Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Jacob and His Twelve Sons.”
The Frick Collection has a surprise for us: a room-filling loan show of “Jacob and His Twelve Sons” (circa 1640-45), thirteen full-length, life-size imagined portraits, all but unknown in the United States until now, by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. Twelve are from the dining room of Auckland Castle, in the small northeastern English town of Bishop Auckland, and one, reuniting the suite, is from another English collection. They constitute a terrific feat of Baroque storytelling: movies of their day. All the characters—each a distinct personality uniquely posed, costumed, and accessorized, and towering against a bright, clouded sky and a low swath of sylvan scenery— appear to be approximately as old as they are in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis. There the dying Jacob prophesies, in gorgeous verse, the fates of the founders-to-be of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Some will fare better than others: poorly, in the case of the eldest, Reuben, “unstable as water,” and in the cases of the second and third, Simeon and Levi, “for in their anger they killed men,” and very well indeed in those of Judah, from whom the “sceptre shall not depart,” and— of course—Joseph, “a fruitful bough” once sold into slavery by his brothers and subsequently their benefactor as the overlord of Egypt. (No, I haven’t read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, “Joseph and His Brothers”—to my acute and, on deadline, irremediable regret. Note to friends: please stop telling me how wonderful it is!) The show enthralls in numerous ways.
この記事は The New Yorker の February 12 - 19,2018 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の February 12 - 19,2018 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
