Assisi

I toured the Basilica of St Francis Assisi yesterday. This magnificent build is one of the reasons I came to Second Life: to see art and architecture in its spatial context, to swim in light and dimensionality, to escape the flat prison of the printed page. The care taken here is a testament to the devotion of its artists and their respect for the work of Cimabue and Giotto, displayed so magnificently upon its walls. Repeated textures have been sparingly employed with ingenuity so as not to spoil the richness of the walls and ceilings, each one a unique painting. Golan Holder, Quozar Winx (whom I met at the basilica), Testsuo Allen, Brando Dovgal, Sarg Bjornson, Giulio Perhaps, and Agnes Noel have done a great thing, and I look forward to their future collaborative creations.
Alas, you have noticed I was so struck with wonder I failed to remove my hat. How uncouth and impious.

Eyelashes restored

Ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize.

Tis a small thing, a hair on the lid of a tinie eye. But it frames the windows of an infinite soul.

Thank you, Osprey, eyelash malfunction resolved. And thank you Dandellion for your kind suggestion which I shall consider when next I go to market.

A l'Italienne

Salazar did me the great kindness of placing Antoine Watteau's painting of my friends in the Comédie-Italienne upon the wall backstage at Phobos. I should like to tell you more about them, though it is a long story and there is more to tell than will fit in this post.

Luigi Riccoboni (dit Lélio), the founder and guiding spirit of the troupe, returned to France with the patronage of the Regent, the Duke of Orléans, was a consummate performer and scholar, creater of many books on the Italian Comedy and, in concert with Pier Francesco Biancolelli and Jean-Antoine Romagnesi, the author of many fine spectacles. His wife Hélène Virginie Balletti was a sweet, caring woman who deeply loved her life on and back of stage, where she played under the name of Flaminia. Their son Antoine-Francois no sooner debuted than Luigi decided to retire in 1729 and the family followed him, but wife and son were back on the boards a few years later. Hélène-Virginie's younger brother Mario was our second lover (after Lélio). Pierre Alborghetti, who remained thin and supple to his dying day, played Pantalone, the miser, and his best friend Fabio Materazzi (Il Dottore), who at 72 was still a bachelor, nobly saved his widow from a miserable life alone. Vicentini, known as Thomassin, was one of history's greatest Arlequins, and I cannot think of him without seeing his lithe figure in black mask a-capering about the boards. He was married to Marguerite Rusca. Then there was the couple you see in back of the painting, our lovely chanteurs Fabio Sticotti and his young wife-to-be Ursula Astori. These were the adults who formed me, providing all the education and love a parentless child might want. They played the comédie de buffons, the commedia dell'arte, sang opera, performed Molière, Racine, Corneille and Shakespeare, tumbled and flew on the wire, imitated every person of quality in their own voice, no matter their origin. Together they spoke Italian, beautiful French (except Riccoboni who was incorrigibly Milanese), English, Prussian and Bavarian, and a little Polish and Spanish. This portrait barely captures their genius, which was improvisation, to which they added gentle satire, imparting always the great joy they took in their roles, and the ability to charm each of their audience into a passionate devotion.
My friends at TSMGO - in their wit and readiness to try anything - recall to life these men and women who passed on to Cytheria so many years ago.

A question...

After a year and a half in Second Life I am still bothered by a matter I have never brought myself to raise, because my time with my friends is so rare I durst not waste a moment on a trifle.

My eyelashes are white. I suspect it is a part of me that has escaped my curse and aged in spite of the rest of me, but it may simply be a setting or a piece of the skin template I never discovered , though not for want of looking.

I would not mind, excepting it gives me a surprised look in some pictures, and an arch look of superiority in others. I should be happy to change it, if any can tell me how.

Burning Life

I spent my only half hour this month paying tier and looking for friends. Alas, I shall have to write another paean to loneliness. Travel and obligations separate me from all those I love and respect, but my fate as an adventurer demands it.
I paid a brief visit to Burning Life, looking for Osprey's growing stones, on the groundless fear she might have sprouted tendrils, but found neither them nor their uprooted author. As you shall see I was watered by Emmanuel Lane's Green Man and entered a foal's vision of her future (doubtless the fire-spewing steed was the dream, the tiny angelic unicorns the nightmare!). The sliced face was a work of genius, a fascinating effect which I should like to adopt in my own builds. Pavig Lok's stylized landscape and Green Man mask was very appealing.



Above and beyond all these, and many other examples of creative minds hard at work, the one work of art I most enjoyed was Andrek Lowell's midnight forest. This artist has created an emotional space with an immediate impact, instilling a calm reverence and suggesting haunting spirituality that we rarely see in our World. This he or she (one must never assume) created with an admirable effortlessness and understated simplicity of idea and execution. The picture I show here does not do it justice. It was a lovely space where one could reconnect with the ancient arbor and its beleaguered giant inhabitants, long-suffering friends of man.

Unglaublich

Apparently this is what happens when you blog about Berlin, in einem neuen Fenster.

Berlin

The German's love for classical antiquity and for music is evident in Berlin, with its Pergamon and Alte Museums, three major opera houses and seven symphony orchestras. Angels grace every part of the city, outnumbered only by bears escaped from its coat of arms and parading in the streets. I was thrilled to see Karl Friedrich Schinkel's proud buildings, charmed to find the Kaisersaal and Cafe Josty still operating (though very much transformed), and impressed to find Berliners as serious and industrious as they ever have been.


