Συλλογή

Some of the «classical cases» of Kuhnian paradigm shifts in science are: 1543 – The transition in cosmology from a Ptolemaic cosmology to a Copernican one. 1687 – The transition in mechanics from Aristotelian mechanics to classical mechanics. 1783 – The acceptance of Lavoisier’s theory of chemical reactions and combustion in place of phlogiston theory, known as the chemical revolution. 1859 – Darwinian biology 1920 – The transition between the worldview of Newtonian physics and the Einsteinian relativistic worldview.

The Church of Saint Charles at the Four Fountains (Italian: Chiesa di San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane also called San Carlino) is a Roman Catholic church in Rome. The church was designed by the architect Francesco Borromini and it was his first independent commission. It is an iconic masterpiece of Baroque architecture, built as part of a complex of monastic buildings on the Quirinal Hill for the Spanish Trinitarians, an order dedicated to the freeing of Christian slaves. He received the commission in 1634, under the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, whose palace was across the road. However, this financial backing did not last and subsequently the building project suffered various financial difficulties. It is one of at least three churches in Rome dedicated to San Carlo, including San Carlo ai Catinari and San Carlo al Corso. The monastic buildings and the cloister were completed first after which construction of the church took place during the period 1638-1641 and in 1646 it was dedicated to Saint Charles Borromeo. Although the idea for the serpentine facade must have been conceived fairly early on, probably in the mid-1630s, it was only constructed towards the end of Borromini’s life and the upper part was not completed until after the architect’s death. The site for the new church and its monastery was at the south-west corner of the «Quattro Fontane» which refers to the four corner fountains set on the oblique at the intersection of two roads, the Strada Pia and the Strada Felice. Bernini’s oval church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale would later be built further along the Strada Pia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Carlo_alle_Quattro_Fontane https://www.teggelaar.com/en/rome-day-4-continuation-2/

Café Griensteidl, printing by Reinhold Völkel, 1896. Café Griensteidl is a traditional Viennese café located at Michaelerplatz 2 across from St. Michael’s Gate at the Hofburg Palace in the Innere Stadt first district of Vienna, Austria. The cafe was founded in 1847 by former pharmacist Heinrich Griensteidl. In the January 1897, the original building was demolished during the course of the renovation of Michaelerplatz. In 1900, the café was reopened and became a popular location among the Viennese coffeehouse culture. During the early twentieth century, the café was frequented by many artists, musicians, and writers.

Victory Boogie-Woogie, a painting that Mondrian conceived in expectation of victory in World War II and that remained unfinished by reason of his death on February 1, 1944.

Apple picking at Eragny-sur-Erpe paint by the French artist Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) – Dallas Museum of Art (USA). 1888, Oil on Canvas. Pissarro employed beautiful combinations of light and color to convey a sense of the utopia that he believed could be achieved in an anarchist society. His paintings Apple-Picking and Apple-Harvest, which depict workers in Pissarro’s future anarchistic utopia, feature a bright hue created by thousands of carefully placed dots of colorful paint. The sun radiates across the rural landscape, and the workers appear happy and peaceful as they harvest apples from the trees.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti – Effects of Good Government in the city (1338 – 1339). The Allegory of Good and Bad Government is a series of frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti from around February 26, 1338 to May 29, 1339.The frescoes are painted in the Renaissance style, but with a Medieval touch to it. The paintings are located in the Sala dei Nove (Salon of Nine or Council Room) in the Palazzo Pubblico (or Town Hall) of the city of Siena, Italy. The series consists of six different scenes: Allegory of Good Government, Allegory of Bad Government, Effects of Bad Government in the City, Effects of Good Government in the City and Effects of Good Government in the Country.In the Good City we can see a panoramic view of a medieval city and its surroundings. The display itself, featuring a dome of a cathedral, black and white belfry, and buildings made of bricks, is much similar to Siena. Also, the fresco depicts all sorts of human activities within the city that are needed in order to have a well organized city. These include various manufactures, builders, and even leasure represented as dancing in the forefront of the fresco. On the right of the city, there is a panorama of a village, i.e. suburb. It depicts a series of human activities related to land and animal cultivation. Above the village there is a personification of Security, who holds a small gallows in one hand, and a scroll with text in another.

In his best-known and largest painting, Georges Seurat depicted people relaxing in a suburban park on an island in the Seine River called La Grande Jatte. The artist worked on the painting in several campaigns, beginning in 1884 with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors. He later added small dots, also in complementary colors, that appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance. Seurat’s use of this highly systematic and «scientific» technique, subsequently called Pointillism, distinguished his art from the more intuitive approach to painting used by the Impressionists. Although Seurat embraced the subject matter of modern life preferred by artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he went beyond their concern for capturing the accidental and instantaneous qualities of light in nature. Seurat sought to evoke permanence by recalling the art of the past, especially Egyptian and Greek sculpture and even Italian Renaissance frescoes. As he explained to the French poet Gustave Kahn, «The Panathenaeans of Phidias formed a procession. I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes, and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of color.» Some contemporary critics, however, found his figures to be less a nod to earlier art history than a commentary on the posturing and artificiality of modern Parisian society. Seurat made the final changes to La Grande Jatte in 1889. He restretched the canvas in order to add a painted border of red, orange, and blue dots that provides a visual transition between the interior of the painting and his specially designed white frame.

The Temple of the Liberal Arts, with the City of Bern and Minerva. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Jacques Sablet.

