Cerulean
...I bought a 1968 reprint of Walter Crane's An Artist's Reminscences
..and first opened to p. 136 of this reprint, to the description of Walter Crane's Carnival segment. He was in Rome, described first a palio/race (traditional in Ferarra as well from Duke Borso's time, circa 1470). What charms me is also other ideas and the idea of Crane's illustrations...on page 133 of the book, I ran across "The Allegory of the Dinner Box" and the humor of the delicate engraving also makes me believe in my imagination that Walter Crane would be also amused by the delicate humor in this tarot design...
Back to Carnival:
..masques and every kind of costume or disguise were worn, punchinello and pierette perhaps predominating. The masqued women always spoke in the same artificially high voice, as different groups of maquers met with each other, there was often a sustained and lively conversation, at this high pitch. The spirit and go with which the citizens and citoyennes threw themselves into the play--for it was really like a play going on to the streets--was amazing. In the Corso anyone was liable to get well peppered with plaster confetti. People at the balconies had troughs of it, and literally shovelled it down on the crowd. I saw Prince Humbert (King of Italy) amusing hismself in this way.
Then a day was given to the battle of flowers, when the ammunition is changed, but the fusillade is carried on as briskly as before between the occupants of carriages and those in the balconies and taken up by the foot passagers. Processions of fanstastic cars full of quaint masquers continually passed up and down the Corso. I remember one filled with people each having a different kind of beast's or bird's head on another with a carriage full of storks, red-legged and red-beaked with proper black and white plumage, with a basket of baies in their midst and a stork coachman and footman on the box. A caricature of an English sporting gentleman and lady in fox-hunting dress, on horseback, but with enormous pantomime heads on, rode down the Corso; and a suggestion of ancient Rome, a biga full of helmeted and crested warriors of the Empire period...The last night of the Carnival was signalised by the "Moccaletti"--a sudden burst of lighted tapers dancing about in the dark crowd like fireflies in the twilight, and then everybody tries to blow everybody else's taper out, in order to cry triumphantly, "Senza Moccoli!"
Walter Crane
An Artist's Reminiscences
London, Methun & Co., 1907
Detroit: Reissued by Singing Press, Book Tower, 1968
(with 123 illustration by the author and others from
photographs)
...and so an appreciative Cerulean amusingly will stop haunting this poor thread with cranium bursting with silly joys of Harmonious Tarot and Walter Crane's amused recollections of triumphi...
Cheerfully humming,
Cerulean
..and first opened to p. 136 of this reprint, to the description of Walter Crane's Carnival segment. He was in Rome, described first a palio/race (traditional in Ferarra as well from Duke Borso's time, circa 1470). What charms me is also other ideas and the idea of Crane's illustrations...on page 133 of the book, I ran across "The Allegory of the Dinner Box" and the humor of the delicate engraving also makes me believe in my imagination that Walter Crane would be also amused by the delicate humor in this tarot design...
Back to Carnival:
..masques and every kind of costume or disguise were worn, punchinello and pierette perhaps predominating. The masqued women always spoke in the same artificially high voice, as different groups of maquers met with each other, there was often a sustained and lively conversation, at this high pitch. The spirit and go with which the citizens and citoyennes threw themselves into the play--for it was really like a play going on to the streets--was amazing. In the Corso anyone was liable to get well peppered with plaster confetti. People at the balconies had troughs of it, and literally shovelled it down on the crowd. I saw Prince Humbert (King of Italy) amusing hismself in this way.
Then a day was given to the battle of flowers, when the ammunition is changed, but the fusillade is carried on as briskly as before between the occupants of carriages and those in the balconies and taken up by the foot passagers. Processions of fanstastic cars full of quaint masquers continually passed up and down the Corso. I remember one filled with people each having a different kind of beast's or bird's head on another with a carriage full of storks, red-legged and red-beaked with proper black and white plumage, with a basket of baies in their midst and a stork coachman and footman on the box. A caricature of an English sporting gentleman and lady in fox-hunting dress, on horseback, but with enormous pantomime heads on, rode down the Corso; and a suggestion of ancient Rome, a biga full of helmeted and crested warriors of the Empire period...The last night of the Carnival was signalised by the "Moccaletti"--a sudden burst of lighted tapers dancing about in the dark crowd like fireflies in the twilight, and then everybody tries to blow everybody else's taper out, in order to cry triumphantly, "Senza Moccoli!"
Walter Crane
An Artist's Reminiscences
London, Methun & Co., 1907
Detroit: Reissued by Singing Press, Book Tower, 1968
(with 123 illustration by the author and others from
photographs)
...and so an appreciative Cerulean amusingly will stop haunting this poor thread with cranium bursting with silly joys of Harmonious Tarot and Walter Crane's amused recollections of triumphi...
Cheerfully humming,
Cerulean
