Recent stories of note:
“To know or not to know”
Costica Bradatan, The Times Literary Supplement
Mark Lilla’s recent book Ignorance and Bliss, a wandering exploration of the “will to ignorance” reviewed by Costica Bradatan in The Times Literary Supplement, begins with a version of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. In this version, however, the man who is compelled to leave his shadowy bondage pities the condition of those around him and brings along a young boy. When the man must return to the cave, he assumes it would be nicer for the boy to stay in the sunny world of truth—until the boy begs, in tears, to go back down with him: “I can’t live here any longer, I hate it. . . . I know too much. . . . Isn’t that terrible? How can you stand it?” The boy might well have cited Thomas Gray’s 1747 poem “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” which coined the proverb Lilla borrows for his title: “Thought would destroy their paradise/ No more; where ignorance is bliss,/ ’Tis folly to be wise.”
“‘Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits’ Review: A Provençal Clain in Vibrant Paint”
Karen Wilkin, The Wall Street Journal
Saying that someone looks like Socrates is usually no great sign of friendship, but a statement of Van Gogh’s proved an exception when he claimed that of Joseph Roulin, the postman who became close with him during the artist’s stay in Arles and, along with his wife and children, became the subject of many Van Gogh portraits. The Arlesian was such a good friend to Van Gogh that, following the notorious ear incident, Roulin visited the artist in the hospital daily, sending letters to Van Gogh’s brother Theo to keep him apprised of Vincent’s condition. Now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, fourteen of Van Gogh’s twenty-six Roulin family portraits are gathered in a new exhibition, reviewed by Karen Wilkin for The Wall Street Journal. From the pudgy, bug-eyed baby Marcelle (who looks more like Socrates than her father does) to the distinguished Joseph in his postal uniform, these are striking fruits of friendship.
“‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts”
Martin Gayford, The Spectator
Modeling for an artist is surely no walk in the park, as the Roulins must have known. But is it any more pleasant to get all those sittings done in one go by making a plaster cast of yourself? In the early nineteenth century, art studios tried this route, as the historian Alain Corbin writes in his Fragility: A History of Plaster, though the casts’ goosebump-laden skin and faces “tense around the eye and the mouth” speak for themselves. Plaster was all the rage in this period, used in life casts (hands, feet, faces, full bodies), Regency interiors, and even eerie “death masks,” made while bodies were still warm. Thanks to these death masks, Martin Gayford notes in his review of Fragility for The Spectator, every well-to-do family could have the gaunt plaster head of Napoleon, Géricault, or Beethoven in their sitting room. How better to signal your tastes?
