Queen Esther (1878), de Edwin Long

RUBENS, The Fur ("Het Pelsken") 1630s

Por sugestão de Howard Jacobson, aqui.

William Henry Hunt, Primroses and Bird's Nest - c. 1840

Por sugestão de D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, cap. 11, onde se pode ler: "so in the lumber room there were bad Sir Edwin Landseers and pathetic William Henry Hunt byrds' nests".

Edwin Landseers, The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner -1837

Leonor Fini, L'Homme aux masques (1949)

Chardin (1699 – 1779), Un Philosophe Occupé de Sa Lecture (1753)

Por sugestão de George Steiner: "o belo e a consolação".

Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 – 1916)

Interior with Young Man Reading (1898)

Por sugestão d'a escola da vida

a large black metal crucifix embedded tenaciously in the wall.

 

RIZI, Francisco, Auto-da-fe on Plaza Mayor, Madrid,1683

"I have been cycled through various great American hospitals in the course of my experience, at least one of which is famous for being operated by a historic religious order. In each of the rooms of this hospital, from no matter what perspective you lie in bed, the commanding view is decidedly that of a large black metal crucifix embedded tenaciously in the wall. I had no special objection to this on one level, because it really did little more than repeat the name of the hospital itself. (I tend not to pick my fights with the chaplains’ departments until I have a proper point to make. In Texas, for instance, in a purpose–built brand–new facility that took the towers to the level of more than two dozen, I got them to agree in principle that it was slightly idiotic not to boast of a thirteenth floor but instead to skip from twelve to fourteen. Surely nobody checks in here to complain of cosmic fears generated by a number, or would check out because of it: We seem incidentally quite unable to discern how this dank little superstition ever got started.) However, I also happen to know that it was a practice, during the wars of religion and the campaigns of the Inquisition, to subject the condemned to a compulsory view of the cross until they had died. In some of the fervent paintings of the grand autos-da-fe, or “acts of faith,” not I think excluding some of the burnings alive captured by Goya on the Plaza Mayor, we see the flame and the smoke arising from the vicinity of the victim, and then the cross itself held grimly aloft before his closing eyes. I have to say that, even if this is now done only in a more “palliative” fashion, it makes me feel disapproving on the grounds of its earlier sadomasochistic associations. There are banal, quotidian hospital and medical practices that remind people of state–sponsored torture. In my own case, there are also practices that I can’t separate from the hell of earlier ones."

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 743-56 )

Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel

Daqui

Por sugestão de Roberto Bolaño, 2666, onde se pode ler:

"All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires is a ready-made. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of distress. As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.” Clearly, then, Duchamp wasn’t just playing chess in Buenos Aires. Tompkins continues: This Unhappy Readymade, as he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp’s instructions in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open hook dangling in midair (the only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel. As Duchamp later told Cabanne, “It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea.” I take it back: all Duchamp did while he was in Buenos Aires was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got sick of all his play-science and left for France. According to Tompkins: Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging “the seriousness of a book full of principles,” and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, “the treatise seriously got the facts of life.” 

(Loc. 3304-16 )

Vincent Van Gogh, Still life with bible (1885)

(Para o Miguel)
 

Por sugestão de Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Hapiness, onde se pode ler: " o antes pregador leigo Van Gogh justapõe aqui a escritura antiga e a moderna: a Bíblia e o romance de Émile Zola, La Joie de Vivre a alegria ou a felicidade de viver." p. 428.

Outras vistas em The Faith of Vincent Van Gogh                                                                                     

Edmund Youngbauer, Die Jagd Nach Dem Glück (fins do séc. xix)

Via Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin, 2007), p.354.

BRUEGHEL, Jan the Elder, Orpheus in the Underworld (1594)

Por sugestão de Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin, 2007) onde se pode ler: "Seria a felicidade como a Euridice do mito grego, que se escapa dos nossos braços quando nos viramos para abraçá-la, desaparecendo mal a vislumbramos? (xi) 

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Poppies 

 Woman Looking at Herself in a Mirror, 1805

The Fields of Sekiya by the Sumida River, 1823-1831

Daqui. 

Por sugestão de Degas que afirmou: "Hokusai não é apenas um artista entre outros no Mundo Flutuante. Ele é, em si, uma ilha, um continente, todo um mundo", in Calza, Hokusai, Phaidon, 2003, p.7.

Jan Havickszoon Steen, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia - 1671/ "a balbúrdia do eu"

Daqui.

