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Othello Di Messina Analysis

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‘I look at it every day and every day it gives me pleasure. Their art is what they leave behind. And art matters because it changes the way we see ourselves in the world. It shows the next generation who we were. It’s important and long lasting.’ ‘That is romantic nonsense,’ Franco said,. ‘Artists are like everyone else. Dead is dead. And death will come much sooner to those who can’t put food on the table.’ But he’d relented, and the fifth child was named Antonello. In primary school Signora Bellini discovered Antonello’s talent for drawing. ‘He is a little artist,’ she wrote in his report card. ‘An artist,’ Emilia said proudly, ‘like your name sake, the great artist Antonello di Messina.’ Among the pictures of artists and writers on the walls of the classroom, was a photograph of Antonello di Messina and a copy of his ‘The Virgin of the Annunciation.’ This painting of the Virgin Mary sitting at a table with an open book in front of her was one of several paintings that hung on both sides of the blackboard. On cold winter mornings when Signora Bellini ran into the schoolroom with her blue shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and her cheeks blushed red, she …show more content…

Work was ploughing the fields or picking grapes; work was long hours in dark and dirty factories, where you had to yield to the authority of other men. Work was tiring and it was joyless. It was coming home with joints aching, with rough hands covered in grease and dirty. Work was toil. The working men and women of his household, his parents and siblings, came home depleted; dripping in sweat, smelling of grease, of glues and rubber. Work was what men did, had to do to look after their families. He knew that those wealthy enough to be educated did other work – they were doctors or lawyers or engineers and he imagined that their work was easier, that they derived some pleasure from it, but that was not the kind of work that he would ever do, maybe his children, his children’s

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