Alas I was unable to obtain tickets for Phaedra or Medea playing at the Berliner Oper, but heard two chamber music concerts, a mediocre one at the Orangerie of Schloss Charlottenburg with musicians in historic costume (well, a half-hearted attempt at such), the other one excellent at the Kammermusiksaal.

Imagine my delight to find hanging in the Gemäldegalerie a painting I know so well, by Antoine Watteau, painted around the year in which I was born and featuring so many who would become my very dearest friends in the Comédie Italienne, including Dominique Biancolelli (far right), dear Marie-Thérèse's father. They were all masters of improvisation, and caused me to think with fondness of our merry troupe now rehearsing in Phobos, who share the same love of nonsense and playfulness, and whom I hope to see again before long.

The last photo is of the Kaisersaal, now absorbed into the Sony Centre. Don't you think Torley Linden would like it?

London

Gone are the songs and cries of street sellers, the unruly and violent theatre audiences, the plagues and the hangings, but the stones of London still guard the bones of Kings and Poets in Westminster, and Sir Christopher Wren's magnificent dome still o'erlooks the city entire from Tower Hill to Tottenham Court, nay further still, for I had a clear view as far as Notting Hill.

In the first of my two short days I paid visit to the shops on Brompton Road, Peter Pan in Kensington Garden, the Queen's Palace, Westminster Cathedral, the Parliament, the Horse Guards, the National Gallery, Canada House in the Square, St. Martin's in the Field (Gibb's building shrouded by scaffolds and sheets whilst suffering a restauration), Covent Garden (and Benjamin Pollock's, now owned by actor Peter Baldwin, where I purchased several tuppence sheets for my collection), quiet Temple, the Embankment and thence to St. Paul's and its 530 steps to the Golden Gallery and its views. It was on slightly wobbly legs I did then discover a rebuilt Tate Museum, now become a monstrosity housing monstrous art, and a rebuilt Globe Theatre, where I secured a gentleman's box to enjoy a delightful Merchant of Venice. Having a better view of the groundlings than I did of the stage, I remarked how enraptured the audience was of Kirsty Besterman's intelligent Portia, and of the remarkable Craig Gazey, who stole the show as the ribald servant Launcelot.

I spent a more restful second day sketching in the V&A and British Museums (which change appearance every time I visit) and browsing in Bloomsbury bookshops.

London was preceded by a quick trip to visit friends in Oxford, where I reacquainted myself with the Radcliffe Camera and the Ashmolean Museum, and saw a tiny, perfect exhibition of armillary spheres and other navigational and scientific instruments exquisitely fashioned of brass at the Museum of the History of Science (or Old Ashmolean).

The (so very tall) Duke of Marlborough was at home during the horse trials at Blenheim, and I enjoyed a wonderful morning watching dressage, cross country and Chris King's spectacular jumping on The Secret Weapon.
Thence to Prussia....

London

Gone are the songs and cries of street sellers, the unruly and violent theatre audiences, the plagues and the hangings, but the stones of London still guard the bones of Kings and Poets in Westminster, and Sir Christopher Wren's magnificent dome still o'erlooks the city entire from Tower Hill to Tottenham Court, nay further still, for I had a clear view as far as Notting Hill. In the first of my two short days I paid visit to the shops on Brompton Road, Peter Pan in Kensington Garden, the Queen's Palace, Westminster Cathedral, the Parliament, the Horse Guards, the National Gallery, Canada House in the Square, St. Martin's in the Field (Gibb's building shrouded by scaffolds and sheets whilst suffering a restauration), Covent Garden (and Benjamin Pollock's, now owned by actor Peter Baldwin, where I purchased several tuppence sheets for my collection), quiet Temple, the Embankment and thence to St. Paul's and its 530 steps to the Golden Gallery and its views. It was on slightly wobbly legs I did then discover a rebuilt Tate Museum, now become a monstrosity housing monstrous art, and a rebuilt Globe Theatre, where I secured a gentleman's box to enjoy a delightful Merchant of Venice. Having a better view of the groundlings than I did of the stage, I remarked how enraptured the audience was of Kirsty Besterman's intelligent Portia, and of the remarkable Craig Gazey, who stole the show as the ribald servant Launcelot.
I spent a more restful second day sketching in the V&A and British Museums (which change appearance every time I visit) and browsing in Bloomsbury bookshops.
London was preceded by a quick trip to visit friends in Oxford, where I reacquainted myself with the Radcliffe Camera and the Ashmolean Museum, and saw a tiny, perfect exhibition of armillary spheres and other navigational and scientific instruments exquisitely fashioned of brass at the Museum of the History of Science (or Old Ashmolean).
The (so very tall) Duke of Marlborough was at home during the horse trials at Blenheim, and I enjoyed a wonderful morning watching dressage, cross country and Chris King's spectacular jumping on The Secret Weapon.
Onward to Prussia....

En route

Samuel Johnson said, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I have suffered a longing for its wet streets and cloisters of late, so now speed there happily for a handful of days, and proceeding thence directly to Berlin. Forgive me if I do not correspond. I shall be occupied in my entirety with the clamour and brilliance of those cities.