Status Anxiety by Botton Alain de

Author:Botton, Alain de [Botton, Alain de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Psychology, Non Fiction
ISBN: 9780375725357
Google: 83ZCBa9hXLQC
Amazon: B001NJUPD4
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2004-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Meal for a Convalescent, c. 1738

But within Chardin’s art lies an implicit subversion of any vision of life that could dismiss as valueless a woman’s domestic labours or even a piece of old pottery catching the afternoon sun (“Chardin has taught us that a pear can be as full of life as a woman, that a jug is as beautiful as a precious stone,” observed Marcel Proust).

The history of painting provides Chardin with a tiny coterie of fellow spirits, and us with a handful of great correctives to our customary notions of importance. One of the more notable, for our purposes, was the Welsh painter Thomas Jones, who worked in Italy, first in Rome and then in Naples, between 1776 and 1783. It was in Naples, in early April 1782, that Jones completed what may be two of the finest oils on paper in the whole of Western art, Rooftops, Naples (which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) and Buildings in Naples (in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).

The views captured by Jones remain a familiar feature of many Mediterranean cities and towns, where houses are pressed together along narrow streets and give out onto the naked flanks of neighbouring buildings. On a warm afternoon, the streets tend to be quiet and the windows half shuttered. One may glimpse the outline of a woman moving inside a sitting room or the dark mass of a man asleep on a bed. Occasionally one may hear the cry of a child or the rustle made by an old woman as she hangs laundry on a terrace with a rusting handrail.

Jones shows us how the intense southern light falls on walls of chipped and weathered stucco, bringing out every indentation and fracture, the painted surface evoking the passage of time as effectively as the rough, worn hands of a fisherman. Soon April will give way to May, and then the blank, dead heat of summer to furious winter storms, which themselves, after an apparent eternity, will once again cede their place to tentative spring sunshine. Jones’s stone and stucco are close kin to clay and plaster and to the fragments of pitted rock that stud so many Mediterranean hillsides. The confusion of buildings in these works affords us an impression of a town in which a multiplicity of lives is unfolding in every window—lives no less complicated than those portrayed in the great novels, lives of passion and boredom, playfulness and despair.

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