Our youngest is very fond of the village with the Rembrandt so we took some of the family to visit it a couple of weeks ago. The Rembrandt isn’t really very inspiring. When you’ve seen one bleeding body on a cross you’ve seen them all. But I do like the church it’s in, and the statue of Mary and a jowly Jesus. There’s no inscription so it’s probably a local effort. I don’t know what the blue ribbons hung on Jesus’s arm signify.
The artist likely never travelled far from Gascony, never saw a Saracen, a Maure or a Persian, but probably had a wife, perhaps sisters, and there were women in the fields, babes in arms, in cradles, crawling on the floor. He fashioned faces from a distant past from those he knew, wife or peasant woman and her baby, no beauties these either. Notions of beauty were different then. Full face, round belly, straight limbs. What more could a mother want?
Village church
pale-plastered plaster-sainted
where dust motes float
incense-tasting
and lofty windows are full of sky.
The Four Swans 