Crusie’s Guide to Art 17

Well, this is bizarre. As I said when I started reposting this series, these captioned paintings were something I fooled around with one weekend over a decade ago. You know me, anything for a cheap laugh. But I just searched to see what this was before I got cute with it, and believe it or not, it’s Isabella and that damn pot of basil again, or to be more precise, pot of Lorenzo. This one is by “Ricciardo Meacci (5 December 1856 – 15 January 1938), an Italian (Sienese) painter who came under the influence of the “Pre-Raphaelite” movement” as per Wikipedia. I’m just gobsmacked it’s another Lorenzo-under-the-herb. And these (this week’s and last week’s) aren’t the only two, either, there are many many if you google. How a lover’s severed head in a pot of leafy greens became a great romantic motif is beyond me, let alone the fact that a poet as great as Keats wrote about it in a beautiful sixty-four page book (it’s here).

And now I really want to write a romcom with this in it. We’re doing art crime next year, I think. Possibly one of them will be about a painting of a pot of Basil.