over realming

Money

"Without it you lost status, face, respect."
- Simon Schama on Rembrandt's bankruptcy 

law and legend

"The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power."
- Simon Schama

an early appeal of theatre

You could laugh which was forbidden in church.

landscapes of an embattled mind

"Living with lunatics, he wrote, paradoxically took his mind off of his own state and the frightening unpredictability of [epileptic] fits. 'For although there are some who rave and howl a great deal, there is much true friendship here. They say that we must tolerate each other so others may tolerate us ... and we understand each other very well.' In between attacks then, van Gogh seemed possessed by clarity and strength. So the phenomenal sequence of paintings achieved at the Arles hospital, and especially at St Rémy, with their convulsive bucklings and writhings, the cartwheeling stars, rocks heaving in sinuous arabesques, the cyclonic rush of brushstrokes through the quaking cypresses, should not read as documents of descent into lunacy."

- Simon Schama, Power of Art, p. 334

filthy feet

The Madonna of Loreto, 1604-5

"He understood how to live inside the skin of the poor and the pious."

- Schama on Carravagio [1571-1610] who ended up abundi capitali or with a price on his head

Wham Shazam

James Rosenquist [born 1933], World's Fair Mural, 1964.

"The opposite of reverential art. Not high-minded. Solemn art was a turn off."

Simon Schama gets zinged

Earlier references to Schama on this blog here.

sauce

Simon Schama's Bolognese sauce recipe here.

Earlier references to Simon Schama on this blog here and here. To Guernica here.