posted by sooyup
on
Daily trivia,
Mythology
I know that’s a curious title, but it happens to be the title of this painting by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. It is one of a series called the Perseus Cycle, commissioned in 1875 by the Tory statesman (and Prime Minister in waiting) Arthur Balfour to decorate his London home. Don’t you find it heartening that senior politicians of the day were so cultured, and so immersed in classical literature, that they should seek to line the walls of their homes with illustrations from Homer? (If you look carefully, there’s a guy fighting with some sort of serpent in the picture.) I may scoff, but if I had the bottle - okay, let’s face it, if were master in my own home - I would have filled my walls with similar pictures, the only difference being that the model would have been Emma. Sadly, there wasn’t a Mrs Balfour to pose for these paintings - the cousin he had hoped to marry died of typhoid. Perhaps that explains Balfour’s most famous utterance: “Nothing matters very much, and most things don't matter at all."
I know that’s a curious title, but it happens to be the title of this painting by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones. It is one of a series called the Perseus Cycle, commissioned in 1875 by the Tory statesman (and Prime Minister in waiting) Arthur Balfour to decorate his London home. Don’t you find it heartening that senior politicians of the day were so cultured, and so immersed in classical literature, that they should seek to line the walls of their homes with illustrations from Homer? (If you look carefully, there’s a guy fighting with some sort of serpent in the picture.) I may scoff, but if I had the bottle - okay, let’s face it, if were master in my own home - I would have filled my walls with similar pictures, the only difference being that the model would have been Emma. Sadly, there wasn’t a Mrs Balfour to pose for these paintings - the cousin he had hoped to marry died of typhoid. Perhaps that explains Balfour’s most famous utterance: “Nothing matters very much, and most things don't matter at all."