Collier John, A Glass of Wine with Caesar Borgia 1893. Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service.

Arnold Schönbergs Pierrot lunaire op. 21, a key work of musical modernism, was written in 1912 in Berlin for the elocutionist Albertine Zehme. Zehme, a singer, professional reciter of texts, and voice coach (as well as a former student of Cosima Wagner) followed a highly idiosyncratic aesthetic in her recitation, in which she wanted to “reclaim the ear’s place in life”: “I demand not freedom of thought, but rather freedom of sound! […] In order to communicate our poets and our composers, we need both the sound of song and the sound of speech. The unrelenting work to find the ultimate expressive possibilities for ‘artistic experiences in sound’ has taught me this necessity.” (Program note from an evening of recitation featuring the Pierrot lunaire poems in 1911) This quest for a boundless “freedom of sound” led her, consequently, to a kindred spirit also fighting for a similar freedom: “I have neither to work with a fundamental tone nor any other tone; I could use any of the 12 tones, I don’t have to constrain myself to the Procrustean bed of motivic work, nor do I need to incorporate conventional formal sections or phrase structures.” (Schönberg’s note on the page margin of a copy of Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, 1916) https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp_historical/chapter/196/ https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/2885/pierrot-lunaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot_lunaire

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–1778) by Johann Zoffany is a painting of the north-east section of the Tribuna room in the Uffizi in Florence, Italy. The painting has become one of the most celebrated images of eighteenth-century taste. Zoffany shows a group of connoisseurs and members of the nobility admiring works of art in the Tribuna, the principal room of the Uffizi in Florence, which was the most famous gallery in the world during the eighteenth century. The Tribuna had been built by Francesco de’ Medici in 1585-9 to a design by Bernardo Buontalenti as a showcase for the most precious items in the Medici collection. Although Zoffany has depicted the architectural features of the Tribuna with a fair degree of accuracy, he has rearranged the works of art and in some cases altered their scale. In fact, he has also incorporated a number of paintings from that part of the Medici collection housed in the Palazzo Pitti, as well as including several additional pieces of sculpture. The painter thus successfully gives the gallery a more crowded and undoubtedly richer appearance than it had during the eighteenth century, and by this means has facilitated his rendering of the complicated sightlines of the room and the perspectival inlaid marble decoration of the floor. The setting is therefore somewhat idealised, but it remains a perfectly accurate representation of the significance of the Tribuna for eighteenth-century connoisseurship, with its emphasis on the antique, the High Renaissance, the Bolognese school and Rubens. Zoffany painted the picture in Florence expressly for Queen Charlotte, beginning in 1772. Much of the composition was completed the following year, but the artist continued working on it intermittently until late in 1777, making changes some of which are now only visible by X-ray. Notable among these changes is the inclusion of a self portrait on the left of the composition, where the artist has shown himself peering round the unframed canvas of the Virgin and Child by Raphael. For this purpose, it is almost as if the painter has abandoned his easel, partly visible in the lower right corner of the picture, and walked across or around the back of the room to partake in the discussion. The figures in the picture, all of whom are identifiable, fall into three groups: those on the left between the sculptures of Cupid and Psyche and Satyr with the Cymbals; those in the foreground, right of centre, gathered around the Venus d’Urbino by Titian; and those on the right around the Venus de’ Medici. These portraits were meticulously painted by Zoffany and won widespread admiration, although apparently not from George III and Queen Charlotte, who claimed that such recognisable figures were inappropriate to the scene. In essence, however, Zoffany has amalgamated the traditional subject of a gallery view, much exploited by Flemish painters in the seventeenth century, with the conversation piece evolved by British painters during the eighteenth century, although recently other more cryptic levels of meaning have been sought in the picture. Royal patronage enabled the artist to have the Venus d’Urbino by Titian taken down from the wall for copying after the Grand Duke of Tuscany (Ferdinando I) had specifically decreed that the picture had been copied too much and should not be moved again for such a purpose. Correspondingly, there are one or two references in the picture to the Royal Collection: the Virgin and Child by Raphael, held by the artist, was a work that was offered to George III by Earl Cowper (this is the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington) and the Samian Sibyl by Guercino, seen at the lower edge of the composition, is a pendant to the Libyan Sibyl by the same artist bought by George III in the 1760s. The Tribuna of the Uffizi is a technical tour de force. The attention to detail and texture involves not just the portraits, but also the copies after the works of art nearly all of which are identifiable. Controlled brushwork and careful application are the hallmarks of Zoffany’s style, and they are seen at their best in this famous picture without any of the loss of verve that such a long and elaborate undertaking might have forced upon the artist

The Palace of Westminster, located in the city of Westminster in the United Kingdom, was the main royal residence for figures in history such as Henry VIII and Edward the Confessor. After a fire destroyed much of the complex in 1512 it served as the home of Parliament and is the central seat of government even today. The palace contains two houses of parliament, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. At the north end stands the famous Big Ben clock, also known as the clock tower. A fire ravaged the palace in 1834, destroying most of the building. Architects Augustus Welby Pugin and Sir Charles Barry were in charge of its redesign in which they used Perpendicular Gothic style. One of the oldest parts of the building is Westminster Hall which dates back to 1097. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Houses-of-Parliament-buildings-London-United-Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Westminster

Tree in Flower near Vetheuil, 1879. Claude Monet. Impressionism. Beauty grows on trees!!!

Plato, THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE Politeia, VII 514 a, 2 to 517 a, 7. SOCRATES: Imagine this: People live under the earth in a cavelike dwelling. Stretching a long way up toward the daylight is its entrance, toward which the entire cave is gathered. The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck..Thus they stay in the same place so that there is only one thing for them to look that: whatever they encounter in front of their faces. But because they are shackled, they are unable to turn their heads around. SOCRATES : Some light, of course, is allowed them, namely from a fire that casts its glow toward them from behind them, being above and at some distance. Between the fire and those who are shackled [i.e., behind their backs] there runs a walkway at a certain height. Imagine that a low wall has been built the length of the walkway, like the low curtain that puppeteers put up, over which they show their puppets. SOCRATES: So now imagine that all along this low wall people are carrying all sorts of things that reach up higher than the wall: statues and other carvings made of stone or wood and many other artifacts that people have made. As you would expect, some are talking to each other [as they walk along] and some are silent. GLAUCON : This is an unusual picture that you are presenting here, and these are unusual prisoners. SOCRATES : They are very much like us humans, I [Socrates] responded. SOCRATES : What do you think? From the beginning people like this have never managed, whether on their own or with the help by others, to see anything besides the shadows that are [continually] projected on the wall opposite them by the glow of the fire. GLAUCON : How could it be otherwise, since they are forced to keep their heads immobile for their entire lives? SOCRATES: And what do they see of the things that are being carried along [behind them]? Do they not see simply these [namely the shadows]? GLAUCON: Certainly. SOCRATES : Now if they were able to say something about what they saw and to talk it over, do you not think that they would regard that which they saw on the wall as beings? GLAUCON : They would have to. SOCRATES: And now what if this prison also had an echo reverberating off the wall in front of them [the one that they always and only look at]? Whenever one of the people walking behind those in chains (and carrying the things) would make a sound, do you think the prisoners would imagine that the speaker were anyone other than the shadow passing in front of them? GLAUCON : Nothing else, by Zeus! SOCRATES: All in all, I responded, those who were chained would consider nothing besides the shadows of the artifacts as the unhidden. GLAUCON: That would absolutely have to be. SOCRATES : So now, I replied, watch the process whereby the prisoners are set free from their chains and, along with that, cured of their lack of insight, and likewise consider what kind of lack of insight must be if the following were to happen to those who were chained. SOCRATES: Whenever any of them was unchained and was forced to stand up suddenly, to turn around, to walk, and to look up toward the light, in each case the person would be able to do this only with pain and because of the flickering brightness would be unable to look at those things whose shadows he previously saw. SOCRATES : If all this were to happen to the prisoner, what do you think he would say if someone were to inform him that what he saw before were [mere] trifles but that now he was much nearer to beings; and that, as a consequence of now being turned toward what is more in being, he also saw more correctly? SOCRATES: And if someone were [then] to show him any of the things that were passing by and forced him to answer the question about what it was, don’t you think that he would be a wit’s end and in addition would consider that what he previously saw [with is own eyes] was more unhidden than what was now being shown [to him by someone else]. GLAUCON: Yes, absolutely. SOCRATES : And if someone even forced him to look into the glare of the fire, would his eyes not hurt him, and would he not then turn away and flee [back] to that which he is capable of looking at? And would he not decide that [what he could see before without any help] was in fact clearer than what was now being shown to him? GLAUCON: Precisely. SOCRATES: Now, however, if someone, using force, were to pull him [who had been freed from his chains] away from there and to drag him up the cave’s rough and steep ascent and not to let go of him untilhe had dragged him out into the light of the sun… SOCRATES: …would not the one who had been dragged like this feel, in the process, pain and rage?And when he got into the sunlight, wouldn’t his eyes be filled with the glare, and wouldn’t he thus be unable to see any of the things that are now revealed to him as the unhidden? GLAUCON: He would not be able to do that at all, at least not right away. SOCRATES : It would obviously take some getting accustomed, I think, if it should be a matter of taking into one’s eyes that which is up there outside the cave, in the light of the sun. SOCRATES : And in this process of acclimitization he would first and most easily be able to look at (1) shadows and after that (2) the images of people and the rest of things as they are reflected in water. SOCRATES : Later, however, he would be able to view (3) the things themselves [the beings, instead of the dim reflections]. But within the range of such things, he might well contemplate what there is in the heavenly dome, and this dome itself, more easily during the night by looking at the light of the stars and the moon, [more easily, that is to say,] than by looking at the sun and its glare during the day. GLAUCON : Certainly. SOCRATES: But I think that finally he would be in the condition to look at (4) the sun itself, not just at its reflection whether in water or wherever else it might appear, but at the sun itself, as it is in and of itself and in the place proper to it and to contemplate of what sort it is. GLAUCON : It would necessarily happen this way. SOCRATES : And having done all that, by this time he would also be able to gather the following about the sun: (1) that it is that which grants both the seasons and the years; (2) it is that which governs whatever there is in the now visible region of sunlight; and (3) that it is also the cause of all those things that the people dwelling in the cave have before they eyes in some way or other. GLAUCON : It is obvious that he would get to these things — the sun and whatever stands in its light– after he had gone out beyond those previous things, the merely reflections and shadows. SOCRATES : And then what? If he again recalled his first dwelling, and the «knowing» that passes as the norm there, and the people with whom he once was chained, don’t you think he would consider himself lucky because of the transformation that had happened and, by contrast, feel sorry for them? GLAUCON : Very much so. SOCRATES : However, what if among the people in the previous dwelling place, the cave, certain honors and commendations were established for whomever most clearly catches sight of what passes by and also best remembers which of them normally is brought by first, which one later, and which ones at the same time? And what if there were honors for whoever could most easily foresee which one might come by next? What would the liberated prisoner now prefer? SOCRATES : Do you think the one who had gotten out of the cave would still envy those within the cave and would want to compete with them who are esteemed and who have power? Or would not he or she much rather wish for the condition that Homer speaks of, namely «to live on the land [above ground] as the paid menial of another destitute peasant»? Wouldn’t he or she prefer to put up with absolutely anything else rather than associate with those opinions that hold in the cave and be that kind of human being? GLAUCON : I think that he would prefer to endure everything rather than be that kind of human being. SOCRATES: And now, I responded, consider this: If this person who had gotten out of the cave were to go back down again and sit in the same place as before, would he not find in that case, coming suddenly out of the sunlight, that his eyes ere filled with darkness?» GLAUCON: Yes, very much so. SOCRATES : Now if once again, along with those who had remained shackled there, the freed person had to engage in the business of asserting and maintaining opinions about the shadows — while his eyes are still weak and before they have readjusted, an adjustment that would require quite a bit of time — would he not then be exposed to ridicule down there? And would they not let him know that he had gone up but only in order to come back down into the cave with his eyes ruined — and thus it certainly does not pay to go up. SOCRATES : And if they can get hold of this person who takes it in hand to free them from their chains and to lead them up, and if they could kill him, will they not actually kill him? GLAUCON : They certainly will. Translation by Thomas Sheehan

