Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/03/13

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Confrontation

When I first saw this famous faceoff of the Thomases, More and Cromwell, in the Frick Museum, I was very much on More's side, probably because of A Man for All Seasons. But now, having read Hilary Mantel's two novels about Cromwell, I'm beginning to think he was the more agreeable of the two. Still, Holbein seems to have liked More better than Cromwell. In any case, are there two more revealing portraits than these?