"...plotted and pieced..."

I spent the Summer of Love doing jigsaw puzzles.  Not just any puzzles, of course, but Springbok, which I fell in love with for their beautiful, unusual pictures--a page from the Très Riches Heures, a K'ang Hsi dynasty Chinese plate--and their odd-shaped pieces.  I did them to music.  I loved the making of beauty and order from a dazzling heap of shards; I loved the fitting of the pieces; I loved the riddles and the metamorphoses:  how a moon-edged cloud? a snow-shadowed hill? became a shoulder, and a corner of a face? a tangled thorn.

This was one of my very favorites:






It's from a Medici palace:  a tabletop in pietre dure--inlaid marble--a puzzle in cardboard of a puzzle in stone.  A prince had a portrait of his rarest china painted--cold mistresses but all exquisite--and the painting Gorgoned into stone.   I love it for its layers on layers of meta-ness.  Flowers painted on china; china wreathed with living flowers, set in stone; stone imaged and recut.  All stone:  the fragile and unfading porcelain (a gathering of many years), the brief garlands, their shadows.

And here is one more transformation:  the flickering image of a picture of a puzzle of a work of time.

Nine