Tea at Trianon: Love and the Underworld

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Love and the Underworld

An analysis of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait from Histories of Things to Come:

The painting was long thought to depict Arnolfini's second wife, Jeanne (or Giovanna) Cenami. But in 1997, it was discovered that she had married Arnolfini in 1447, thirteen years after the painting's date and six years after the death of van Eyck. Only in 2003 did art historian Margaret L. Koster realize that Arnolfini's first wife, Costanza Trenta, had died by 1433, a year before the portrait was painted. In other words, this painting is a memorial to her. The identity of the man is also disputed, in which case Koster's theory does not hold, except her idea seems to match van Eyck's symbols. Everything on the man's side of the portrait indicates life, while items on the wife's side of the painting represent death.

The surface story in this painting is about material wealth and love. But the underlying allegory is about life and death. This is a picture of the present, holding onto the past, with the artist speaking on the back wall to the future. How would you depict a ghost in a time poised between two great European eras, with the earlier period being an age of spiritualism and faith, and the later period fixated on the rise of secular capitalism? This portrait is both a modern-oriented realistic representation of a rich businessman and a medieval-styled vision of his wife's spirit. (Read more.)