#goldencaves

[vampire-scripture]

Things Louis, Lestat and Armand Watch in TVC books

Louis de Pointe du Lac

The Company of Wolves, that was one which he watched over and over - The Tale of the Body Thief Beauty and the Beast, a French film by Jean Cocteau, also pleased him mightily - The Tale of the Body Thief Louis standing in the rain on a slick deserted downtown street watching through the store window the brilliant young actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Shakespeare's Romeo kissing his tender and lovely Juliet (Claire Danes) on a television screen. - The Vampire Armand

Lestat de Lioncourt

On the screen before me the stunningly crafted film of war called Apocalypse Now. Such a symphony of sound and color it was. - The Vampire Lestat On the giant television set I played the cassette of the beautiful Visconti film Death in Venice. - The Vampire Lestat Oooooh, God. What does the witch say in that ghastly film? How could you do this to my beautiful wickedness. - Tha Tale of the Body Thief

Armand

Over and over he watched Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, fascinated by Rutger Hauer, the powerfully built actor who, as the leader of the rebel androids, confronts his human maker, kisses him, and then crushes his skull. It would bring a slow and almost impish laugh from Armand, the bones cracking, the look in Hauer's ice-cold blue eye. - Queen of the Damned After Blade Runner it was the idiotic and hilarious Time Bandits, a British comedy in which five dwarfs steal a "Map of Creation" so they can travel through the holes in Time. (...) He lost all supernatural composure and became utterly human, laughing till the tears rose in his eyes. - Queen of the Damned I have rather tiresome supernatural explanations that read like (...) the scripts for Mulder and Scully on the television show called The X-Files.- The Vampire Armand

Disclaimer: this is not an exhaustive list, if you have any others you find interesting and are willing to share I'd be eternally grateful ^^

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Art and details in TVC: Armand described as Art

A Botticelli angel, which has become my tag line among the Undead. - The Vampire Armand

A Cupid out of Caravaggio, seductive yet ethereal, with auburn hair and dark brown eyes. - The Vampire Lestat

And I saw his face in Notre Dame, boyish and almost sweet, like the face of an old da Vinci saint. - The Vampire Lestat

I felt fetching and even beautiful. Come on, somebody, tell me I make you think of Mercury chasing away the clouds in Botticelli's Primavera - The Vampire Armand

Ah, he is Verrocchio's David, the very model for the bronze statue. Don't try to tell me he is not. And immortal, ah, yes, I can see it, immortal. He shall never die – The Vampire Armand

This is a non-exhaustive list. If you have any other quotes you find interesting and are willing to share, I'd be eternally grateful ^^

[vampire-scripture]

Art in the subterranean room of the Théâtre des Vampires

It was the terrible ‘Triumph of Death’ by Breughel, painted on such a massive scale that all the multitude of ghastly figures towered over us in the gloom. Those ruthless skeletons ferrying the helpless dead in a fetid moat or pulling a cart of human skulls,

beheading an outstretched corpse or hanging humans from the gallows.

A bell tolled over the endless hell of scorched and smoking land, towards which great armies of men came with the hideous, mindless march of soldiers to a massacre.

I turned away, but the auburn-haired one touched my hand and led me further along the wall to see ‘The Fall of the Angels’ slowly materializing, with the damned being driven from the celestial heights into a lurid chaos of feasting monsters (...) above to the very height of the mural, where I could make out of the shadows two beautiful angels with trumpets to their lips. And for a second the spell was broken.

The candle rose. And horrors rose all around me: the dumbly passive and degraded damned of Bosch, the bloated, coffined corpses of Traini, the monstrous horsemen of Dürer

The very ceiling writhed with skeletons and moldering dead, with demons and the instruments of pain, as if this were the cathedral of death itself. - Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice, in the Vampire Companion:

I was very interested in the Northern European artists at that time - Brueguel, Dürer, Bosch - painters who I felt were absolutely grotesque in many regards.

