First Friday Links – April 2019

The Open Culture site has a small feature on Franz Kafka's drawings. "In those diaries, Kafka doodled incessantly – stark, graphic drawings infused with the same angst as his writing. In fact, many of these drawings have ended up gracing the covers of Kafka’s books."

The Risking Enchantment podcast takes on the subject of Monsters and Morality in Romanticism.

Have you ever been perusing a Medieval manuscript and thought, I wish someone would turn these fantastic beasts into piñatas? "He uses the crepe paper creations as the basis for his sculptures. In the past, Benavidez recreated the strange beasts found in Bosch’s triptych but has more recently turned to the Luttrell Psalter, a famous medieval manuscript."

Have scholars discovered Leonardo da Vinci's only surviving sculpture? "It’s always been part of Leonardo’s legend that he made sculptures, including a giant horse, but not a single extant three-dimensional work by him had been identified. The Virgin with the Laughing Child is the miraculous exception, according to the curators of the exhibition Verrocchio."

Joshua Hren writes about the Christ-haunted George Saunders. "Still, though Saunders may have formally left the Church, its forms didn’t leave him. Raised in parochial Catholic schools in the 1960s, to this day he traces his need for 'mystery, and metaphor, and beauty' to 'the power of the Catholic Mass' he encountered in childhood."

Franz Klein considers the farming life, springtime, and Hopkins. "Everything about the spring-- and about Lent, which occurs in the spring-- evokes the impending freshness, to steal Hopkins' word, that is buried deep in the dark, loamy dirt, hidden somewhere amidst last year's dead growth. There is dearest freshness in Mary's womb-- and in the deep-down things of the earth, too."