faces

Faces

May 2008

My iTunes: The Mermaid's Song by Anne Sofie von Otter

Writing about museums in my last post made me look through some of my old images from museums in Europe. It's difficult to photograph in museums sometimes, usually because of the low-lighting and no-flash-allowed, and the "no cameras" rule is difficult to work with as well...

I took this on my last weekend living in London; I went with a friend to the Sunday morning service at Westminster Abbey, and afterward we walked around the Abbey and looked at some of the smaller side chapels.

One of my favorite things about this image is how each person is looking somewhere different. This was just a very small section of a large painting (possibly a fresco, but I can't remember the exact setting). Unfortunately, I didn't remember to take a picture of the plaque to see what the story is about or when it was made, but my educated guess is that it dates to somewhere in the Middle Ages before the Renaissance. Art at that time was very flat and two-dimensional, and in diptychs and triptychs (two- and three- panelled altarpieces) from that era often had the angels arranged much like these people: very close together, overlapping, and without a clear sense of three-dimensional space.

I hope you learned a little something about art history, but enough of that for today. I'm getting ready to go to my follow up appointment after surgery and see if I'm allowed to sit down again! I sure hope so!