Thinking aloud about Placidus..
This images is from “Pisanello – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.”
If you really look at this painting, it has a rather otherworldly quality. The animals and the figure of St Eustace (he changed his name when he converted) all seem rather stiff and the landscape makes very little sense. It almost looks as though the figures are painted on top of a map of the forest, rather than being part of a scene.
I suppose when you consider that it is a painting representing an encounter with the numinous, it needn’t make sense. And perhaps he is depicting the moment after the event, when everything winds back a little.
I want to depict, if I can, the moment itself. The pulse of – Something – from the stag, the dogs and the horse and the man all astonished, skidding to a stop from a headlong chase. But also – and my little Animal Vignettes should help with this – the sense that this is happening in a forest with other creatures going about their daily activities. Some will be observing, aware; some, like the little Fawn, totally oblivious. My thought at the moment is for the stag to have bounded up onto a convenient bit of rock, and started a waterfall, which references the water of baptism. I’m finding it hard to design a landscape that makes sense.
Maybe Pisanello had that problem too! There’s no reason to believe the artists of the past had it any easier than we do…
Finding the right references for horses reined in from a gallop is so far proving impossible, and so many other things are proving elusive, too. I originally planned to have a frame of scrollwork with the symbols of the four Gospels in the four corner, then I thought I would extend the animals into the frame, and now I don’t know at all.
This is another case when I find myself agreeing with Degas (“If it were easy, it would not be fun!”). It is the difficulties and the challenges that give me something interesting to ponder, and devising my improvisatory stitching technique for the animals is giving me some interesting stitching.
I don’t really know the answers to these questions. You’ll have to find your way to your picture as you see it. Horses being reined-in from a gallop sounds like a cue to watch some old westerns. (Giving Placidus a sherif’s badge and a ten-gallon hat might not quite work, though!)
To me, it is a strange picture. Things seem to be positioned in the wrong place, they are frozen in an odd movement, and they also appear to be lonely and have nothing to do with each other.
The hare is skipping away out of the picture, but isn’t the white dog also skipping? Should the back legs really look like that?
How will you make heads and tails of this scene?
You do like to challenge yourself!
To me it looks like allusions to a succession of scenes. Somewhat randomized, you could almost frame the episodes.
It makes me think of the Chinese scroll paintings that you read from bottom to top, but mush less organized.