Barricade fights at Berlin Alexanderplatz in the night of March 18, 1848.

Artist Postcard Sozialdemokratie, Weltpolitik, Propaganda! «Weltpolitik» («world policy») was the foreign policy adopted by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany in 1890, which marked a decisive break with former Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s ‘ «Realpolitik,» and referred to Germany’s foreign policy. The aim of Weltpolitik was to transform Germany into a global power through aggressive diplomacy, the acquisition of overseas colonies, and the development of a large navy. Weltpolitik was a fundamental change in the conduct of German foreign policy. Up until Wilhelm’s dismissal of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Germany had concentrated its efforts on eliminating the possibility of a two-front war in Europe. Prior to Weltpolitik, German policy had focused on using its army and subtle diplomacy to maintain its status. In particular, Bismarck was wary of acquiring overseas colonies and wished to reserve the role of Germany as honest broker in continental affairs. Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, was far more ambitious.

Difference between the true religion of Christ and the false idolatrous doctrine of the Antichrist in the most vital questions-(Comparism between the Luther. doctrine and Catholic church practice). Woodcut, 1546, by Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515-1586). A woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Younger showing anti-Catholic propaganda. On the right, the corrupt pope sells indulgences to his debauched Catholic congregation, and the devil blows into a monk’s ear as he preaches, while on the left, the devout Lutherans follow the «true» path to God.

The Creation of Adam (1508-1512) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni ( 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564). Of all the marvelous images that crowd the immense complex of the Sistine Ceiling, The Creation of Adam is undoubtedly the one which has most deeply impressed posterity. No wonder, for here we are given a single overwhelming vision of the sublimity of God and the potential nobility of man unprecedented and unrivaled in the entire history of visual art. No longer standing upon earth with closed eyes and mantle, the Lord floats through the heavens, His mantle widespread and bursting with angelic forms, and His calm gaze accompanying and reinforcing the movement of His mighty arm. He extends His forefinger, about to touch that of Adam, who reclines on the barren coast of earth, barely able as yet to lift his hand. The divine form is convex, explosive, paternal; the human concave, receptive, and conspicuously impotent. The incipient, infecundating contact about to take place between the two index fingers has often been described as a spark or a current, a modern electrical metaphor doubtless foreign to the sixteenth century, but natural enough considering the river of life which seems about to flow into the waiting body. Genesis tells how the Lord created Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This story is never illustrated literally in Renaissance art. Usually, as in Jacopo della Quercia’s beautiful relief on the facade of the church of San Petronio in Bologna, which must have impressed the young Michelangelo deeply, the Creator stands on earth and blesses the already formed body of Adam, read together with the ground, since his name in Hebrew means earth. Michelangelo’s completely new image seems to symbolize a still further idea – the instillation of divine power in humanity, which took place at the Incarnation. Given Cardinal Vigerio’s reiterated insistence on the doctrine of the two Adams, and the position of the scene immediately after the barrier to the sanctuary, at the spot where the Annunciation customarily appeared, and after Ezekiel with his vision of the Virgin Birth, this would seem natural enough. The scene recalls the famous verses from Isaiah, «Who hath believed our report ? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed ? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground . ..,» invariably taken by theologians to foretell the Incarnation of Christ, shoot of Jesse’s rod. Two striking visual elements make clear that this was one of the passages actually recommended to Michelangelo by his probable adviser, Cardinal Vigerio. First, the mighty right arm of the Lord is revealed, naked as in no other of His appearances on the Sistine Ceiling, nor anywhere else, as far as I have been able to determine, in all of Christian art prior to this time. (The left arm is clothed, at least to the elbow, by a white sleeve.) Second, directly under Adam, the arm of the veiled youth to the left above the Persian Sibyl projects into the scene – a matter that involved considerable advance planning – coming as close to touching Adam’s thigh as the Creator does his finger. This hand holds a cornucopia bursting with Rovere leaves and acorns, appearing to grow from the dry ground, as full of potency as Adam («ground») is empty of it. Such an image is characteristic not only of Michelangelo, who insofar as possible preferred to show male figures, including that of Christ, completely naked, but of the Roman High Renaissance and of Julius II himself, whose language as recorded by his astonished contemporaries overflows with boasts of his own physical strength and potency.

