Et una invernata che e’ nevicò in Fiorenza assai, gli fece fare di neve nel suo cortile una statua che fu bellissima...In late summer the folk of Tirsirriðân wove their tall ice-baskets of golden lake-flax on the island of Tithgungmek, caulking them well with resins and clay, then abandoned them to be filled by the rains of autumn and frozen by the gales of winter. Then, at the hibernal solstice, they returned to strip the flax and caulking away and sculpt of the ice-blocks thus exposed, with hammer and warmed chisels of new-forged bronze, their thirty-seven national treasures. It was said by some that the treasures had once, centuries before, been sculpted in gold and precious stone, exciting the cupiscence of neighboring kingdoms and forcing the folk of Tirsirriðân to an unaccustomed militarism, whereby they might guard not only their treasures but also the sculptors thereof, whose skill, bred up over many generations, was highly prized by the kings of unhandier folk.Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarruoti di Giorgio Vasari.
But, wearying of sword-drill and the manufacture of arms, so the tale ran, the gentle Tirsirriðân had, not without tears and lamentation, abandoned their homeland of green-lilied canals and flower-starred meads and sought out a harsher to the far north. Their treasures of gold and precious stone they could not carry with them, for their way led across marsh and fen that would have swallowed any wagon weighed down with such richness; therefore the treasures were either buried in hope of an eventual return or sacrificed to the lily-gods of the widest canals, to lie eternally beneath the criss-cross flight of the dragon- and damselfly. Yet they nowise abandoned their passion for sculpture with their transmigration and finding their new home bereft of such materiæ as they once delighted to carve and shape, they settled on ice and snow as transient substitutes.
Thus they re-created their national treasures year on year, allowing them to melt each spring and fearing no theft while yet they stood solid beneath the crackling sky-banners of the aurora. Their marriage-customs too they preserved in the ice-sculpture, rewarding the most skilful copyists with the most beautiful maids to a maximum of three, and holding an annual competition for some new sculpture to challenge for entry to the national thirty-seven, which crowded the highest point of the island of Tithgungmek. Thrice over the centuries a new sculpture had thus entered the ranks of the thirty-seven, replacing the least favored of the old: an ensiferous centaur replacing a lion-slayer; a dolphin-charioteer replacing a gorgon; and a trinity of snow-nymphs replacing an sun-archer. The stalwart thirty-four had been altered too by the passage of centuries, when daring copyists introduced variations in their stance or dress or equipage and won popular acclaim thereby, but conservatives kept the memory of the original and unaltered triakonta-kai-heptad by reproducing them on a wind-swept southern slope of the island, where few came but rarely.
© 2006 Simon Whitechapel