Posts in category: Powerpoints

As an introduction to my new BLOG POST The Labours of the Months: July, let’s read Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts’s poem on July… I am for the open meadows, / Open meadows full of sun, / Where the hot bee hugs the clover, / The hot breezes drop and run.    /    I am for the uncut hayfields / Open to the cloudless blue,— / For the wide unshadowed acres / Where the summer’s pomps renew;    /    Where the grass-tops gather purple, / Where the oxeye daisies thrive, / And the mendicants of summer / Laugh to feel themselves alive;    /    Where the hot scent steams and quivers, / Where the hot saps thrill and stir, / Where in leaf-cells’ green pavilions / Quaint artificers confer;    /    Where the bobolinks are merry, / Where the beetles bask and gleam, / Where above the powdered blossoms / Powdered moth-wings poise and dream;    /    Where the bead-eyed mice adventure / In the grass-roots green and dun. / Life is good and love is eager / In the playground of the sun! https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/july-poems/

The Labours of the Months had a role in highlighting authority and privilege, hard work, and occasionally, small, everyday pleasures. They are often perceived as a link between the work of man, the seasons of the year, and God’s ordering of the Universe. The Trentino Fresco Panels at Torre Aquila in Northern Italy for example, present trained and obedient peasants busy with their seasonal activities, but dominated by the local aristocracy who seem to only care for their idler activities. (I presented the eleven surviving Torre Aquila frescoes in 2020. Please check https://www.teachercurator.com/?s=torre%20aquila&cat=plus-5-results)

Starting the 1^st of January 2021 and for every month so far, we “take a trip” to the National Gallery in London and “study” a small picture (there are twelve such pictures), “painted on canvas and then… glued to a wooden panel. It is possible that (these twelve pictures) were made to decorate the recessed panels of a pair of doors! The paintings seem to have been planned in pairs with the figures facing each other and are currently displayed in two frames in groups of six. They show the ‘labours of the months’ – the rural activities that take place each month throughout the year.” https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/italian-venetian-the-labours-of-the-months-january#painting-group-info

For the Month of July, we have a copious outdoors scene. National Gallery experts believe that this small painting presents July and shows a man (as he) threshes grain from the corn husks and stalks of straw. He holds the corn on a wooden block and strikes it with his wooden flail. The weather is warm and the man is barefoot with no hat on his head. He is a little older than the labourers in the other pictures – some streaks of grey appear in his beard. The depicted man kneels outside a small brick building with an overhanging roof supported on two posts. Perhaps it is the same building in which the elderly man sits in the representation of January. At the foot of the blue mountains in the distance, we see a fine villa, to which this farmland perhaps belongs.

For a PowerPoint on The Labours of the Months at the National Gallery in London, please… Check HERE!

What is so rare as a day in June? / Then, if ever, come perfect days; / Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, / And over it softly her warm ear lays: / Whether we look, or whether we listen, / We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; / Every clod feels a stir of might, / An instinct within it that reaches and towers, / And, groping blindly above it for light, / Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers; / The flush of life may well be seen / Thrilling back over hills and valleys; / The cowslip startles in meadows green. / The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice, / And there’s never a leaf nor a blade too mean / To be some happy creature’s palace; / The little bird sits at his door in the sun, / Atilt like a blossom among the leaves, / And lets his illumined being o’errun / With the deluge of summer it receives; / His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings, / And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings; / He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,— / In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best? Writes back in the 19^th century James Russell Lowell… and further back, in the 15^th century, an anonymous painter creates The Labours of the Months: June! https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/june-poems/

The Labours of the Months is a theme that frequently occurs during the Late Medieval-Renaissance Period Art. It attracts our attention in sculptural pieces adorning Churches and Cathedrals of the time, striking Vitreaux Windows, amazingly colourful manuscripts, and paintings, monumental, like the eleven surviving panels in Torre Aquila I presented in 2020 (check: https://www.teachercurator.com/?s=torre%20aquila&cat=plus-5-results), or small, like the paintings in the National Gallery, in London, we explore in 2021… month by month… https://archive.org/details/labormonth00webs/page/n9/mode/2up Webster, James Carson – 1905-1989, The labors of the months in antique and medieval art to the end of the twelfth century, 1938, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University,     and      https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/italian-venetian-the-labours-of-the-months-january

For The Labours of the Months: June, we have an outdoor scene. “A barefoot young man sits holding a sheaf of corn he has cut in one hand and his scythe in the other. The sleeves of his blue jacket are rolled up and a straw hat shades his face, suggesting that this little painting represents one of the summer months.” The National Gallery of Art experts “think it may be June when grain crops are harvested in northern Italy, where this picture was painted.” https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/italian-venetian-the-labours-of-the-months-june

For a PowerPoint on The Labours of the Months at the National Gallery in London, please… Check HERE!