Florence (Tuscany) by Markus Kolletzky on Flickr.
Now almost regretting not making it to Pisa when we were in Italy at the end of July…
Via theworldwelivein:
Piazza dei Miracoli, Pisa, Italy
© Gianluca Rasile
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In honour of Fra Angelico’s feast day, here are three of his works to be found in San Marco, Florence. From the top: the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and Noli me tangere.
Divina Commedia, Yates Thompson 36, f. 190 by Dante Alighieri, Tuscany, Italy c. 1444-1450 via The British Library, Public Domain
That blue!
It was when his lapdog, Tory, got eaten by a wolf that Horace Walpole began to have serious reservations about Mont Cenis.
Simon Schama, Landscape & Memory, p.447.
Of Walpole, Schama adds: “Swathed in beaver furs, he had been lumbering up the mountain path on a chaise carried by four sweating porters.” An enduring image.
Finished reading Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama.
I’ve posted some more detailed thoughts on this here, but here’s a quotation (from p.574) which I wasn’t able to fit into that review, and which summarises well what Schama sets out to achieve (and succeeds triumphantly in achieving) in this book:
Thoreau’s rejection of history was based on the fierce conviction that it was irreconcilable with nature. Civilization’s habitual way with the natural world, he thought, was to make it meek and compliant, a thing of herbaceous borders and bedding annuals rather than the “impervious and quaking swamp."
I have spent these many pages of Landscape and Memory begging to differ, attempting to piece together a different story. For it seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrarch’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. For within its bag are fruitful gifts – not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though it may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has ground the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalist supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over generation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.
In offering this alternative way of looking, I am aware that more is at stake than an academic quibble. For if the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction.
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, p.14.
Yay! It’s time to start working through Tumblr’s favourite book again:
