Lost in the crowd

I know you'll remember my fascination with the wide-eyed young woman on the left in Pontormo's "Visitation" -- and the painting that evolved as I paired her with another young woman spotted in a Boston crowd last fall. 

Well, it happened again, thanks to my current project of browsing through art history for poses for my One Hundred Hands project.   I opened up Google Images for Filippino Lippi, son of the only vaguely familiar (to me) Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi. 

And there he was -- in a presumed self-portrait on the sidelines of his "Dispute with Simon Magus."

That gaze!  I had to give it a try -- not to copy exactly, but just to spend time getting to know that face.  Also, I thought,  I could try working on one of the small canvases I bought recently as an alternative to the fine arts paper I usually work on.

And so I set to work on "Young Fil," as I called him -- restraining myself, though, from putting him into a backward baseball cap.

Things developed quickly and easily, and I was quite pleased and excited.

  

But it was at about this point that I allowed myself to think something that had been nudging at me over the course of a week:-- his nose was too long.  I hemmed and hawed and decided to belatedly accept the counsel of artist/teacher Richard Schmidt:  "Never leave a mistake on the easel."

Okay.  So I painted over the middle of  Young Fil's  face and re-did his nose:

 

This looked quite promising, especially when viewed from across the room -- a familiar painter's technique for assessing progress.

Up close, though, it was a different story.  I had to admit that the placements I'd made in relation to the too-long nose were now off-kilter. (I should have listened to Richard Schmidt's whisper earlier in the week).   The mouth should go a little more to the right, and the subject's left eye should move a little more toward the centre.

So many ups and downs.  Should I try to correct, feature by feature?  Or should I just paint the whole thing over and start again?  Maybe give him a baseball cap after all?  I didn't have the heart to deal with it.

For now, he's been consigned to sit out a few games (maybe a season) in la panchina -- that's Italian for the dugout. 

You didn't know they played baseball in Italy?  I'm not talking about the feats of Italian-Americans Yogi Berra or Joe DiMaggio -- but actual on-the-ground baseball in Italy, a gift from the New World to the Old.

And maybe the last word on my Young Fil experiment belongs with baseball legend Satchel Paige:

"You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them."