Henri Fantin-Latour, White Lilies (c. 1883)

The beautiful and the terrible mingle. The horrible and the delightful- the flower that blossoms in all its loneliness into a beauty incarnate. Setting against the ugly and the homely, like a harmonious melody that courses through a hubbub of ceaseless clanks and clangs, one need not strain his ears and the music will flow into them like honey. Modesty the flower knows not. The flame of its beauty coruscates even in the depth of night, when the whole town is plagued by endless sleeps and ravaged on the point of crumbling away. Those who are inexorably licked by the flame allege that the flower is the vessel of the Devil.

Still-lives often take on the appearance of an artificial nature. What is depicted is no longer something that bustles with life, as life is frozen for the sake of art. Therefore we see, on closer inspection, how every leaf of the lily seems to tremble as its last breath is on the brink of slipping away, or some might fancy that they hear the flower letting out a long but faint hiss of remorse. Impeccable beauty often comes with the price of an ephemeral existence. Even before the flower starts to bud we prophesy its decay. And the process of its decaying can be painfully long for spectacle: it is akin to witnessing a molten wax model melting away to its demise.

“And thus whenever I toss and turn, unable to sleep when my head is too weighed down with heavy thoughts, the balmy night wind will always be there to calm my restlessness with his affectionate caress. This little gesture of ready charity never fails to transport me to sublime happiness. In return to his kindness I sway my supple body like a serpent navigating his way to a disarmed prey, or an undulated sea, the choppy waves making periodic appearances like numerous crescent moons. He will be so ecstatic that together we sing a duet of a merry elegy, until the music abruptly ceases as we are out of breath, and silence, and the whole earth, is peopled only by our thrumming echoes,” the flower confesses.

The flower lives perennially with her beauty immortalised fresh as if she is just on the cusp of her youth. Myriads hands rub her petals, savagely or tenderly, in their sweated palms yet beauty is indestructible. Veins still betray a pale red even when the flower is withering. Confidently she whispers to herself that her heart still palpitates.

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Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov

John Martin, the Great Day of His Wrath (1853)

The sky is ablaze with burning flames and the earth splits asunder- the image of an impending apocalypse looms. Those paintings are impregnated with forebodings of the demise of all living things, and can be served as memento mori- mostly cautionary tales that remind people of their mortality. Landscape paintings that depict the biblical scenes of eternal damnation (most often the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) are sometimes reinterpreted as prophetic visions of the end of the world. Painters as early as one in the Romantic period, John Martin, conjured up images that continued to awe and frighten the viewers of today. In John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) a volcano erupts and its ashes and fire surge towards the air, rendering the sky an infernal red. One can easily establish himself into the painting and feel the quake rumble under his feet. The earth takes a topsy-turvydom, where the ground and sky suddenly become one. There are people in the paintin

Musings. Ex Libris

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