Tea at Trianon: Blood Red Dirt

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

Friday, May 22, 2026

Blood Red Dirt

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

I’ve started doing something lately that I’ve wanted to try for years, but for some reason never quite had the nerve to attempt. I know that many of the earth pigments used by our artistic forbears in Italy were prospected, dug up and processed by the painters, or by members of their workshops, themselves. Back then, unless one lived in Florence or Bologna, one could not simply go to an art supply shop and buy tubes of ready-made colour or pots of dry powdered pigments. A skilled painter, or a professional workshop, was expected to understand materials intimately and would often have prepared them personally.
So, in the interests of science, I’ve collected up a basic set of tools from stuff around the house and have started hunting for pigments in the woods and trails and rock-formations along the Narni-Amelia limestone ridge, in the farming countryside around Narni and Terni, and along the steep cliffs and banks of the Nera river gorge. (Read more.)