ah the rococo period of art and design. a mighty spewing-forth of unrestrained, fruit-laden, cherub-infested, gilt curliques, plaster frivols and hypnotically vertigenous architecture.
how about a gold cherub riding a lion? we can do that! or a painting of fruit, in a gilded, fruit laden frame finished off with the heads of two gold cherubs that look suspiciously like the might be kissing? why not. or a teapot in the shape of a leafy pumpkin? sure, it's the rococo man, the rococo.
i am not alone here - even good old Noah Webster weighs in on this! according to the well-worn, two volume 1880 New Edition With Supplement I've just dipped into, he comments that the rococo is...
A kind of florid ornamentation [...] by some [...] thought to be rich, though luxuriant; and by others it is condemned as a weak attempt to refine and improve upon the purest models of art, producing capricious, fantastical, or childish results.thank you noah. i see we are in agreement.
In September a freak hurricane shoved its way across parts of the UK. In Ireland, plane rides were bumpy. In Oxford, winds were big enough to push over cyclists. After coffee and cake, two friends and I went for a walk around the Water Meadow in the tail end of the storm. Even the clouds were discombobulated.
oils transpiring off the eucalyptus trees is what gives the brindabella mountain range their characteristic purple hue. in the ancient world, purple was a hard-to-get colour and usually involved milking the mucus from murex snails to produce tyrian dyes - a precious, but limited resource, reserved for royalty, and controlled by strict sumptuary laws. the sky has no such qualms about conspicuous sumption!
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