A Song
Words boogie down
As thoughts become song
Hear them resound
Enchanting the throngs
Masters of rhyme
They awaken the spirits
Rapping through time
In harmonious lyrics
Catch the beat if you can,
it's all part of the game
A symphony so sweet
and a song - is its name…
Le Chant d'Amour [The Love Song] -- Edward Burne-Jones
Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco ("Giorgione" -- Big George) was a 16th-century Venetian painter. Only about 6 extant paintings are firmly attached to him. At one time the unfinished "Concert Champêtre" (Woodland Music-makers) in the Louvre in Paris was once thought to be his, but now it is generally thought to be a tribute to him by his student and friend Tiziano Vecelli ("Titian)." The painting was especially important in Walter Pater's influential 1877 essay "The School of Giorgione" he proclaimed "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" and insisted that music is a waveform instilled in the air and contours of a landscape. In advance of Pater's pronouncement but inspired by the same painting, Burne-Jones began working on "Le Chant d'Amour" in 1860 as a design for the decoration of a panel on an upright piano given to him for his marriage to an accomplished singer whose repertoire included folk songs and medieval music as well as modern pieces (the title may be a reference to traditional Breton song “Hélas! Je sais un chant d’amour / Triste ou gai, tour à tour”). One of his wife's sisters was married to artist sir Edward Poynter; another was the mother of future prime minister Stanley Baldwin; and another the mother of author Rudyard Kipling. He also used the composition in an 1865 watercolor. From 1868-1873 he worked on the oil painting. In 1866 Euphrosyne Zambaco, the niece of the Greek consul Alexander Constantine Ionides, hired him to paint her daughter Maria Zambaco, who had just divorced her rich husband whom she too had married in 1860. In 1869 Burne-Jones created a social scandal by attempting to leave his wife for Maria, who entreated him to commit suicide with her by taking a laudanum overdose beside the canal in Little Venice; the police had to be called. In an 1870 portrait of her, a tiny version of "Le Chant d’Amour" is shown as an illustration in an illuminated manuscript she was reading. The finished painting was shown in 1878 at the Grosvenor Gallery, the preeminent exhibition space for the Aesthetic Movement (which proclaimed "art for art's sake." Cupid, personifying Love, slowly squeezes the bellows of a portable organ played by a maiden whose music bewitches her lover, a lovelorn knight. In W. s. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s 1881 satirical musical "Patience," the fictional Aesthetic poet Bunthorne declares himself to be “a greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery / Foot in the grave young man,” a reference to Burne-Jones’s muted coloring and enervated male figures.
ReplyDeleteThank you!! Duane Vorhees, and wow, I so very much love all the trivia you share with the published pieces =)
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