This is really Blog #2

Sorry--technical difficulties...

Now that I have the textbook, this should be a little easier. I initially made some notes regarding the still life by de la Porte on page 13; it seems the author spends more time reading the Peck painting that follows and gives that painting more voice than the de la Ponte’s painting. De la Ponte’s painting is dismissed as being symbolic of peasant life, but how do we know this is a peasant table? There are nectarines in a painted bowl—do peasants have easy access to nectarines? Is the painted bowl a local product or is it imported (the design looks Asian to me)? How does the author know the flowers are “wildflowers,” suggesting that they were plucked from nature rather than cultivated? The flowers look like stocks or delphiniums—those are garden flowers (in the Peck painting they look more like wild asters}. What was happening in the world when de la Porte painted his still life—sometimes the very stillness carries meaning. The 17th Century Dutch painters that de la Porte apparently admired, for instance, were painting at a time when the Netherlands was known as the “cockpit of Europe” because of all the fighting (the Thirty Years War, trade wars with England, etc.). For me, the de la Porte is much more intriguing than the Peck, with it silly little faces (it’s too “cute”; the lack of chiaroscuro softens the composition). Who left the coffee and cheese? What caused this person to leave cheese crumbs on the table? The other thing I wanted to comment on regarding the first reading had to do with the Nancy Burson photos on page 22—an interesting concept, but was she familiar with what Ingmar Bergman did about 20 years earlier when he merged Liv Ullmann’s face with Bibi Anderson’s in Persona?