Born on this day (or possibly 28 March) in 1483 (†1520—on the same day), the artist mononymously known as Raphael—Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino—would go on to become one of the trinity of Italian High Renaissance art alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, prolific despite his relatively early death, working in Umbria, Florence and finally in Rome under the patronage of two popes, the majority of his creations on display in the Vatican. Reflecting his Neoplatonic ideals, arguably his best known, commercially duplicated work is The School of Athens (Sculoa di Atene, complemented by The Parnassus and the Disputa on opposite walls), a suite of frescos commissioned between 1509 and 1511 to decorate the rooms of the papal palace with a celebration and revival of the arts and sciences and cameos of philosophers portrayed by contemporaries.
Wednesday 6 April 2022
Sunday 20 March 2022
oral traditions
First championed by networks of storytellers in Sweden and Australia in the early nineties before being organised as a global observance in 2004 and held on or near the March equinox World Storytelling Day is a convention of sorts for audience and authors to connect, inspire and synthesise diverse folklore and myth (see previously here, here and here). Acknowledging the craft as a form of art and our own penchant for and appear to narrative, each annual gathering has had themes, like 2018’s Wise Fools, 2020’s Voyages and for 2022, Lost and Found. See if you can come up with a tall tale to share today.
catagories: ๐ญ, ๐, ๐ง , myth and monsters
Monday 14 March 2022
7x7
be kind, rewind: the miniature dioramas of Marina Totino—via Waxy
doobly doo: recreating a Hallstatt period hair-style
wck: more on Josรฉ Andrรฉs’ World Central Kitchen (previously) and its work in Ukraineit is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it: solace from the Stoics and other timeless words of wisdom—via Messy Nessy Chic
blogoversary: Kottke turns twenty-four
the wife of ฯ: a Pi Day (previously) round-up—plus this one
family pictures: artist Martha Naranjo Sandoval reanimates antique stereoscopic photos
Thursday 20 January 2022
an unfinished revolution
We had scant idea that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had not only contributed hundreds of articles as foreign correspondents for the New York Daily Tribune in the lead up to the US Civil War advocating strongly against slavery and the apartheid of the American South—and North, Marx moreover kept up a correspondence with Abraham Lincoln—one does not readily summon this overlap and epistolary relatisonship, influencing and informing to an extent his interlocutor’s views on labour, suffrage and the estrangement of chattel and capital. Much more from Open Culture at the link above.
Monday 13 December 2021
pearls before swine
An investigation into sudden-onset meat allergies comes full-circle with the recognition of a particular sugar called Alpha GAL that can cause intolerance for some and results in in an expansion of organ-donor base for others raises some thorny philosophical questions for us, cheerleaders, the lonely survivor and commodifying dissenters alike airing our objections over the brashest of enthusiasm for progress.
Tuesday 7 December 2021
ngc
On the anniversary of the discovery of a pair of barred-spiral galaxies in 1785 by Anglo-German astronomer by William Herschel whilst observing the night sky in Leo Minor, Edwin Powell Hubble, namesake of the space telescope, first found evidence, using Cepheid variables-whose periodic pulsations can be used to measure cosmic distances-that the Universe extends far beyond our own Milky Way and that nebulae were far too distant and were in fact galaxies in their own right. Definitively demonstrating his proof the following year and though contrary to scientific consensus at the time that the Universe was our own galactic skies some researchers-Hubble included, harboured suspicions that the Cosmos was a much bigger place since the conjectures of Immanuel Kant in his 1755 treatise on the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, positing that the Solar System is a smaller reflection of the fixed stars.
