In The Lives of the Painters, Vasari offers Piero as a preternaturally gloomy man. “As he discoursed,” Vasari says, “he would twist everything to the strangest meanings ever heard.” Why else would an artist paint a wedding picnic dinner ending...
Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates (371BCE) tells that when Hercules was approaching manhood, he was given a choice of a life of pleasure or a life of Virtue. While sitting at a crossroads and considering his future, he is approached by two immortal women, Virtue, in...
When Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, and his wife Lucrezia Borgia, asked for a painting expressing worldly delights, drinking, and sensuality, Giovanni Bellini could not refuse the offer though he was eighty-five and in failing health. The Feast of the Gods...
“The Story of a Panic” is one of several stories Leonard Wolff complained that were “Pan-ridden.” It was well-known that Pan was code for identifying gay men and women. Woolf’s complaint implies that a Pan story such as “The Story...
A pleasant picnicky scene in which Pan serenades a family. See Henri Matisse. Pastoral (1905), oil on canvas. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris. The painting was stolen in 2010 and not yet recovered.
Frederick Ashton’s Picnic at Tintagel is inspired by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s popular Victorian novel Royal Mount, where sightseers picnic on Tintagel Castle’s ruins. (Discussion of Braddon’s Royal Mount is posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.com)...
