Adriaen Brouwer, the Flemish artist who worked in Holland for part of his short life (1605-38), was thrilled on one occasion to receive 200 guilders for a picture. When he got home, he poured the money on his bed and rolled among the silver pieces. Then, Houbraken said, he spent most of it overnight and felt relieved that he had 'rid himself of all that ballast'.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, December 13, 2008
Rolling in Dough
Anthony Bailey, Vermeer: A View of Delft (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), p. 40: