ordinance survey

Similar to the application that allows one to listen to Wikipedia being edited, amended and improved in real time, the always excellent Maps Mania introduces us to the chimes and tintinnabulation of OpenStreetMap. As with the former whose collaborative success inspired the latter, because of all the contributors globally, the update process plays a continual and emergent tune. Learn more at the links above. 

 

the anathema of zos

Among the youngest artists to exhibit at the Royal Academy and securing an art scholarship and associated with occult figures like Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare (*1886 – †1956) is virtually unknown despite his contemporary presence—possibly for his departure from other esoterics by turning inward to uncover hidden knowledge by engaging his atavistic subconscious psyche. Accessing his portfolio full of Art Nouveau grotesques and echoing the style of artwork of Aubrey Beardsley through his self-published grimoire Earth Inferno, inspired by Dante’s epic trilogy. Eventually accusing other magicians as only concerned with self-aggrandisement and harshly critical of Nazism’s flirtation with the occult, Spare’s subsequent works articulated the process of automatic writing and mediumistic sketching, a method to produce the sigils that summon spirits, and analysing the output. Modified by later adherents and evangelisers, Spare’s techiques and theories were transferred to a movement broadly called chaos magick. More to explore at the link up top with the content warning that some of the imagery verges on the sexually domineering and violent.

selective-service or solider of christ

Venerated on this day on the occasion of his martyrdom under order of African Proconsul Cassius Dio in 295 (*274), Saint Maximilian of Tebessa (Numidia, Roman Algeria) was obliged to enlist in the Roman army as the son of a solider, Fabius Victor, on his twenty-first birthday. Refusing on religious grounds, Maximilian was beheaded immediately and posthumously made patron of conscientious objectors—giving rise over the millennia to several pacifist organisations, including the Order of Maximilian, a group of aligned clergy members opposed to the continuing war in Vietnam (see also) that fought against conscription and the draft.

portrait of the artist as a young woman

BBC Culture showcases the Flemish Renaissance painter Caterina van Hemessen (*1528 – †1565) through the lens of her 1548 self-portrait which is the first known depiction of an artist—of any gender—at work at the easel. Certainly knowing her art history, van Hemessen’s reflection, projection has a definite correspondence to Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 work. As in many professions at the time, the certification and apprenticeship process was biased against women joining the ranks of artists with curricula consisting of studying cadavers and vivisections and the nude male form—places where women had no access to—it was difficult to find a sponsor and teacher, making female painters exceedingly rare, though in Hemessen’s case it was her father that taught her, Jan Sanders van Hemessen—renowned as well for introducing Italian, romantic influences to the Northern Renaissance.

cosmography

A devoted cartographer of Heaven and Earth, William Fairfield Warren of Boston University mapped out in 1915, his last work after earnestly sourcing Paradise Found to the North Pole, the Universe according to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (previously here and here), extracting, teasing the subtle cartography of Eden and Hell and empyrean Heaven out of the epic poem overlaid with terrestrial correspondence (see also) with a rigour that indeed makes the accounting of angels dancing on the head of a pin an academic exercise. Thinking that there a possibility for bias and that illustrations were imperfect and prejudicial, Warren paired his diagrams back for a straightforward T-O map (orbis terrarium) look but there are more elaborate depictions of Miltonic cosmology from contemporaries at Public Domain Review at the link up top for comparison.

a book by its cover

Lit Hub curates a gallery of classic books with horrendously bad and misleading cover illustrations. There were too many good ones to pick from, a particular preponderance of Pictures of Dorian Grays, Middlemarches (Middlesmarch—spoonfuls, spoonsful, octopodes) and Jane Austin novels with a definite Young Adult energy or Moby Dick as an early 90’s manual for whale-watching, but we especially enjoyed The Scarlett Letter as a Planned Parenthood pamphlet. What’s your favourite? Be prepared to filter through a lot of stock imagery and typesetting transgressions (this is what happens when literature, intellectual properties enter the public domain) but nonetheless a good way to revisit one’s core curricula.

fractured fairy-tales

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency contributor Tom Smyth excerpts segments from Oprah Winfrey’s other tell-all interviews with princesses. Below is a passage from her dialogue with a certain maiden in the tower. 

ᴏᴘʀᴀʜ: I think a lot people have this false perception of royalty. Can’t a process do whatever a princess wants to do? 

ʀᴀᴘᴜɴᴢᴇʟ: You have to understand, I couldn’t just get up and go. They took my passport and driver’s license, and when I would ask to do something like get lunch with my friends, Mother Gothel would say that it wasn’t a good idea, that I was too oversaturated in the press. And I would say, how could I be oversaturated? I haven’t left this tower in 18 years. 

More at the link up top.

impasse des deux frères et le moulin à poivre

Never loaned to a museum or displayed to the public in its hundred and thirty-year history, this Van Gogh work from his Monmartre period when the artist lived in Paris with his brother Theo has been in private hands and only now previewed ahead of its auction. Having developed an intensive interest in ukiyo-e woodblock prints in Antwerp and hoping to experiment with Japonaiserie with his new circle of acquaintances, this landscape (absolutely rustic in comparison to what the neighbourhood is today), represents a transition in style when Van Gogh started to adopt elements of pointillism and bright clash colours. Ahead of its sale, the painting is slated for short exhibitions, with due precautions, in Hong Kong, Amsterdam and Paris.