Always on the lookout for a good coffee table book, several months ago I was thumbing through art books at the Cambridge Library. By change I took from the shelf a collection of the works of
Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose name I did not recognize. Opening randomly to the middle, however, I found a painting depicting a scene very much recognizable as one lifted near-exactly from several instances throughout my life...
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The Timid Lover (1719) by Jean-Antoine Watteau |
It was deeply comforting to see the shyness I've experienced played out in a scene three hundred years old.
In an entirely seperate book,
Alain de Botton wrote about the consoling power of art to normalize our experiences: "There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter." He ends the passage, which I love, by quoting Schopenhauer:
'The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands'
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