Vaux Le Vicomte

Had the wonderful opportunity to tag along my extremely generous host's Sunday bike ride.

I think I asked a few hours into the ride, where it was we were actually going.

"Hey, where are we going?"

Such questions seem like obvious things to ask, but when you don't know an area almost at all and there's no real reason to be going - except to go - out, they're mostly inconsequential.

"We're going to Vaux Le Vicomte."

For the uninitiated, or at least, unversed in French, Vaux Le Vicomte, sounds something like Vooleviszoome, which just proves my point above.

In the end, we came across a huge castle!

Inside, is generally what you'd expect when it comes to castle-things: immaculately reconstructed rooms filled with this or that. Art on the walls, mostly copies of other famous works (the garden on the other side is the real gem of this place).

Of all the artwork, the engravings really got my attention. This one, especially:

This is Jean François Niceron and what's really amazing is that diagram he has - it just looks so contemporary. The above geometric model is some sort of stellated dodecahedron and below that is a figure of a Hypercube, if it could be in 3D space:

Very interesting how it's illustrated by showing a projection of the intricate figures onto a 2D plane. A little research finds that this guy wrote a book on perspective. 

I haven't yet found out what his portrait is doing in Vaux Le Vicomte. It's quite the silly place!

Another closeup of the portrait - I found the technique, especially around the eyes, wonderful:

Another etching:

Again, what's interesting is the out-of-context contemporary feel of this etching - I don't know what it was doing at this place and I don't know why the face has no... face. There was a couple printings of it, some with different faces, some actually mirrored.

My guess is that some of these were test prints, before the actual plate was printed. It might have been that the plate was used as a template (hmm, thus the term), so the engraver could fill in anybody's face into the blank space and save a few weeks of work.

But, to have them just presented like so... - quite amazing.

Final one:

I was just pleased that my (admittantly much looser) technique for this little guy:

Proved to have some echos to this past master's methods.

A good trip to a place I'd never go myself, alone.