Continuing to think about the tennis-ball of error quote from yesterday, I had the additional thought that the image could also contain a suggestion of man’s deadliness – tennis in those days being more fatality-prone than now. This led to Wikipedia pointing me to a curious Tiepolo in the Thyssen museum (that I’ve likely never looked at because I don’t care for Tiepolo or the period) where the painter has apparently substituted the traditional deadly discus for a tennis racket and balls in his Death of Hyacinth.
Extracts 