Stone Circles, Saints and Signs
I wish these were better photos but the lighting in the museum* was really difficult.** I also wish my French was better so I could give a decent translation but, well, it isn't. This is what I think, more or less, the label says:
St Genevieve looking after the sheep
The patroness of Paris is shown in a curious megalithic stone circle something something Paris as seen from the east; from left to right we can recognize the Bastille, the Temple tower, the enclosure (not, as I first thought, the pregnancy) of Charles V and the hill and abbey of Montmartre.
Like Dr Who, I have two hearts at the moment. One is a Slightly Jones heart, beating away, pumping blood around the final pages of The Case of the Hidden City which is set in Paris (where I saw this painting). The other heart is my Silver Skin heart, currently in a state of suspended hibernation, beating hardly at all and yet despite appearances, definitely not dead - Juliet before Romeo blundered into the tomb, not after. And Silver Skin is set in the late Stone Age and features more than one "megalithic stone circle" ...
Is it a sign? A portent? A something else that means sign or portent? Probably not. But it is ... curious.
*Musee Carnavalet
** Here is an image that you can zoom in on.
posted by Joan Lennon @ 1:58 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
What a strange picture - that stone circle seems an odd pagan thing to include. Although the size they have been painted, they look rather like little teeth ...
So she's in fact sitting inside a huge mouth ... I love that she's reading a book at the same time! And that the sheep all have their lovely long tails.
What an amazing painting, and 2 hearts of course!
I keep coming back to look at this picture. Are those dwarf sheep being herded by a foxlike chihuahua? Or is the saint really a giant?
And is that girl running from a pair of would-be molesters - or are they all running away from something that hasn't yet appeared in the picture, and she is simply fleeter of foot? Exiting left, pursued by a bear perhaps ...
So many questions!
What a fascinatingly bizarre painting. St G has obviously just returned from the hairdresser, and I reckon she's reading a copy of Vogue. And what's that fox doing there?
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