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Art and Details in TVC - A deck of cards for Vampires

"Solitaire for blood drinkers. Perhaps you could devise a new deck of cards." "Would our beloved Prince be the jack of diamonds? If so, who would be the king?” “It’s too early to be talking treason,” Fareed murmured

- Gregory and Fareed, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

The images are examples of the Paris pattern: "The Paris pattern came to dominate in France around 1780 and became known as the portrait officiel." (x)

[vampire-scripture]

The Garden of Trinity Gate

The long rear salon of Trinity Gate on the Upper East Side—a glass porch that in fact united all three townhouses along the back like the service galleries of old in southern mansions—the glass wall beside them open to a magically illuminated garden.

Artfully lighted with electric bulbs concealed at the roots of the trees and the shrubbery, and little Japanese stone lanterns here and there on patches of grass with flickering flames.

In this glass garden room with its fragile white lilies and its exquisite wisteria. (...) the shivering wisteria hanging down from the trellis that ran up the wall behind Armand, with its purple blossoms like an abstract painting of a cluster of grapes.

We were gazing on this little wilderness of thick pink hydrangea and luminous calla lilies

of creeping moon flowers on tree trunks and glistening white gardenias that gave off the most intoxicating scent.

Paradise in New York.

- Prince Lestat, quotes from Chapters 17 and 25

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TVC + Art: Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil - Lestat de Lioncourt

Syndics of the Drapers' Guild by Rembrandt

The painting, which was that of several proper Dutchmen, (...) They seemed possessed of a great secret, and if all men were to learn that secret, there would be no more wars or vice or malice on earth. How did such person ever become members of the Drapers' Guild of Amsterdam in the 1600s?.

I believe that Rembrandt sold his soul to the Devil when he was a young man. It was a simple bargain. The Devil promised to make Rembrandt the most famous painter of his time. (...) But Rembrandt had been changed by his encounter with the Devil. Having seen such undeniable evidence of evil, he found himself obsessed with the question What is good?

At last the faces Rembrandt painted were not flesh-and-blood faces at all. They were spiritual countenances, portraits of what lay within the body of the man or the woman; they were visions of what that person was at his or her finest hour, of what that person stood to become. This is why the merchants of the Drapers' Guild look like the oldest and wisest of God's saints.

- Lestat, The Tale of the Body Thief

[Anne Rice] had hoped to write a novel about it but instead gave the story to Lestat, who claims that if he were mortal, he would write a novel about Rembrandt - The Vampire Companion

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Art and details in TVC: Botticelli's illustrations of Dante's Inferno

"These are illustrations for Dante's Inferno" [Botticelli] told me. "Surely you've read it. I want to do an illustrated version of the entire book." My heart sank when I heard this, but what could I say?

I looked down at the drawings of the twisted and suffering bodies! How could one defend such an enterprise on the part of the painter who had rendered Venus and the Virgin with miraculous skill? Dante's Inferno. How I had despised the work while recognizing its brilliance.

"Sandro, how can you want to do this?" I asked. I was shaking. I didn't want him to see my face. "I find glory," I said, "in those paintings that are filled with the light of paradise, whether it is Christian or pagan. I find no delight in the illustrations of those who suffer in Hell." He was plainly confused and perhaps he always would be. It was his fate. I had only stepped into it, and perhaps fed a fire that was already top weak to survive - Marius and Botticelli, Blood and Gold

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Art and details in TVC: Raglan's gifts to Lestat

No personal note at all. The author of the story was a lovable creature I knew well, H. P. Lovecraft by name, a writer of the supernatural and the macabre. In fact, I knew the story, too, and could never forget its title: "The Thing on the Doorstep." It had made me laugh.

Trembling with annoyance, I forced myself to scan this story, which was only a few pages in length. "Eyes of the Mummy" was the title, author Robert Bloch. A clever little tale, but what could it possibly mean to me?

And yet somehow enjoying this little game, and even enjoying my own indignation at his cleverness and capacity for tracking me. I saw that, indeed, it was a videotape of a recent film. Vice Versa was the title. What on earth . . . ? I flipped it over, and scanned the advertisement. A comic piece.

There was yet another package waiting for me. Another videotape. All of Me was the name of it, and once again, the description on the back of the plastic case gave a fair idea of what it was about. I went to my rooms. No video player! Not even in the Ritz.

(...)

"Has he mortally offended you?" David asked. "No, he's merely made me all the more curious, powerfully curious!" "There you have your answer. I think he knows you too well."

- The Tale of the Body Thief