like Ben Kingsley in Hugo.




All this hangs together as the internet brings us the private views from devotional pages to the news of a colleague's death, someone we have never met before tonight.