Tea at Trianon: Mortality and the Old Masters

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

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Mortality and the Old Masters

From The New Yorker:

In December, I spent most of two days studying “Las Meninas” during a visit to Madrid, when I believed that my end was near. I had set myself the task of ignoring all received theories about this voluminously analyzed masterpiece and, on the spot, figuring out its maddening ambiguities. It’s big: more than ten feet high by about nine feet wide. Its hanging in the Prado allows for close inspection. (The picture’s illusion of a space that is continuous with the one that you occupy can make you feel invited to walk into it.) The work’s conundrums orbit the question of who—situated where in space and when in time—is beholding this placid scene in a large room at the court of the Hapsburg king (and Velázquez’s employer) Philip IV which captures life-size presences with the instantaneity of a snapshot. The painter? But he’s in the picture, at work on a canvas, with its back to us, that can only be “Las Meninas.” Some characters, mildly startled, lock eyes with ours; others remain oblivious of us. (But who are we?) There’s the riddle of a distant mirror that doesn’t show what you would assume it shows. (Read more.)