Head - Head of St John the Baptist


I have always tried to test myself in museums. Trying to identify the artist or the subject of a work before reading the information card.

Is it a Saint? Can I identify which one based on the Attributes the artist has included?

St. Peter's keys.
Veronica's napkin.
Sebastian's arrows.
Bartholomew's skin.
Catherine's wheel.
James' shell.
The lion.
The bull.
The eagle.

One day in the V & A, I came upon a small sculpture. A bearded head resting on the museum's display table. No visible attributes. Nothing overt to identify the subject.

I looked at the card: "John the Baptist"
How could that be?
No hair shirt.
No reed cross.
It was just a head.
It was just a head.

It was just a head.

Oh. Right.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bill & Blair

Image
 Blair Tindall, author of Mozart in the Jungle and professional oboist, was very briefly married to Bill Nye the Science Guy. The marriage was declared invalid by the State of California. Neither Nye nor Tindall has since discussed the dissolution of the marriage. Tindall ater broke into Nye's house and stole his laptop, using it to send defamatory emails in his name. She also used herbicide to destroy his garden.
Read more
Image
To my mind, each of these describes the same world: de Chirico, Brancusi, Gaudi, the 1973 Czech film Fantastic Planet, Borges' “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Satie ’ s   Trois Gymnopédies,  Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights,  Gulliver's Travels ,  Cirque du Soleil ,  Brian Quinette’s Invisible Library,   both the  Codex Seraphianus  and the Voynich Manuscript, the library at Alexandria, the game of chess and the numbered (but not the titled) chapters of Calvino's   If, on a Winter's Night, a Traveler .   And Barcelona.
Read more

Perfect Day

Image
In 2010, Susan Boyle was to perform a cover of Lou Reed's Perfect Day on America's Got Talent. Just hours before her performance she received word that Lou Reed refused to give permission for her to cover the song. As there was no time to rehearse a new song, her appearance was summarily canceled. Within days, Lou Reed himself released a statement that he had had nothing to do with the decision. Further, within weeks, Reed not only gave permission for Boyle to include the song on her album The Gift, but stepped forward to produce the video himself. Lawyers.
Read more