about the site

the author

titles

first lines

essays

translations

acknowledgments

abraxas press

Note on Grandmother and child  

Not everyone knows that St Anne was God’s Granny, the mother of the Virgin Mary.  Leonardo da Vinci’s two surviving paintings of Madonna and Child with St Anne are in the National Gallery, London, and the Louvre in Paris.  Leonardo belongs to the late quattrocento (fourteen hundreds) and beyond.  My St Anne and Child is imagined in an earlier, trecento (thirteen hundreds) setting.  A modern photograph is compared to an old painting.

I think all art, like all mathematics, is part of an immense patchwork act of self-referencing; a vast, meandering tautology.  But in the maze of topics, which taken together, if that were possible, would say no more than ‘A dog is a dog’ or ‘I am that I am’—in the often dull maze—appear provocative imitations of life.  The imitation theory goes back at least to Plato.  I extend it from the arts to science as well.  Aren’t all disciplines today called ‘memetics’, from meme (mental addition to the world)?  I hope memetics also remembers its debt to mimesis (mental copy of the world).  My provocative also suggests that art awakens.  One can provoke by being too witty by half, or with mockery and pseudo-erudition, or with overweening tenderness; or with all these together, and more, as I do here.

Alan Marshfield

top of page                                                  Grandmother and Child