Por sugestão de James Wood, A mecânica da Ficção (tr. mui cuidada de Rogério Casanova, Quetzal, 2010) onde se pode ler:

"O filósofo Bernard Williams preocupava-se bastante com a inadequação da filosofia moral. Grande parte dela, na sua opinião, em particular a que provinha de Kant, erradicava a balbúrdia do eu do debate filosófico. A filosofia, considerava, mostrava uma tendência para encarar todos os conflitos como conflitos de opiniões, que podiam ser facilmente resolvidos, e não como conflitos de desejos, que já não se resolvem facilmente. (...)

(...) Williams estava mais interessado no que ele chamava «dilemas trágicos», nos quais alguém é confrontado com duas exigências morais contraditórias, ambas de igual importância. Agamémnon tem de trair as suas tropas ou sacrificar a sua filha; qualquer uma das acções lhe causará vergonha e arrependimento duradouros. Para Williams, a filosofia moral devia prestar atenção ao tecido da vida emocional em vez de definir o eu, em termos kantianos, como tendo princípios estanques, como sendo consistente e universal. Não, disse Williams, as pessoas são inconsistentes; refazem continuamente os seus princípios; e são determinadas por toda uma séria de factores - genéticos, educacionais, sociais, etc.

(...)

Evidentemente, o romance não dá respostas filosóficas (como disse Tchékhov, é suficiente que coloque as questões certas). No entanto, faz aquilo que Williams pretendia que a filosofia moral fizesse - produz a melhor representação possível da complexidade do nosso tecido moral." (192-195)

Emil Filla (1882-1953), A Reader of Dostoievsky, 1907

 

Por sugestão de Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, new directions, p.17, onde se pode ler:

"He sat behind his desk, his head leaning back, legs outstretched, his hands resting on the desk. Filla's picture, A Reader od Dostoievsky, has something of the attitude he assumed. From this point of view, there was a great resemblance between Filla's picture and Kafka's bodily appereance Yet it was purely external. Behind the outward likeness lay a great inner difference."

Giuseppe Arcimboldo 1527-1593

 (Spring,  1573)

 

"In 1583 Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612) switched the imperial court from Vienna to Prague. This was to be the first and last occasion in which Prague would hold centrestage in the Habsburg Empire, and as such is seen as something of a second golden age for the city (the first being under Emperor Charles IV; see p.85). Bad-tempered, paranoid and probably insane, Rudolf had little interest in the affairs of state – instead, he holed up in the Hrad and indulged his own personal passions of alchemy, astrology and art. Thus, Rudolfine Prague played host to an impressive array of international artists, including the idiosyncratic Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose surrealist portrait heads were composed entirely of objects. The astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe were summoned to Rudolf’s court to chart the planetary movements and assuage Rudolf’s superstitions, and the English alchemists Edward Kelley and John Dee were employed in order to discover the secret of the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that would transmute base metal into gold. Accompanied by his pet African lion, Otakar, Rudolf spent less and less time in public, hiding out in the Hrad, where he “loved to paint, weave and dabble in inlaying and watchmaking”, according to modern novelist Angelo Maria Ripellino. With the Turks rapidly approaching the gates of Vienna, Rudolf spent his days amassing exotic curios for his strange and vast Kunst- und Wunderkammer, which contained such items as “two nails from Noah’s Ark…a lump of clay out of which God formed Adam…and large mandrake roots in the shape of little men reclining on soft velvet cushions in small cases resembling doll beds”. He refused to marry, though he sired numerous bastards, since he had been warned in a horoscope that a legitimate heir would rob him of the throne. He was also especially wary of the numerous religious orders which inhabited Prague at the time, having been warned in another horoscope that he would be killed by a monk. In the end, he was relieved of his throne by his younger brother, Matthias, in 1611, and died the following year, the day after the death of his beloved pet lion."

(The Rough Guide to Prague, 2011)

Vermeer, Man and woman drinking wine/c.1660

Por sugestão de uma colagem feita por uma criança em Theresienstadt e exposta na sinagoga Pinkas, no museu Judaico.

Vermeer, The Milkmaid - c. 1657–1658

Por sugestão de John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972):

BOTTICELLI, Portrait of a Young Man 1482-83

 

Por sugestão do Doutor Fausto de Thomas Mann, p.240.

La era ou el verano, Francisco Goya (1746-1828)

Por sugestão de um marcador de livros do Museo del Prado de 1996.