Animal beauty. In the beginning was the rhinoceros. That of the hand of Pietro Longhi which certifies that it is indeed a “real portrait of a rhinoceros taken to Venice in the year 1751”. The painter made several versions, including the one in the National Gallery in London, without the cartouche with the signature but still depicting the elegant masked spectators. A magazine asked Suzanne Doppelt to write a text on this canvas, combining the two loves of the writer and photographer: animals and painting. Other texts on other paintings with animal motifs followed. Then came the idea of grouping them together in a book. A beautiful mask takes the air is the fruit of this meditation on the presence of the animal in works by Dürer, Tintoretto, Chardin, Corot…
In The old man by Georges de La Tour, the fly seems a detail in his portrait of a beggar, it in fact invites us to imagine another point of view of the world. The insect has “ the mosaic eye far from this old man seated who cannot see a thing.” Don Manuel, son of the Count of Altamira, aged 3, portrayed by Goya, is surrounded by a small courtyard of pets, but in no way secondary: magpies or finches speak in his place, to him the child in red to “cherub mask”walled in the haughty solitude of his status. The anamorphic skull at the feet of Holbein's “ambassadors” becomes in the author's imagination an enormous cuttlebone gnawed by omnivorous rats having fled this glorious staging to escape the death to which we are assigned, what let us, men and mice alike, assume our animal condition.
Suzanne Double
A beautiful mask takes the air
POL
Edition: 1,000 copies.
Price: €16; 80 p.
ISBN: 9782818059463
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