Carnival

Dürer’s House, Nuremberg, February 2018.

I’m a bit behind, chronologically. On Saturday morning I went to Albrecht Dürer’s house while Robert was playing in the quarter finals.

Permit me to draw a veil over his score. Suffice to say that I only report victories and more work needs to be done on his close to the net vollies.

If you know as much about Dürer as I did at breakfast on Saturday you will be vaguely aware of his woodcuts and prints. Rather enterprisingly he did a woodcut of a rhinoceros, an animal he had never seen and, on firmer ground, a rabbit. Frankly neither match up to his St Jerome in his Study.

St Jerome in his Study, Dürer, 1514.

I wonder if Dürer had ever seen a lion? You will recall from visits to the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, Carpaccio’s rendition of St Jerome meeting the lion that has presented himself with a thorn in his paw. The other monks scarper while St J attends to the matter in paw.

St Jerome and the Lion, Vittore Carpaccio, Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice,1502.

In the same Scuola is one of my favourite pictures, also by Vittore Carpaccio, St Augustine in his Study.

St Augustine in his Study, Vittore Carpaccio, Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice, 1502.

These beautiful Study pictures seem to belong to a genre – one that Dürer  adopted after living in Venice in 1494/95. I was reminded of this sort of artistic cross-fertilisation at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich on Sunday morning. There were German artists painting in the same style as English painters such as Gainsborough or French Impressionists and of course Irish artists, Evie Hone and Maine Jellett  created work similar to their mentor Albert Gleizes.

The last museum I went to in Nuremberg was the Railway Museum; it is the oldest in the world. Properly, it pays credit to the part played by English inventors before embarking on a detailed exposition of the development of railways in Germany. There was some rolling stock on display including this reproduction of the Adler by a DB ICE train.

Railway Museum, Nuremberg, February 2018.

In Munich it is carnival time.

2 comments

  1. I found my enjoyment of the authors didactic travelogue somewhat interrupted by the inclusion of another cameo role for the ever esoteric Robert. However, the inclusion of his attainments provide a useful foil to the authors garrulous writings.

    As the author has heretofore bypassed the opportunity to properly inform the reader of said tennis players identity on two recent occasions, the score stands at: Author 30 Reader Love.

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