Jean Louis Théodore Géricault’s 1821 “The Derby at Epsom”! A historical example of «Beliefs and Biases» in scientific methodology is the belief that the legs of a galloping horse are splayed at the point when none of the horse’s legs touches the ground, to the point of this image being included in paintings by its supporters. However, the first stop-action pictures of a horse’s gallop by Eadweard Muybridge showed this to be false, and that the legs are instead gathered together.

Johannes Vermeer (Delft 1632-Delft 1675). Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman early 1660s. A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman entered the Royal Collection in 1762 as a work by Frans van Mieris the Elder owing to a misreading of the signature. Indeed, the name of the artist was not correctly identified until 1866 by Théophile Thoré. During the late seventeenth century the picture had been in collections in Delft, Vermeer’s home town, including that eventually sold on 16 May 1696 by Jacob Dissous which had twenty-one paintings by the artist – the largest group of such works assembled by a single individual. A lady at the virginal was subsequently acquired by the Venetian artist, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, in 1718 either in Amsterdam or The Hague. Pellegrini’s collection was bought by Consul Joseph Smith, who in turn sold his own collection to George III. By such a route did one of the greatest Dutch pictures in the Royal Collection arrive and to a certain extent the initial oversight regarding its importance has been more than adequately compensated for by the amount of scholarly attention that it now receives. Paintings by Vermeer – of which there are only thirty-four – are difficult to date and any chronology has to be based on an interpretation of style and complexity of composition. A lady at the virginal was undoubtedly painted during the 1660s, but it is not possible to be more specific although there is at present a consensus of c.1662-4. The composition is characterised by the rigorous use of perspective to draw the eye towards the back of the room where the figures are situated – the young woman rather surprisingly seen from the back. The viewer is at first more aware of the jutting corner of the table, the chair and the bass viol than of the figures themselves, whose privacy is thereby protected. The back of the room, dominated by the virginal comparable with those made by Andreas Ruckers the Elder, is like a grid of verticals and horizontals into which the figures are carefully locked. Light is admitted through the windows on the left and fills the room, casting only soft, subtle shadows. A striking feature of the composition in this part is the mirror on the wall where the slightly blurred reflections include the young woman’s face, part of the table and the legs of an artist’s easel. The implication of this glimpsed easel is that Vermeer shares the same space as the figures he is depicting, but as a result of this artifice he is also, like the viewer, standing outside that space. In fact, as Alpers has observed, Vermeer’s composition is based on exclusion. Many of the elements, particularly at the back of the room, are seen only partially, as though indicating ‘the appearance of the world as ungraspable’.

Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics 1489-91. Santa Maria sopra Minerva (Cappella Carafa) – Rome. Filippino Lippi (April 1459 – April 1504) was an Italian painter working during the High Renaissance in Florence, Italy. This fresco by Filippino Lippi and his assistant Raffaellino del Garbo, is part of the decoration of the Carafa Chapel of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. The central scene of Aquinas confounding the heretics is inspired by the fourth book of Aquinas, the Summa contra Gentiles. Within an elaborate architectural stage is a central building with pilasters ornamented with torches, that was copied from an antique funerary monument. In the background are views of the Lateran and the Tiber. This may allude to Carafa’s war against the Ottoman Turks, for he had departed from the Tiber to fight the Turks and when he returned to Rome, in January 1473, it was by Porta San Govanni. In the fresco, Aquinas is surrounded by four female figures, representing Philosophy, Astronomy, Theology, and Grammar. At the sides, in the foreground, are the defeated heretics, among which can be identified Arius, Apollinarius, and Averroes (on the left) and Sabellius, Euchites, and Manes (on the right), with the books thrown down on the ground before them. The overall architecture is enlivened by elaborated grotesques and putti bearing inscriptions, as well as by a number of references to Carafa.

Wedding of Henry V and Katherine de Valois. At the time of their marriage, King Henry’s army was rolling across Normandy and France with great success. He claimed the throne of France and engineered the marriage as a more peaceful way to achieve his ends. By all accounts, however, the king was quite taken with his lovely princess.

«Lamartine, before the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, rejects the Red Flag,» February 25, 1848. By Henri Felix Emmanuel Philippoteaux (1815–1884). The red flag represents terror, blood, and a «party’s republic,» Lamartine told the crowd. Leader of the provisional government that seized power after Louis-Philippe’s fall, Alphonse de Lamartine (who also happened to be a leading Romantic poet) sought to pursue a moderate, liberal course after the February Revolution. When some revolutionaries proposed the red flag—long associated with social revolution—as France’s new flag instead of the tricolor, Lamartine rejected the proposal. Yes, he conceded, Louis-Philippe had reintroduced the tricolor in 1830, but it did not represent that monarch’s regime. Instead, Lamartine claimed, the tricolor was the flag of the original revolution of 1789 and therefore represented the French nation. «Citizens, you have the power to commit violence against this government; you have the power to command it to change the banner of the nation and the name of France…. …As for myself, never shall my hand sign such a decree! I will push away until death this blood flag, and you should repudiate it even more than I will! Because the red flag that you have brought back here has done nothing but being trailed around the Champ-de-Mars in the people’s blood in 1791 and 1793, whereas the Tricolore flag went round the world along with the name, the glory and the liberty of the homeland!»

