Il calice del titano

Thomas Cole usually told you what his pictures meant. He wrote out programmes for his big allegories, explaining every ruin and river. About this one, painted in 1833, he said nothing at all, and it has puzzled people ever since. A colossal stone goblet rises out of an ordinary valley, and along its rim, high above the land below, sits a whole separate world, a ring of water with sailing boats on it, trees, a Greek temple and an Italian palace, tiny at that height. Where the water spills over the edge, a rougher, smaller life springs up on the ground beneath. People have read it as the Norse world-tree, as the cup of the sun god, as Rome seen from a distance, and none of the readings quite closes. Cole was a young English-born painter making his name in America just then, and he never sold it. It stayed in his studio the rest of his life.