Taxonomy

After a week in London (and briefly, Oxford), I came home and was going to report when I was felled by a sneaky virus. Timing suggests the plane, which, regardless of its merits as a way of getting home is a perfect device for wafting other people’s germs at you for an hour and a half. I generally try and totter South once the exams are over, but for once, I wasn’t astonished by leaving winter and arriving in spring – though it is true that my Mama had a camellia in a bud vase on the mantelpiece, it was bloody cold and there wasn’t a sign of a daffodil, or even a crocus. I varied my usual long hours in the British Library with a beguiling day and a half in the Warburg, looking for matches for mysterious fifteenth century images. The picture library is compelling: it’s easy to get obsessed with the idea that the image you’re after must be there somewhere. But, under ‘Allegory of Life?’ ‘The Soul?’ Something else entirely? I also found myself tangling with the taxonomy of another great print collector, Christopher Columbus’s bastard son Fernand. The renaissance mind in action (categories are nested and hierarchic). Saint/not saint. Clothed/nude, male/female, animals, number of figures are the basic ones. Thus an engraving of the Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John comes out as Three Nude Male Saints, as far as I can see, because the nudeness and maleness of the principal figure leads over the gender and clothedness of the others. Once you learn to work it, it is, like Aby Warburg’s collection, a mighty taxonomic engine. I’d never really thought before how difficult it is to organise prints. The weather wasn’t nice in London, but here it is quite spectacularly foul. Blizzard has turned to sleet, and there’s been a sort of insidious creeping chill. I have been in bed, coughing, and Miss Kit has been welded to my lap, which is mostly nice for both of us. The only problem has been over her medication. It’s obviously extremely upsetting to wake her from trusting slumber and do something awful, so I have to catch her when she’s been off for a walkabout and has just returned. These moments have been few. She has flicked an ear at the sleet spattering the window, and snuggled. The antibiotic does seem to be doing her some good, at any rate.