From left: grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy Attributed to the Coëtivy Master French, Paris, about 1460–1470 Coëtivy Master, French, active about 1450 – 1485, Philosophy Presenting the Seven Liberal Arts to Boethius.

Hargreaves’s spinning-jenny. This is a later version of the Spinning Jenny, with the main wheel switched from the horizontal to the vertical to make operation easier.

Women on Board, 19 x 25″, limited edition print, by Dennis McGregor. This post first appeared in August, 2011.

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent! If Pieter Bruegel the Elder enjoyed a solid reputation during his lifetime, his paintings were «even more sought after following his death» (in 1569), as Provost Morillon wrote to Cardinal de Granvelle as early as 1572. It is probably this constant demand which led the famous painter’s oldest son, registered as a master in the Antwerp guild in 1584/85, to specialise in copying his father’s works. The Battle of Carnival and Lent, the original of which is conserved in Vienna, is a very fine example of this. The subject matter can be found in medieval literature and plays. In the foreground, two opposing processions, the one to the left led by the replete figure of Carnival and the one to the right by the haggard figure of Lent, are about to confront each other in a burlesque parody of a joust. Here, on either side of the picture, are feasting and fasting, winter and spring (the trees to the left are leafless, those to the right have leaves), popular jollity and well-ordered charity, the ill-famed tavern and the church as the refuge of the pious soul. Whilst the father’s work was not lacking in humour, the son’s emphasises the encyclopaedic aspect: the many scenes accompanying the «battle» are all ceremonies or customs attached to the rites of carnival and lent, which succeed each other from Epiphany until Easter. One intriguing element for which no satisfactory explanation has yet been found is the fool guiding a couple with a torch in broad daylight in the centre of the composition. The group is walking towards the right, but with its back turned both to Carnival and the viewer. The smooth pictorial handling, the richness of the chromatic range and the subtlety of the colours, as well as the extreme care given to each detail make Brueghel the Younger’s painting much more than a simple copy. In addition to its own qualities, the painting also acts as a precious witness to the original state of its model: the children lying at the entrance to the church, the old woman bent double in the cart drawn by a poor woman in rags, and the bloated body of the corpse in the right foreground have all been painted over out of prudishness at a later date on the Vienna panel. The cripple standing with a naked torso on the far right of the son’s copy is also absent in the original.

A canopied mediaeval bed – this picture dates from about 1400, and shows Queen Guinevere dragging Sir Lancelot into her bed. Library, Book, France Paris.

Donato Creti, Observations astronomiques : la Lune 1711. The series of Astronomical observations was commissioned in 1711 by the Bolognese count Luigi Marsili. He had the artist Donato Creti paint all the planets in as many small pictures and made a gift of these to the Pope to convince him of the importance for the Holy Church of an astronomical observatory. The gift made it possible to achieve his goal, because with the support of Clement XI (pontiff from 1700 to 1721) the first public astronomical observatory was opened in Bologna a short time later. The eight small canvases show the planetary system as it was then known: the Sun , the Moon , Mercury , Venus , Mars , Jupiter , Saturn and a Comet . The planet Uranus, only discovered in 1781, is missing. The presence of the planets is dominant in the composition. They are depicted as observed with telescopes and various optical instruments (for which the artist had precise instructions) by small human figures in eighteenth century clothes, reabsorbed into the vastness of the nocturnal scene.

Moon Goddess by Josephine Wall. Selene, ( Greek: “Moon”) Latin Luna, in Greek and Roman religion, the personification of the moon as a goddess. She was worshipped at the new and full moons. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, her parents were the Titans Hyperion and Theia; her brother was Helios, the sun god (sometimes called her father); her sister was Eos (Dawn). In the Homeric Hymn to Selene, she bears the beautiful Pandeic to Zeus, while Alcman says they are the parents of Herse, the dew. She is often linked with Endymion, whom she loved and whom Zeus cast into eternal sleep in a cave on Mount Latmus; there, Selene visited him and became the mother of 50 daughters. In another story she was loved by Pan. By the 5th century bc Selene was sometimes identified with Artemis, or Phoebe, “the bright one.” She was usually represented as a woman with the moon (often in crescent form) on her head and driving a two-horse chariot. As Luna, she had temples at Rome on the Aventine and Palatine hills.

Michele Taber, Amalgam of Oil and Wax Produces Distinctive Paintings.

When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris. After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to urban landscapes. At a time when the critics Duranty and Zola exhorted artists to paint their own times, Monet tried to diversify his sources of inspiration and longed to be considered, like Manet, Degas and Caillebotte, a painter of modern life. In 1877, settling in the Nouvelle Athènes area, Claude Monet asked for permission to work in the Gare Saint-Lazare that marked its boundary on one side. Indeed, this was an ideal setting for someone who sought the changing effects of light, movement, clouds of steam and a radically modern motif. From there followed a series of paintings with different viewpoints including views of the vast hall. In spite of the apparent geometry of the metallic frame, what prevails here is really the effects of colour and light rather than a concern for describing machines or travellers in detail. Certain zones, true pieces of pure painting, achieve an almost abstract vision. This painting was praised by another painter of modern life, Gustave Caillebotte, whose painting was often the opposite of Monet’s. https://smarthistory.org/monet-the-gare-saint-lazare/ http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings-analysis/gare-sainte-lazare.htm https://www.biography.com/artist/claude-monet

Pietro Perugino, Christ Handing the Keys of the Kingdom to St. Peter, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome, Italy, 1481-83. Perhaps the most famous painting in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo’s time was one by fresco by Pietro Perugino called “Christ Handing the Keys of the Kingdom to Saint Peter”.

