A Journey of Discovery.
On the 4th August I decided to
make a monotone A1 brush drawing of the Porpora painting – ‘Still-life with a
Snake, Frogs, Tortoise and Lizard’, as a
means of analising the work, bit by bit.
The rationale for this was to try and dig
deeper into the meaning of this work, and, maybe discover something about Paolo
Porpora himself along the way.
I came
to realise that, far from being a still-life, as the title suggests,
this painting could be a ‘memento mori’.
(the Latin for ‘remember you must die’). At first I wondered how Porpora
had achieved the vivacity and movement of these reptiles in his painting – I
did not think from taxidermy. Then, by
chance, I came across a work, almost identical in composition and subject
matter, to a Porpora, that I could hardly believe that it was painted by
another artist – a Netherlander with the unlikely name of Otto Marseus van
Shrieck!
continued on Joanna's page
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