Portobello and Other Funtivities

Today's funtivity (no management parables) was a trip to Portobello, a coastal suburb of Edinburgh that is highly touted amongst my thrifty peers as the greatest place on earth to go charity shopping. There is also a beach, a craft store, and the world's greatest fish and chip shop. I partook of all three.

I was in the market for a gold leaf pen (bear with me), and apparently the only place in Scotland that sells gold leaf pens is on Portobello High Street. My quest for said terribly specific item was successful, thank goodness, and we had a terrific fish supper to celebrate. Hurrah, Portobello! Hurrah!

The reason for the gold leaf pen is this:

My latest and greatest acquisition: an old crumbly mirror in the rococo style. Don't ask how I'm getting it back to the States. I am having anxiety dreams about it already.

Other ongoing projects include upholstery classes on Tuesday nights and a one-weekend masterclass of calligraphy. I only recently discovered the Lothian Council programme of adult continuing education courses -- they are amazing! And cheap! At this rate I am going to be one crazy old lady.

Anyways, would you like to see the fruits of my academic labour? Here, nap a while:

"For at least 150 years after it was painted, Giorgione’s Castelfranco Altarpiece, the largest surviving composition in oils that the artist ever produced, remained shut off and virtually ignored in the funerary chapel dedicated to St George on the right side of the atrium of the ancient church of San Liberale, Castelfranco. Commissioned by Tuzio Costanzo, a Cypriot condottiere in the Veneto, it was originally in the chiesa vecchia of San Liberale, an edifice demolished in the mid-18^th century. The present chapel in the new church, designed by Francesco Mariareti, does not correspond to the one described in early documents. The saints represented, St Francis, and St George, who significantly holds the banner of the Order of the Knights of St John, gueles a croix argent, were chosen because they participated in the crusades against the Turks, in which successive generations of condottieri in the Costanzo family had made their fortunes in Sicily and Cyprus. For a century and a half, the strange composition of the Madonna on a high throne, isolated against a landscape, seems to have made little impression in the provincial ambiance of Castelfranco, with the exception of a painted panel derived from the St George figure, owned by famed collector Gabriel Vendramin. Following its restoration in 1635, and Carlo Ridolfi’s description of it in the Maraviglie dell’arte (1648), the altarpiece became one of the few known works to be correctly attributed to Giorgione in the 17^th century....

[More, you say? You want more? Well alright. It's your funeral]

... A substantial amount of data concerning the analysis of Giorgione’s pigments was first presented by Lorenzo Lazzarini at the Castelfranco exhibitions in 1978, where Giorgione’s reputation as a colourist was given serious scientific study and proved to be as revolutionary as the early sources claimed. Paolo Pino once said that Venetian colour was so complex it could not be defined in words, but this is no longer the case. The Castelfranco Altarpiece was examined in relation to other works by Giorgione and his contemporaries found in Venetian collections between 1500 and 1510. On the Castelfranco altarpiece itself, Giorgione drew the principal architectural outlines of the throne in relation to the landscape with a pointed stylus on the gesso preparatory ground, and then painted in the backgrounds and details without complex underdrawings. No traces of an extensive preparatory drawing in charcoal or other media, such as was habitual in Bellini’s studio, were found. All this confirmed what Titian told Vasari, that he and Giorgione painted ‘senza disegno’ in the Florentine sense, that is, without preparing compositions in works on paper and without making cartoons. Giorgione really worked out his compositions on the canvas as he went along, beginning with some outlines of the major shapes. He used a rich variety of colours and applied a mixture of coloured glazes in conjunction with related undercolours."

There is so much more where that came from. Nearly 8,000 words of it. Let me know if you're interested and I can fax over a copy.*

* Bibliography courtesy of the National Library of Scotland