It’s as if the curtain has just come up. Voila! Cornell’s miniature stage. The play is about to begin.His set is striking. A black frame, painted along the border of this box, reveals a grand chateau, which conjures up a feeling of the past. The chateau is set back from the border, giving the box an additional dimension, and making room for characters to act out their dramas before it. A forest, constructed from twigs, lies behind the chateau.
A Setting for a Fairy Tale.
Act 1, scene one.
Nothing happens. The tableau is frozen. No props or objects are moveable. Nothing will ever change. Yet there’s a magical atmosphere, as if much could happen, years could pass, or time could stand still. People could die and come back to life, or get lost in the forest behind the chateau. Who knows what happens in that forest? This box is all about the imagination.
Setting for a Fairy Tale asks me, the viewer, to create my own drama, becoming storyteller and listener for this stage.
The props: a mammoth Renaissance building, decorated with external galleries running between turrets. The building has a high-pitched roof and many windows. Yet this isn’t a three-dimensional miniature house that Cornell has drawn or built at a small scale. It’s a cutout engraving of a Paris municipal building, clipped from a book on French edifices entitled Les Plus excellents bastiments de France, published in 1576. The engraving by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau depicts the Chateau de Madrid, built for Francis I in 1549.
This clipped engraving, however, re-creates the feeling of an inhabited place. I experience a magical stumble back in time, and enter this symbol of the lost splendor of a Golden age, a world of princes and princesses, of chamber music, exotic banquets, trade, and romance. An enchanting world that no longer exists, except in its vestiges in the modern ballet and fairy tales. What might happen in this world, if I could imagine it?
