Went on a bit of an art binge this morning. It started in the Met's
China galleries with students from "Religion & Ecology." Hard to imagine a better way of communicating the "liquid ecology" we'd read about than a scroll painting like "Remote Buddhist temples among autumn mountains" above (14th-15th C., unidentified artist). Since I had time I stayed on at the Met, encountering further landscapes in an exhibit of mountain paintings
from Korea, and a lovely
exhibition about Thomas Cole, one of the US's most famous landscape painters. This show,
which feels a little like the scene in the tiny work above (from the
Ashmolean), lets us see paintings (Turner! Constable!) which Cole saw
when traveling in Europe, and then experience anew his imaginings of the
Hudson river landscape, and the famous "Course of Empire" (from the
New-York Historical Society). Enough never being enough, I popped into the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, where I found a
15th century Iskander (Alexander) lecturing the seven great philosophers of Greece, with two onlookers tittering behind the hill. Delights!
Went on a bit of an art binge this morning. It started in the Met's China galleries with students from "Religion & Ecology." Hard to imagine a better way of communicating the "liquid ecology" we'd read about than a scroll painting like "Remote Buddhist temples among autumn mountains" above (14th-15th C., unidentified artist). Since I had time I stayed on at the Met, encountering further landscapes in an exhibit of mountain paintings from Korea, and a lovely exhibition about Thomas Cole, one of the US's most famous landscape painters. This show,
