Stories Portraits

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) in his Canterbury Tales written between 1386-90, provided a portrait of the society of his times. Within this collection of stories, the Canon Yeoman s tale, gives us an insight into some of the ways in which alchemy was viewed at that time. Chaucer obviously had more than a superficial undertsanding of alchemy"... 

The Pickwick Papers The Picture of Dorian Gray Pilgrim s Progress The Plague Plato s Dialogues Plato s The Republic Poe s Short Stories A Portrait of Artist... 

Theophrastus was frail and sickly as an infant and suffered from rickets as a child. The effects of the disease can be seen in an etching that was made of Paracelsus as an adult. According to legend, he was also a eunuch, the result of an encounter with a wild boar. Another story says that he was castrated by some drunken soldiers. No one really knows which story is true or whether Paracelsus was indeed emasculated. Portraits of him as an adult never show him as having a beard, and he never became involved with any woman. Furthermore, he once declared that it was better to be a eunuch than an adulterer. On the other hand, he became bald in his later life and eunuchs almost never go bald. 

R. Gordon Wasson, the father of ethnopharmacology who revealed the presence of psilocybin to the late 20th century. His story is touched on ahead (229 ff.), and is described as well in The Magic Mushroom Seeker, Dioscorides Press, in which we get an intimate portrait of this banker-scholar from his daughter, friends, and colleagues. 

I have painted too drab a portrait of today s students, making them seem a solemn lot. That is only half of their story if they were so dreary I wouldn t so thoroughly enjoy their company. The other half is that they are easy to like. They are quick to laugh and to offer friendship. They are not introverts. They are usually kind and are more considerate of one another than any student generation I have known. 

Baudelaire s own art of translation can be seen, strangely, to take the colors from the cheeks of Poe s own portrait and enframing text, to reframe the story and the model, and eventually, to make yet another lifelike canvas, in a future poem.92... 

Jackson Hunsicker, the editor of Turning Heads, Portraits of Grace, Inspiration, and Possibiiities, a compilation of photos and stories of women who are bald and beautiful after chemotherapy (www.turningheadsthebook. com). Breast cancer, diagnosed in 2000 at age fifty-one. (Treatment lumpectomy, radiation. Chemo cyclophosphamide, doxurubicin and paclitaxel.)... 

In Nick Broomfield s Kurt Gourtney, a film about the death of rock star Kurt Cobain that paints an unflattering portrait of his widow, Courtney Love, Broomfield (like Herzog) makes himself and his quest to make the film the story of the film. But the style is noticeably different Broomfield, much like Judith Helfand in Blue Vinyl and Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, is confrontational, in a style somewhat akin to televised investigative journalism. 

With the subject of the film so involved in its creation, there is the risk that it will become a vanity piece, but that doesn t seem to be the case here. The portrait of Philippe that comes through is complex and not always flattering, and of course the film is much more than just his story. It s also the story of his many collaborators and their relationship to Philippe and each other. 

Hart-Davis, Adam. Chain Reactions Pioneers of British Science and Technology and the Stories That Link Them. London National Portrait Gallery, 2000. 

The portraits of Catherine Howard painted about 1521 show her wearing an oval gold pendant set with a sapphire, chased with the story of Tobit, and Princess Mary Tudor s inventory of 1542 lists brooches with the stories of the finding of Moses, Moses striking the rock, Susanna, Solomon, Abraham, David, Noah and Jacob s Dream, as well as subjects drawn from the New Testament. The only recognisably secular subjects in her pictorial jewels, indeed, are a brooch with the history of Pyramus and Thisbe and another with an Antike and a French motto. 

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