The Calf-Bearer, and: Peaches and Glass Jar, and: Illuminated Ms. of the Maqamat of Hariri, and: Things Lose Color at the Level of the Sky, and: Farm Scene, Horses and Barn

The Calf-Bearer

Archaic statue from the Acropolis

What is implied here is some pastoral emergency—a flood, say, in the lower reaches of the pasture, and the man has hoisted the calf to his shoulders, where it rides perfectly at ease as he carries it uphill to safety. His hands are joined at his chest around the animal’s ankles. There is a perfect trust between them.

And this out of marble, the chisel true to every detail of the calf’s face and body—truer, in fact, than to the man’s own features. Between his dreadlocks, those wide, staring eyes, and the slightly silly, eternally frozen smile.

The marble parts on sinew and flesh: down through the ages he strides, the calf riding easily there, the water rising behind them, poppies ablaze in the grass.

Peaches and Glass Jar

Wall painting from Herculaneum, ca. ad 50

To judge by the shadows, the light comes from different sources, and the perspective falls flat; there is simply no sense of depth here. The peaches are green, four of them on a branch with few leaves, and two to the side. One of the latter has been dug down into, showing the rich brown pit.

Below the two detached peaches sits a glass jar half filled with water. Again the perspective is wrong: the water rides too high on the other side. But the light on the empty half of the glass looks real, if not the way it floats on the water, and through the glass and water we see the tip of a single peach leaf.

Though so much is wrong, there is a kind of rightness here, where every object on its own is whole, and the whole makes only a part.

Illuminated Ms. of the Maqamat of Hariri

Mesopotamian (?), 1323

Flowing script above, below, and in the center a circle of listeners in red ink. They are like a jury, caught in the various stages of thought, with something at once sketchlike and finished about them.

Less visible in their midst, set back a ways as if he floated there, a small man or imp who reaches his right hand out in argument. He seems to be pleading with them: their verdict hangs in the balance.

Whatever it is that happens here, the artist has caught it perfectly, the pleader and the men ranged round about him in one quick rhythm of dissension or accord.

Things Lose Color at the Level of the Sky

Charles Burchfield, Decorative Landscape, Shadow (Willows on Vine Street), watercolor and pencil, 1916)

As if all color had been lifted halfway up the sheet. Two black-trunked trees (but willows?) leave a foliage of shadows on the house here, on the front and side of the garage. The leaves are a sort of khaki, in clumps unlike a willow’s; the trees behind them show as darker and lighter greens. But follow the trunks skyward into their limbs and it’s all black and white, the leaves in cuneiform and fractals, like the edges of fossil ferns. The upper branches of the near tree tail off into nothing, the random strokes like the tines of a pitchfork.

Two drawings or paintings in one, then: the muted colors below, a range of green washes, and grays, and browns, the whole perspective tilted slightly right to show the hill; above, this striving of black on white, the immediate landscape erased to imply the heavens, the prick of stars in the darkness, the strewn décor of the light.

Farm Scene, Horses and Barn

Mark Rothko, watercolor, graphite, and ink on paper, ca. 1930

Across the paper’s pebbly grain the scene is set: out of the middle ground the road angles down in several shades of gray; a wash of green on tan picks out the roadside grasses.

A strip of gray implies a crossroad at the...