The Church of San Giorgio is like an art gallery. All the pictures are altarpieces which vary in merit but all are well worth seeing. But what subjects these poor artists had to paint! And for what patrons! A rain of manna, thirty feet long and twenty feet high, and, as a companion picture, the miracle of the five loaves! What is there worth painting about that? Hungry persons pounce upon some small crumbs, bread is handed out to countless others. The painters have racked their brains to give these trivialities some significance.
San Giorgio ist eine Galerie von guten Gemälden, alle Altarblätter, wo nicht von gleichem Wert, doch duich- aus merkwürdig. Aber die unglückseigen Künstler, was mußten die malen! und für wen! Ein Mannaregen, vielleicht dreißig Fuß lang und zwanzig hoch! das Wunder der fünf Brote zum Gegenstück! was war daran zu malen! Hungrige Menschen, die über kleine Körner herfallen, unzählige andere, denen Brot präsentiert wird. Die Künstler haben sich die Folter gegeben, um solche Armseligkeiten bedeutend zu machen.
"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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Thursday, August 07, 2025
Trivialities
Goethe, Italian Journey, Sept. 17, 1786 (Verona; tr. W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer):