My contribution for the weekend. As always, please hold your yawns till the end.

I confess that as art goes I come from the "I know what I like" school. One artist whose works I genuinely like is the early Italian Renaissance painter Masaccio (1401-1428). In part this is because he was the first Italian artist whose works break completely from the stiffness of late medieval art, using perspective to give his paintings an almost three dimensional depth and shading to suggest heavenly gradations of light. Mostly though it stems from the fact that we know almost nothing about him outside of his art.

Born Tomasso Cassai (for his grandfather's profession of cabinetmaker) or, in other accounts, di Ser Giovanni di Mone, in 1401, he lost his father at the age of five. His mother remarried, but the next fact we know for certain is that he joined one of the seven main crafts guilds in Tuscany's capital city of Florence in 1422. It was members of this guild who gave him the nickname that has overshadowed his birth name: in English, "Masaccio" means something like "big, ugly Tom." He apparently was a big goodnatured lug of a man; the only image we have in paint of him is a self-portrait contained in one of his surviving frescoes. We also have no idea where he learned to paint, a very strange circumstance in an era when the great artists of the day ran workshops and schools and younger painters were apprenticed to them.

His career lasted a bare five years. In those five years he completed a number of paintings, many of them lost in the centuries after his death. The most famous of his surviving works grace the walls of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, painted for a patron named Felice Brancacci for his family's private chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Other works can be found in such far-flung locations as Berlin's Staatliche Museen, Florence's fabled Uffizi Gallery, and London's National Gallery.

In late 1427, Masaccio left some of the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel unfinished and relocated to Rome. We do not know why he moved; we only know that by the autumn of 1428, he was dead, two months short of his twenty-seventh birthday. One lurid account claims he was poisoned by a jealous fellow artist; another says he died "of grief and want" which suggests that, unable to get commissions in the highly competitive art community in Rome, he fell ill from malnutrition and was carried off by disease or outright starvation.

His influence can be seen in particular in the paintings of the late Renaissance painter and sculptor Michelangelo. I see a lot of Masaccio in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings, especially in the size and musculature of the figures.



Above is a detail from his painting of the Holy Trinity (1425), in Florence's church of Santa Maria Novella. The figures depicted here are the Virgin Mary and a "donor"--i.e. the patron who commissioned the painting. I couldn't find a picture of the full painting small enough to put on the blog, but the Trinity is depicted as God tenderly supporting a cross on which hangs the dead Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove hovering between them. The whole scene is given perspective by a spatial structure in the form of a barrel vault, giving the impression that the whole painting is set into a hole in the wall, as art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote.

My favorite of all Masaccio paintings, however, is "Adam and Eve Expelled from the Garden of Eden," also known as "The Expulsion from Paradise" (c. 1427).



Masaccio painted exclusively on biblical themes. This one has brought the story of the Fall and Adam and Eve's punishment by being banned from Eden alive for me in a way the words on the page cannot. In her book SISTER WENDY'S 1000 MASTERPIECES, Sister Wendy Beckett, Carmelite nun and art historian, pinpoints its emotional impact: "No artist has entered more deeply into the horror of the expulsion from Paradise than Masaccio. It is a refugee situation that he portrays: home and happiness swiftly turned into loss and misery. It is this position of exile, so painfully familiar to our own times, that we can well appreciate." I've never been to Florence, but the first time I saw a picture of this painting my breath literally caught in my throat.

Worth noting that Masaccio apparently painted his figures of Adam and Eve nude, and some later painter--possibly Filippino Lippi, who completed some of the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel some six decades after Masaccio abandoned them--added fig leaves to them. In the late twentieth century, a cleaning removed the fig leaves. In any case, there is no eroticism implicit in the painting--only grief and contrition and fear. The great brooding swordwielding angel who blocks the way back in to Eden has a look of such sympathy and sorrow on its face as to move me to tears.

So Eden sank to grief--as Robert Frost wrote in another context.

One day I hope to get to Florence. And the first place I'm going to sightsee (after a good authentic Tuscan meal, of course) will be the Brancacci Chapel. Surely I won't be the only overawed slackjawed tourist standing gawking before the majesty and genius of a man who gave us more beauty in five short years than most artists do in a lifetime.

And on that note, fair thee well.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Got a story for you from Willard's family's recollections. She's been hors de combat for the past three weeks, between oral surgery and a car accident; she's improving, but she told me to make what I could of the story of the Valentine bride.



Along Conasauga Creek, in the shadow of the Unicoi Mountains, stand the remains of an old military fort, built by the US Army in the 1830s, just before they began rounding up the Cherokee who lived in the area and forcing them off to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears. In later years, after the fort was deserted, the area in which it stood was a favorite walk for a young courting couple. They didn't get to spend much time together; he worked on the railroad, and she was still living at home, helping her mother raise a large and boisterous family, and, when she was needed, helping out neighbors as well.

Though he was a shy young man, he eventually took his courage in his hands and told her he loved her, and asked her to be his wife. She joyfully agreed, and they made plans to meet at their minister's house on Valentine's Day, two weeks away; there they would be married, and like all young couples, they believed they would live happily ever after. They parted at her front door, exchanging sweet chaste kisses and promising to meet at the preacher's house at the end of the long two weeks.

He went back to work on the railroad, daydreaming as he worked of his lovely bride-to-be; she returned home. The first week she spent making her dress for the wedding. The second week she fell ill. For several days her life was despaired of, but at last, on the very day before her wedding, she seemed to take a turn for the better.

The next morning, the young groom arrived at the preacher's house bright and early, eager to meet his bride, go through the brief ceremony in the minister's study, and begin married life. To his surprise, though, his bride was late. He was becoming really worried when, to his relief, he heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs. "Ah," he thought. "She must have been getting ready up there."



A moment later, his bride stood at his elbow, smiling at him. She looked lovely, but was much paler than usual. Even worse, she seemed to have lost her voice: when the minister asked her the beautiful simple questions of the ceremony, she only nodded.

And then, the minister told him to take her left hand and place the broad gold wedding band he had bought on her finger.

The instant he touched her, she vanished.

The frightened groom and the minister rushed out of the house in a frenzy and ran all the way to her family home. In the yard, they stopped; they could hear sounds of sawing and hammering in the barn, and, in the house, the ominous sound of weeping women.

The young lover went into the house, his heart growing colder by the moment. Inside, lying on a bed, was his bride. She was dead, and the women of the family were laying her out for burial, while the men in the barn built her coffin. On a chair by the bed lay her wedding dress; it would now be her graveclothes.

She had been helping with nursing duties for a family up the holler that had been stricken with typhoid fever, a common ailment in the old days of poor sanitation. She had seemed to rally on the day before her wedding, but by morning she was dead.

After her funeral, her groom left the county, but everyone remembered the strange events at his wedding. To paraphrase the poet Alan Seeger, she to her pledged word was true; she did not fail that rendezvous.

Many years later, now an elderly man, her groom returned and lived out his days in the shadow of the Unicois.

He never married.

He remained faithful to his Valentine bride.



The picture of the ghostly bride was taken in 1936 at Raynham Hall in Great Britain, and is said to depict the Hall's famous Brown Lady in her wedding dress. This picture is a rarity--it is one that has never been debunked.

And on that spectral note, fair thee well.

In the blog below about Tony Bourdain's visit to New Orleans last week, I mentioned a series of books by James Lee Burke about Cajun detective Dave Robichaux, and specifically one of the books, IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD.

Imagine my surprise when I read just yesterday that this year's Oscar nominee Tommy Lee Jones (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) will star in a film version of that novel called simply IN THE ELECTRIC MIST.

To the best of my knowledge, the only previous film based on a Robichaux book starred Alec Baldwin, back in his younger days. Too pretty by half. Jones, though, has the craggy, weary, nothing-can-surprise-me-anymore sort of face I associate with Robichaux, and he's a fine actor to boot. This one oughta be good.

Have a good day. Snow here; just enough to leave a lacy skift on the grass and thin blankets on fenceposts and the like, not enough to close school though. Otherwise cold and cloudy and damp; there was rain last night before the temps fell and brought the snow. Till next time fair thee well.

Not a good day today. Words that should have been left unsaid--or, in the case of email, unsent--a cold wind, dark clouds that do not rain, no matter how threateningly navy blue they get--tired, irritable, bored--the relevant words in French would be malaise or ennui--both teetering on being the eighth deadly sin.

We regard castles as places of romance. Who hasn't imagined being in an Arthurian romance, with the fair lady looking down from the tower as her knightly true love fights off evil barons or dragons or waves goodbye as he goes off on some quest or other? How long could she wait faithfully for the knight's return?

Castles were not built for romance, unfortunately. Their original purpose was, pure and simple, military defense. Castles always had a garrison of soldiers and many times the entire population of the surrounding villages and countryside would take shelter within their vast stone walls. Some of the best preserved ones are in Wales, that mountainous section of Britain where the natives revolted against the crown--particularly during the rule of the redoubtable Edward I (1272-1307)--over and over again in the medieval period--and they are not romantic; he was a warrior king, and romance was far from on his mind as he built the strongholds and garrisoned them with the intent of preventing more uprisings by such great Welsh rebels as Llewelyn the Great, and later, Owain Glyndwr. His ploy succeeded; Llewelyn died in battle and Owain Glyndwr died in England in his bed, old and forgotten, in his daughter's Hertfordshire home. Such romance as reposed in Edward I's soul was expended in the Eleanor crosses that he built as memorials for his beloved wife, Eleanor of Castile, after her death in 1290.

No matter. I want a hiding place today, and the thick stone walls of a castle (some as thick as twenty to twenty-four feet) sound like a good place. Up in a tower, perhaps in a narrow Gothic window overlooking the moat. Don't know if I'm waiting for a knight's return or for a siege to begin or a battle to break out under the walls; do know that it's probably a drafty old pile and there aren't all that many comforts around, but I can dream. Maybe there's even a ghost or two to keep me company; castles are notoriously haunted places.



Sorry to be so incoherent; I'm feeling sorry for myself today.

Till next time, fair thee well.

Ghost lights are a staple of folklore. I've already covered them once in an earlier blog about lights that haunt train tracks, and are usually associated with some tragedy. Other ghost lights are more anomalous. Some may have their origin in legends from the Old World; the story of Jack o'Lantern is one such.

Geographically, other than a light that once haunted a cemetery about a half-mile from the house, the closest ones to my hometown appear on North Carolina's fabled Brown Mountain. There are two origin legends that account for these dancing multicolored lights, which no amount of scientific study has managed to debunk. One says the lights represent spirits of Cherokee maidens, searching for husbands and lovers on who died in a battle on Brown Mountain in the year 1200. Another dates their origin to the year 1850, when the lights were seen during a search for a local woman who had disappeared on the mountain. Her body was eventually located at the base of a cliff, and it is believed she was murdered by her abusive husband. Other sources say the lights are mentioned in documents dating to the 1770s.

The Brown Mountain Lights appear most often on summer evenings. Skeptics have blamed swamp gas, foxfire (the phosphorescent gleam that shows up on rotting wood), pitchblende (a radioactive metallic element), and headlights for the phenomena, but none of these explanations have gained widespread acceptance.

About a quarter century ago, I heard a song called "Brown Mountain Light" for the first time. Written by the great country songwriter "Skyland Scotty" Wiseman, it was recorded by the Kingston Trio, but the version I learned was recorded by the Country Gentlemen in 1966, on their album BRINGING MARY HOME. The song revolves around a southern plantation owner who vanished while hunting in the Brown Mountain area. His slave came searching for him, but was lost too; the light is explained away as the slave still "searching for his master who's long gone on."

Nice story--except that nowhere could I locate any account in North Carolina folklore that links Brown Mountain to a lost hunter and his faithful body servant.

It would be twenty years or more before I located what I believe to be Scotty Wiseman's source material. It's a story about another light entirely: the Cole Mountain Light in the area of Mooresville, West Virginia.

The Cole Mountain Light origin story was originally collected by the great West Virginia folklorist Ruth Ann Musick, and retold by Michael Norman and Beth Scott in their book HAUNTED HERITAGE (2002). The story begins in the 1850s, when a planter named Charles Jones came to Cole Mountain on a raccoon hunt. Jones vanished into thin air on the mountain; his slave and others searched for his body for a week before they gave up. On the one-year anniversary of Jones's disappearance, it's said, the slave renewed the search, but he also vanished without a trace. The light began to appear shortly after the slave vanished, and it is said that it is the lantern the slave carried when he went on his second and doomed search for Charles Jones.

This is purely speculation on my part, but I suspect that Scotty Wiseman heard or read the legend of the Cole Mountain Light and was inspired to write a song about it, but moved the location to Brown Mountain. Brown Mountain is internationally famous; Cole Mountain, for all that its story is equally as interesting as Brown Mountain's, is not.

If you have a chance, seek out "Brown Mountain Light." It's some great bluegrass, as performed by the Country Gentlemen. Just remember it's not really about Brown Mountain, but about a lesser known mountain a couple hundred miles up the road. And until next time, fair thee well.

Check out the comments below. Whit was kind enough to download some YouTube video for me, including the Country Gentlemen performing "Brown Mountain Light." Thanks a bunch, Whit!