From a bridge

Another delightful but eerily quiet morning.

I listened for the first time to Belle and Sebastian's album "If You're Feeling Sinister" on which my favourite track was The Stars of Track and Field.

I read about the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci.  For most of his career he chose the conventional subjects of the period - pictures of saints, Crucifixions and scenes from Greco-Roman mythology, presumably to meet his clients' wishes.  However in about 1583 he painted two versions of The Butcher's Shop as well as one of a farm labourer eating haricot beans, the food of the poor. 

In the sixteenth century, the world of craftsmen, peasants and other "ordinary" people was first painted by artists from the Netherlands. These reached Italy and were taken-up by Carracci's teacher, Bartolomeo Passarotti who also painted butchers, appropriately in Bologna known then, as now, as a capital city of good food, nicknamed in Italian "la Grassa" - or "the fat."

In Carracci's butcher's shop, the customer is a member of the Swiss Guard, made to look absurd in his clumsy uniform, awkwardly reaching for his purse, alongside the fit and noble butchers. This marks the picture as a Mannerist work. Mannerism prefers compositional tension and imbalance to the clarity and balance of earlier Renaissance painting.  Mannerists also used black backgrounds (as in the depiction of the shop itself) and well-outlined figures.