Ascolan cucumber

We recently acquired a book of the Annunciation, a chuck out from Surrey Libraries. Rather an odd little book from Phaidon, approximately 6.5 inches high, 5.5 inches wide and 1 inch thick. The book opens with St. Luke 1:26-38, taken from some modern rather than the authorised version, then plunges straight into reproducing rather more than 100 annunciations, in roughly chronological order. Most of the reproductions full page right with a little light commentary on the left. A few notes and an index at the back and that is it: no preface, introductory essay or anything like that. The other odd feature being the religious adherence to lower case throughout. No-one and nothing is accorded the accolade of an initial capital, an affectation which I last came across in a quality consultant from the norwegian truth (http://www.dnv.co.uk/). On further thought the book and the consultant were roughly contemporary at the start of the new millennium, so perhaps it was a new fad for that new millennium.

Prompted by all this for a further visit to the ascolan cucumber, last noticed on 14th February. Ascola being an old town, north east of Rome, quite near the north eastern coast of Italy.

Off to a good start (Boris's recent blast at the contractor is maybe having some effect) and collected my Bullingdon from Waterloo 3: across Waterloo Bridge, around the Aldwych for fun, up the Strand, around Trafalgar Square, past the Cockspur Street stand (which had vacancies for once in a while) and onto the stand at St. Martin's Street, hard by the back door to the National Gallery, clocking just 15 minutes for the journey.

Mixed starters in the form of a triumph from Rubens, a golden calf from Poussin and a young lady from Vermeer. The first struck me with its fanciful exuberance and more particularly with the expressions of the elephants. One wondered how many elephants Rubens had seen in the flesh. Did he have a model? The second reminded me how careless I am about the overt content of paintings, with it being a long time before I worked out that the central white figure was Aaron, the brother of Moses, fallen back to the old gods. Working out which didn't seem to make much difference as I was much more interested in its sharing material with 'The Dance to the Music of Time' on the other side of town. The third started by seeming quite dim in a dimly lit room, but it rapidly grew on one as the brain adjusted to the picture.

Onto the main course, Crivelli's Annunciation, an annunciation which is more a townscape and does, indeed, include a cucumber resting on the masonry ledge framing the bottom of the picture, along with an apple. A picture which I am coming to like a great deal. The sort of thing one might sensibly get reproduced in China and hung in one's house - if one's house was a little larger than ours. Poorly served by Phaidon who got the colours very wrong and I don't think that they have the excuse that the picture has been cleaned since they took their photograph. Reminded by the pot plant of a recently seen painting by Holman Hunt about a pot of basil. Was it a crib or a coincidence?

To come down from the clouds, down to Gordon's in Villiers Street (http://www.gordonswinebar.com), a place I have not visited for a while. Pity about all the food, but the place still has some of its old atmosphere - which must have been pretty fetid in the days when one could smoke there, down in the cellars. A convenience was the availability of a range of half bottles, handy for occasional social drinking.

PS: back home I take a look at the National gallery site (http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/). Excellent place where one can browse good quality images of nearly all the pictures at one's leisure. I imagine that it would also be an excellent study aid: one can imagine, for example, an art teacher projecting things onto a screen from his PC while he harangues his class. Hopefully he would not sound as tiresome as some of the lecturers/guides one comes across at the Gallery itself. Meanwhile, I was able to learn that the bird sitting above the rug top right was probably a pigeon (see illustration above), my eyes not being good enough to work this out from the real thing. I had wondered whether it was a hawk.