Lost in a Good Book v2 by Perry Edwards 3D – posted 7th May 2009

Plato´s Symposium – Anselm Feuerbach – Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, w598 cm x h295 cm. Oil on canvas. In ‘Das Gastmahl des Platon’ (1869) Anselm Feuerbach depicts the scene in Plato’s Symposium in which a drunken Alcibiades, accompanied by a band of revelers, enters the house of the poet Agathon. In this paper I offer an account of the significance of ‘Das Gastmahl’ in the light of three aims we have reason to attribute to its creator: (1) to recreate a famous scene from ancient Greek literature, making extensive use of (then) recent results of archaeological research; (2) to convey a sense of the nobility of the ancient Greeks; and (3) to offer a visual contrast of reason with desire. I also argue that as he set out to accomplish these objectives Feuerbach displayed considerable indifference to the contents of Plato’s dialogue. Thus what ‘Das Gastmahl’ offers us is less ‘Plato’s symposium’ and more ‘Feuerbach’s symposium’, a visually striking but in some respects unfaithful representation of the Platonic original. (http://philosophy.unc.edu/files/2013/10/New-Feuerbach.pdf)

Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.

The Troubadour Marcel Brunery (French, 1893-1982). Marcel Brunery was born in Paris and came from a family of respected artists. He was the Grandson of Francesco Gonin (Turin 1808 – Giaverno 1889) who painted romantic subjects for the Royal Piedmont Court and the son of Francois Brunery (Turin 1849 -Paris 1926). Although the Brunery family established themselves as artists in Paris and London they never forgot their Italian origins. Marcel painted cardinal and historical scenes. His style (like many other artists of this genre) was to make fun of the Lords of the Church and he delighted in portraying them in domestic dramas. Brunery’s paintings showed that the clergy was no different from the humble flock they presumed to lead and that they were victims of the same mundane trials and tribulations of everyday life. Brunery’s canvases are lavishly painted in a masterly way, accounting for his popularity, which has remained constant over the years.

The Cité Radieuse (Radiant City) was built between 1947 and 1952 and it proved enormously influential in the Brutalist architecture style and philosophy that was often cited as the initial inspiration. The Unité, designed as a «vertical garden city,» as opposed to the construction of villas, was an innovative integration of a system of distributing goods and services that provides independent support to the dwelling unit, responds to the needs of its residents and ensures operational autonomy in relation to the outside world. The proposed housing units is made up of the Marseille architectural unit that houses 1600 people. The building is an enormous construction, 140 meters long, 24 meters wide and 56 meters high, and provided an internal operation of more than 26 separate services. Each floor (twelve in total) contains 58 duplex apartments accessible from a wide corridor. Corridors run through the centre of the long axis of every third floor of the building, with each apartment occupying two levels, and stretching from one side of the building to the other, with a balcony Inside the building, the 337 apartments intersect each other in the vast network of reinforced concrete. At half height, a two-storey shopping area extends along the 135m length of the building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation https://www.dezeen.com/2014/09/15/le-corbusier-unite-d-habitation-cite-radieuse-marseille-brutalist-architecture/ https://mymodernmet.com/brutalist-architecture/

Sultan Omar Initiates the Reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, from the ‘Histoire de la conquete de Jerusalem’ by William of Tyre (c.1130-85) c.1470 (vellum), French School, (15th century).France, Rouen, XVe siècle Artiste : Maître de l’Échevinage. Painting had made great progress in the naturalistic depiction of distance and volume during Medieval times. Moving from flat, decorative space to three dimensional illusions of space to better represent the world they saw around them. This propelled painting and sculpture into a new stratosphere and paved the way for the Italian Renaissance and Dutch realist paintings that had people literally fainting in front of them – dizzy and giddy with delight. Modern concepts such as momentum, inertia and (expression of) rates of change came to be put in place in the 17th century, thanks mainly to the efforts of Galileo, Newton and Leibniz. Yet three centuries earlier John Buridan was thinking in terms of these concepts and attempting to apply them to moving things. In examining the motion of moving bodies, Buridan sought to correct the Aristotelian understanding of how movement is maintained in them. Buridan’s nine arguments on motion are presented and critiqued, and imagined counter-arguments, from an Aristotelian perspective, are offered.

