The other day I went looking to see what the NGA had online in terms of paintings of books. (Don’t just put ‘books’ in as the prompt. You will get the entire museum since every picture is in someone’s book.) I started looking for this famous picture of Dante, (attributed to Bronzini, 1530) holding his own Divine Comedy, open to Canto 25, Paradiso. The passage, so carefully painted that it can be read, is Dante’s lament over his native city of Florence and his own exile from it. I knew the painting was in the NGA collection but couldn’t remember anything else. ‘Dante’ as a prompt, didn’t reveal it, nor did ‘books in art.’ I didn’t want illuminated manuscripts this time. The actual title is The Allegorical Painting of Dante.
Eventually I used the prompt, ‘people reading books’ and a different lovely work popped up. Italian artist, Giovanni Moroni, gave this painting the title, “Titian’s Schoolmaster” (1575) for obscure reasons. But I think the gentleman would have interesting things to say.
When I started strolling through the online galleries, I had the Dante picture in mind, but I kept thinking I was being forgetful, that there was another obvious candidate for the prompt. Eventually I got here. Oh, yes. This is a lovely picture by Fragonard from 1769. Young Girl Reading.
The header is another Young Girl Reading by Jacques André Portail, a French artist in the early 1700’s.
Finally, there is this hilarious send-up of the starving artist. Poor Artist’s Cupboard, c. 1815. Charles Bird King, painter. American, 1785 – 1862
An invitation addressed to A. Palette, one of the cards at the bottom of the picture, gives us the fictional name of the character who owns these books and bits of leftover food and whatnot.
The middle top of the painting shows a paper with the words, “Perspective view of the County Gaol [jail] of Philadelphia,” printed on the curling edge.
The paper pinned to the top left of the picture says,
SHERIFF’S SALE The Property of the Artist,
The paper continues with a description of the artist’s property including Four Pictures,[:] of Roast Pigs, Turkies [sic] Decanters of Wine, and Plumb Cake [—] Painted from Recollection.
Book titles include Cheyene on Vegetable Diet, Miseries of Life, and Calamities of Author. And of course, the open book on the bottom left,
Advantages of Poverty, Third Part.
And he was not a Franciscan. Just saying.
