The Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Thomas Craven's A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day and Other Sources

As a young St Lucian living on the outskirts of a fading colonial empire, Walcott had no direct access to metropolitan museums and in order to familiarise himself with the European tradition he admired so much he had no choice but to rely on reproductions and artbooks. The accessibility, portability and transferability of these sources ensured that they continued to remain central to Walcott's engagement with the visual arts throughout his career; as a result, his relationship with a particular painter or work ended up being mediated and inflected not only by editorial selections (and omissions) but also by the commentaries, art criticism and art-historical annotations that accompanied the reproductions that Walcott carefully studied.

All the painters from the Italian tradition that Walcott mentions in Another Life, for example, are those Craven had identified in A Treasury as the cornerstones of Western art and, almost invariably, the visual referent evoked in the lines Walcott devotes to these artists is to be found in Craven's colour plates: from Giotto's ‘cherubs’ in The Deposition (1305–6) to Crivelli's ‘jewelled insect’ in Virgin and Child (c. 1480); from Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (1508–10) to Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks (1483–6); from Fra Angelico's ‘golden plaits’ in The Coronation of the Virgin (1435) to Verrocchio and Leonardo's John the Baptist's ‘kneeling angel’ in The Baptism of Christ (1472–5). In his analysis of Another Life, Baugh and Nepaulsingh single out Craven's volume also as a primary example of Walcott's simultaneous engagement with the verbal and the visual and highlight how the poet quickly absorbed textual interventions and responded to them just as much as he did to the paintings themselves: for example, they observe that when Walcott refers to Andrea del Verrocchio's The Baptism of Christ in Another Life, he not only directly acknowledges Craven's book but actually builds on the information it provides, namely the fact that Leonardo, still in his boyhood, painted the kneeling angel's hair (AL23).