Skull & Serpent

 When I visit museums, I'm always excited to see groups of people sketching the artefacts. I always really want to join them, and then destroy them by doing the best and most crazed drawing. This is a competition, I think, and I could win. But usually, I'm with someone who needs to go fast (understandable - life is short, and our legs hurt quickly), and I probably don't have a big, beautiful, chunky sketchbook on hand either.

Fortunately, we are blessed with online catalogues of museum pieces that are both fascinating to look at, and enticing to draw.

One such wonder is the V&A's collections, in which I found an intriguing ivory figure of a child stepping on a skull and a snake. A tiny little goth.

Here he is.

The website speculates that this is "probably" a depiction of the Christ child - overcoming death (skull) and sin (snake). Other details are similarly murky. It was made in "France or possibly the Netherlands" somewhere in the estimated forty years between 1780 and 1820. This little boy is an enigma, and I really like him. 

He was the clear first choice for a sketch, and I love his serene little face, sort-of statesman-like, and the cartoonish, medieval look of that weird snake. Cute.