Thursday 25 November 2021
saint catherine of alexandria
Counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, one of the counsellors who appeared to Joan of Arc and whose cult according to some academics was cover for sympathies for the murder and defamation of Greek philosopher Hypatia with a broad patronage that includes potters, millers, milliners and spinners for her tortured martyrdom on the breaking-wheel, scholars, scribes, secretaries, stenographers, etc. was a late third century daughter of the governor of the Egyptian centre of learning who converted to Christianity, aged fourteen, and evangelised to many with her winning eloquence and persuasive reasoning—and is venerated on this day. Once persecutions of Christians resumed under the reign of Maxentius, Catherine embarked to Rome and rebuked the emperor. Rather than dispatching with her instantly, the emperor instead assembled a retinue of fifty of his most skilled and pagan orators to challenge Catherine to a debate and refute her arguments. Not only did Catherine roundly carry the day, her words also managed to garner some new converts to the faith, all of whom were summarily put to death with Catherine confined in a dungeon and made to endure terrible tortures daily. A dove and a host angels healed her wounds nightly and Catherine survived her torment for twelve days, persuading the emperor to ultimately proposing marriage to her. Refusing to yield to Maxentius’ overtures, Catherine said she was happily taken by her spouse, Jesus Christ. Enraged, the emperor first had her bound to a spiked breaking wheel (now also known as a Catherine Wheel) and then beheaded for good measure.
Saturday 9 October 2021
dor nischl
The colossal stylised bust of philosopher and historian Karl Marx (previously) sculpted by Soviet realist Lev Efimovich Kerbel for the city formerly and presently known as Chemnitz (redesignated as Karl-Marx-Stadt for the year of the revolutionary in 1953) was dedicated on this day in 1971 before an assembly of a quarter of a million attendees. The wall directly behind the visage and plinth is inscribed with the famous phrase from the Communist Manifesto “Workers of the World, unite!” in German, Russian, French and English by graphic artist Helmut Humann. Locally referred to as the above Mitteldeutsch colloquialism for head or skull and used as a backdrop for much propaganda and pageantry under the East German government, the symbol was not without controversy, but was preserved while many other monuments to Soviet heroes and ideals were dismantled. After reunification, the city of Kรถln even offered to buy the head in order that it be saved from destruction, while residents were wrestling with the recent past and deciding to restore their city’s former name. Ultimately, it was decided to keep this and select vestiges of times past, which can still be a focus of the here and now.
Saturday 2 October 2021
stunaep
Reprising an Austin Kleon post from last year for this anniversary of the first time Charles Schultz’ Charlie Brown and friends first appeared in print in 1950 (see previously), we have these cut-ups of Peanuts strips re-mixed to consider and mediate on—which I think only enhances the characters’ philosophic outlook in the same daily dose. Much more at the link up top including multiple anthologies of zines composed of the same material.
Tuesday 14 September 2021
6x6
moo-loo: calves are being toilet-trained to mitigate some of the greenhouse gasses the livestock produce
รผber die bestimmung des weibes zur hรถheren geistesbildung: a look at philosopher Amalia Holst, whose 1802 work is comparable to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
ferryman: an interesting look at legally-mandated river-crossings in Manchester
the colour of money: a mesmerising video to accompany the Blake Mills song
microcosmos: outstanding photographs of the world not visible to the naked eye
charismatic megafauna: a biotech firm is raising funds to de-extinct the woolly mammoth—see previously
Friday 10 September 2021
6x6
clรฉo from 5 to 7: discovering an Agnes Varda classic
la sociรฉtรฉ du spectacle: an update of the 1974 Situationist Guy Debord’s critique of mass marketing and estrangements of modern society
raise high the roof beam: experience a house inside a barn
wtc: a profile of architect Minoru Yamasaki, best known for designing New York’s World Trade Center
ccs: Iceland’s carbon capture and sequestration plant (previously) goes on-line
Wednesday 8 September 2021
why is there even a blue pill?
Via Super Punch, we are treated to this sincerely, unintentionally unfortunate juxtaposition with this teaser landing spot for the upcoming Matrix sequel, in which actors from the original reprise their roles. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Saturday 7 August 2021
floating capital
The excellent house blog of San Francisco’s storied DNA Lounge, JWZ, asks us to consider the meaning and message of one of the least popular emojis, the so described as man in business suit levitating (๐ด)—an enigma but not in the sense of Avicenna’s thought experiment of the Floating Man or Magritte’s Son of Man, but rather what sort of capitalist, privileged elation that this symbol can be used to express. Click through for a selection of literary tropes for which this shorthand for rapture, stock-photo, narcissist or sociopath—whereas the real backstory involving a webdings exclamation mark and a Ska band is equally intriguing if not more circuitous.
