Sunday, November 25, 2012

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.




5 Comments:

At 4:10 AM, Blogger madwippitt said...

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 ...

 
At 4:46 AM, Blogger Joan Lennon said...

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.

 
At 6:17 AM, Blogger Maureen said...

What an amazing painting, and 2 hearts of course!

 
At 4:16 AM, Blogger madwippitt said...

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!

 
At 11:55 AM, Blogger Gill Arbuthnott said...

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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