In theory there is no reason to take digital pictures in black and white, since they can always be desaturated later. In practice, knowing that the picture will never have any colors in it makes one think more in terms of lines and shadows. Here are two pictures taken with a camera from the Neolithic era of digital cameras, which Father Pitt keeps set to black-and-white mode.
Courtesy of the New England Granite Works, a picture of the fountain in the Mellons’ Walled Garden shows us a little of what the garden, now part of Mellon Park, looked like when the Mellons lived there. The sculpture on the fountain is the work of Edmond Amateis, and the fountain has been beautifully restored for the delight of visitors to the park.
This fountain is a memorial to Mary Schenley, heir to the O’Hara glass fortune and donor of the vast tract of land that became Schenley Park. It is remarkable as a work of art, and almost as remarkable for being one of the relatively few fountains in the world built above a buried bridge. There was once a hollow here; an arch bridge crossed the hollow at this point. The hollow was filled in, but if you dig far enough at this spot, you will find the Bellefield Bridge.
The sculpture, A Song to Nature, is by Victor David Brenner, and old Pa Pitt is going to make a remarkable offer to his readers. If you ever meet Father Pitt in person, he will give you for your very own another famous sculpture in metal by the same great artist. He can make this remarkable offer because Victor David Brenner’s most famous work is the face of Abraham Lincoln on the United States penny.
In this sculpture, the female figure represents Sweet Humanity playing her song to the lazy earth-god Pan, who responds in a way that we may perhaps judge from his face.
