DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.

The Italians have a compact aphorism for the problem of translation: traduttore, traditore. Translator, Traitor in English. To translate is to betray. This gets at the fundamental problem of accessing texts in other languages (although T. S. Eliot supposedly said he could tell Dante was a great poet reading him in Italian, before Eliot could speak Italian himself). But translations can take other forms, like texts into the visual arts. Or into films.

But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the torso, back, legs, arms, and knees, with the bones underneath. Then one may be sure that through much study attitudes in any position can be drawn by help of the imagination without one’s having the living forms in view. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique, trans. L. S. Maclehose, Dover Publ., 1999, p. 210 I'd like to offer two alternative

one of the qualities that make Old Master drawings both beautiful and interesting is their pentimenti

I thought to myself, and then said to him, it would be fun to think of the right painting subject for that frame.