They say Verona’s roses paled nearby
and summer winds retired out of spite
the day the master poised the brush to paint.
Madonna smiles, resplendent in her grace,
the Child swaddled in her azure robes:
The critics rave about the lucid strokes
that shine like flames upon a canvas sea.
The hues shine through the many centuries,
the souvenir of brightest brilliance,
undying to the transient populace.
Instead –
thrown out with trash and cans of beer,
half-painted as a shoddy, forged Vermeer,
by whom, but rats shall it be seen?
Oh Fame, you are a fickle, fickle fiend!
Beautiful. Would like to hear about the artwork that inspired this.
ReplyDeleteThank you! This sonnet was actually inspired by something interesting that I read and no a specific portrait (though I was perhaps envisioning da Vinci's lovely Madonnas).
ReplyDeleteThere was apparently a fraudulent painting of Shakespeare that actually a forgery painted over a canvas of an old, supposedly unimportant painting of Madonna and her child.
That got me to thinking about a storyline about a masterful Renaissance Italian painter whose beautiful artwork was doomed to obscurity by a forger who decided to deface it.