Some were not:
I wouldn't trust this one down a dark alley:
But each of them reminded me that there had been people here before me, not just those commemorated in stone, but the craftsmen who had built up the skill, over years of steady, patient work, to shape these often unnoticed portraits of the great and the good. In those days, things were not made in Mordor, although no doubt, in the absence of a health and safety 'framework', the odd sculptor fell off his ladder from time to time:
Makes me want to put faces on the corners of my house.
ReplyDeleteMakes me want a glossy book of them with a light bit of explanation... when's it coming out?
ReplyDeleteSome of those positions are a hoot ... I love the faces that seem to pop out of nowhere. Time I went back to England. It's been way too long.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of a passage from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall:
ReplyDelete"Fenchurch Street, Leadenhall, Cheap, Paul's Churchyard, Fleet, Temple Bar, Westminster Hall. So many fountains flowing with wine that it's hard to find one flowing with water. And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city's uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and ducks' bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, leathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed in their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs."
I've just come back from the UK, where I spent a wonderful day at Hampton Court. I love the Tudor kind of scale and domesticity. And the bricks.
ReplyDeleteHand goes on chisel. Hand wraps around hammer. Hammer hits chisel. Stone falls away. Art is made to stare at us over years and centuries. Nothing better. Humans are cool; I don't care what anyone says.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Squawking, Whispering, MH and Chris. I think that book will come out just in time for Christmas, Polly - it's the kind of book that does. You are a more retentive reader than me, Gaw - I've read and enjoyed Wolf Hall, but I don't remember that bit at all, brilliant spotting.
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