Evanescent art that isn't

[sartorias]

Thanks to green_knight for this link to a twelfth century boy's doodlesI've always loved these brief glimpses of real people. A treasured memory is the front leaves of a very battered and dull Latin historical treatise aimed at schoolboys, printed in the early 1600s, on which some unknown boy had sketched out different styles of doublets. He'd also practiced

Comments

[barbarienne]

I much prefer doodles to "real" art as a measure of a culture.

I love real art, art created as art, with the expectation that people will see it. But while it can say a good deal about a culture, what it really says is "these are the things people thought important enough to show other people."

Doodles and suchlike marginalia say, "these are the things that are important to me."

Knowing what's of personal importance to an everyday person in a culture tells you a lot more about that culture. Capital-A Art tells you what the culture thought of itself. Little-a art tells you the truth.

[sartorias]

Well, truth is in the eye of the beholder . . . the art of a culture is definitely how it wishes to be viewed, but once one is outside of its particular style criteria, doesn't that tell us a lot of truth about that culture?

I tend toward a feeling that different sides of the truth are glimpsed through different types of art: the shape of a well-worn chair tells me as much as a Vermeer, or a young monk's margin drawing from his scriptorium window on a lazy summer's day.

[tooticky]

Thank you sartorias, especially for the story about Onfim and his drawings. I love the idea that Medieval Euroean kids were depicting human faces very much the way that Western kids do now: two dots for eyes, a line for a nose, a line for a mouth and circle for a head.

[sartorias]

:-)

[tooticky]

Exactly! :D

[c_bibliophagist]

That boy's drawings reminded me so much of ones my kids made when they were around that age, especially which body parts were drawn, which were left out.

[sartorias]

Yep--they looked like a lot of my second graders' drawings the year I taught grade 2.

[ladybranwen]

Thanks for sharing these links. I find it all quite fascinating.

I admit that I'm more apt to purchase an old used book if there is random writings in it than not. Why else would I buy an 1830s spelling book? It had (bad) schoolgirl poetry in it!

[sartorias]

Oh, how cool is that? I feel the same way about old books.

[steepholm]

Thanks for these lovely links! Doodles and marginalia are the primeval swamp where words and ideas so often have their birth, before crawling onto dry land. Think of the Hobbit, or Leonardo's notebooks - or Pangur and his cat, so much more interesting than yet another pretty copy of Leviticus.

[sartorias]

Yes! Though the pretty copy is interesting, too--but discounting these serendipitous works is such an error.