Saturday 31 July 2021
perpetuum mobile
Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are led to a tantalising research project that if it fully pans out bypasses the second law of thermodynamics (see also, that energy in a system tends to wind down and dissipate) and have created “time crystals” as predicted by Richard Feynman in 1982. An exotic state of matter produced and maintained within a quantum computer, the matrix of atoms continually flips between two states without expending any energy, forever—like a perpetual motion machine.
Thursday 29 July 2021
the treachery of images
We really enjoyed these philosophical Captchas (see also) from the always brilliant Jason Kottke that in addition to referencing, name-dropping the classical metaphysical conundrum of Heraclitus and Plato in the Ship of Theseus also appeals to Renรฉ Magritte.
catagories: ๐ญ, networking and blogging
Thursday 24 June 2021
rotation № 17
Born this day in 1926 in Berlin (†1999), Robert Rotar was a painter, sculptor and photographer whose contemplative, meditative repertoire drew on symbolism, instructions—flow-charts from alchemy and astrology and was quietly prolific and accrued many patrons from all over the world. Receiving artistic training in Kรถln after the war—his studies at the Waldorfschule and Vitte in Hiddensee interrupted, Rotar became a member of the Deutsch Werkbund, collegial with Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Beuys, Florence Knoll, Alfred Schmela and other gallerists and artists, departing somewhat from the school’s usual output with a doctrinaire opus that conveyed a certain philosophic correspondence, indulging a trance-like state as he worked, especially with spirals, which embraced the motif of coincidentia oppositorum—out of the union of opposites wisdom is gained and cultivated close friendships with such contemporary thinkers as Werner Heisenberg, Niel Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrรถdinger.
Monday 14 June 2021
index librorum prohibitorum
Though with the twentieth and last printed edition published in 1948 and Pope Paul’s December 1965 Motu Proprio (see also) reorganising the curia failing to renew or reinstate it as a part of canon law, an official notitiรฆ from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith effectively abolished the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited books. In circulation and updated since 1571, the Church realised that their censorship and denunciations often carried the opposite effect than the one intended and chose instead to emphasise the moral and persuasive force of the banned books index rather than focus on punitive controls. Among those authors blacklisted include Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal and John Milton.
Saturday 12 June 2021
sympathy for the devil
Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a delightful animated overview of Satan and his tripartite forms, counterweight of a righteous god, trickster spirit and rebel, forms in this TED-Ed short from priest and historian Brian A. Pavlac and how we limn our experience and understanding of evil and temptation in art, theology and scholarship.
Tuesday 1 June 2021
stultifera navis
A Latin, international edition translated by his pupil Jakob Locher in Strasbourg and published by printer Hans Grรผninger of Sebastian Brant’s 1494 German-language Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) on this day in 1497 made the late medieval moral allegory a success all over the continent, prompting several more translations, sanctioned and otherwise. The humanist and theologian compiled an anthology of one hundred and twelve brief satires, illustrated with woodcuts (originally issued in Basel), as commentary and condemnation of the human condition, developing the character of Saint Grobian, a patron for the crude, clumsy and gluttonous and is singled out as the best treatment of the trope taken from Plato’s Republic about a dysfunctional crew unable to pilot the ship of state. Locher (*1471 – †1528), the student who translated the work, went by the Latin name Philomusus and became a professor of Humanism and a dramatist himself and published a multivolume study on comparative religion. Though an artefact of medieval sensibilities sharpened with the focus of scholasticism, the conceit, tempered with allegory, gave the authors’ license to, writing in the voice of the fool, to legitimately criticise church and court.
Friday 14 May 2021
fig leaf
Writing for รon magazine prehistorian Ian Gilligan from the University of Sydney proffers an interesting alternative theory to the rather labour-intensive and leisure limiting congress of development of agriculture and animal husbandry that it emerged not out of a need for sustenance—hunter-gatherers were happy campers in the above regard (see below) and it was more efficient and less taxing on the environment—but rather out of an urgent need for fibre and pelts with layering and insulation being what brought humans to the other side of the last ice age with an expanded range that would eventually dominate the whole Earth—though the dinosaurs and their highly-achieving avian ancestors might take exception to that claim. Because threads of evidence would quickly fade away, much of this proposal is speculative but rings true and seems like a plausible catalyst to protect our relatively hairless bodies from the harsh elements and lend us to the attendant toil. More at the links above.