Winslow Homer, Artists Sketching in the White Mountains, 1868. Here Homer documented the nineteenth century trend toward artists painting landscapes directly from nature rather than in their studios, «en plein air.» The expression «Realism», when applied to literature of the 19th century, implies the attempt to depict contemporary life and society. The growth of realism is linked to the development of science (especially biology), history and the social sciences and to the growth of industrialism and commerce. The «realist» tendency is not necessarily anti-romantic; romanticism in France often affirmed the common man and the natural setting, as in the peasant stories of George Sand, and concerned itself with historical forces and periods, as in the work of historian Jules Michelet. The novels of Stendhal, including The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, address issues of their contemporary society while also using themes and characters derived from the romantic movement. Honoré de Balzac is the most prominent representative of 19th century realism in fiction. His La Comédie humaine, a vast collection of nearly 100 novels, was the most ambitious scheme ever devised by a writer of fiction—nothing less than a complete contemporary history of his countrymen. Realism also appears in the works of Alexandre Dumas, fils.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo is widely considered the first great opera. The libretto, penned by Monteverdi’s friend Alessandro Striggio, relates the legend of Orpheus and his descent into the underworld to recover his beloved, Euridice. Monteverdi’s opera was commissioned by a wealthy group of Mantuan nobility known as the Accademia degl’Invaghiti whose members included Striggio and the heir to the Mantuan throne, Francesco Gonzaga. Gonzaga’s palace would later serve as the location for the premiere of Orfeo on 24 February 1607; a second performance was prepared for the ladies of the city the following week. Opera as a musical genre was the development of a group of Florentines who were looking for a way to present plays in music. The Florentine Camerata, as they were known, looked to early Greek drama, which was believed to be entirely sung, as a model. To recreate the ethos of Greek drama they used a new form of vocal writing, known as monody, to heighten the words of the drama. Over the accompaniment of basso continuo (chords improvised from a framework given by the composer and performed by a chordal instrument or instruments, such as lutes, harpsichords and the like and a bass instrument such as a cello) a soloist would sing in a type of heightened speech, known as recitative. Interspersed throughout the opera were also sung passages, often strophic or rhythmically lively, known as arias, and passages halfway between recitative and aria, known as arioso. The structure was filled out with choral numbers, dances, ritornelli (instrumental interludes) and so forth. It is important to remember that modern notions of opera or film were nonexistent in the 1600s. Drama functioned more as ritual than as excitement. When Monteverdi approached the composition of Orfeo, he approached it as he would a ritual text, such as a Mass. However, given that most music of the time was of significantly shorter duration, Monteverdi realized that he would need to have a larger musical form to tie the varied elements of the opera together. To do so, Monteverdi arranged his opera in a chiastic structure – (a structure in which individual parts pivot around a central axis, as in, for instance ABCBA) pivoting around the third act and its climactic aria Possente Spirto («Powerful Spirit»), an aria in which Orfeo tries to convince Charon, the boatman who ferries souls across the rivers that divide the world of the living from the world of the dead, to allow him, a mortal, entry into the underworld. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Orfeo https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-alamo-musicappreciation/chapter/monteverdis-lorfeo/ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claudio-Monteverdi

This little picture shows the street party tea organised in Pilgrim Street, Newcastle to celebrate the end of the First World War (1914-1918). John Potts was a Newcastle accountant who painted watercolours in his spare time.

The represented Council is sometimes called the Tridentine Council, after the Latin name for the city, Tridentum. The coat of arms on the left wall behind the cardinals in red is that of Pius IV, the pope at the time of the closing of the Council. Long after the closing of the Council of Trent its importance was underscored in a didactic and journalistic fresco painted as part of an otherwise elegant and classicising decorative program for a chapel in Santa Maria in Trastevere for one of Rome’s leading churchmen, Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps. Participants in the Council session are spread row upon row across the top of the composition, their faces directed forward or turned in profile as if to record as completely and accurately as possible the individual members. At the lower right of this pictorial chronicle of the event, however, allegorical personifications of the virtues crown a figure representing the Roman Church with a papal tiara. A globe at the lower left shows Europe, Africa, and parts of Asia. Thus the Church appears not only victorious, but extending far beyond Europe, where Protestantism had recently made such dramatic inroads. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) marked the beginning of the Counter Reformation. After Luther’s widely successful protestant reforms the Catholic Church needed to bring back the people under its fold. Where Luther and his followers were mostly turned away from the Catholic Church by the displays of decadence and opulence the Papacy tried to convince the masses with statements and interpretations that proved the Catholic Church existed according to god’s will through events and persons past. The baroque style so predominant in that era was mostly fueled by the Catholics. All over Europe were artists and architects commissioned for works to restore the Catholic Church back to its place of undisputed eminence. In effect the Papacy used art as a form of propaganda to sway the masses in favor of their ideology over that of the protestants. Around the turn of the century, a few decades after Council of Trent, painters and sculptors like Caravaggio, Rubens and Bernini were being commissioned by the Church to make many works of art to decorate the churches and palaces of Rome. Most of these commissions still had the tenants of the Council of Trent in mind and thus contained themes and subjects aimed at persuading the audience to the side of the Catholic Church. Pasquale Cati (c. 1550–c. 1620) was an Italian Mannerist painter active mostly in Rome. Born in Jesi, Cati moved to Rome, where he was known as a follower, if not pupil, of Michelangelo, and later of Federico Zuccari. Among his works are frescoes in the Remigius chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, frescoes depicting the life of the Titular saint in San Lorenzo in Panisperna, and in walls and vault in the Altemps chapel in Santa Maria in Trastevere. He is also known for a painting depicting the assembled clergy for the Council of Trent. Council of Trent (1588), Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome. Cati was one of the painters engaged during the papacy of Gregory XIII in painting the ceiling of the Galleria Geografica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasquale_Cati http://rome-honours-groningen.co.nf/2015/WikiCounterReformation.php https://simplycatholic.com/myths-and-facts-about-the-council-of-trent/

Primavera or Springtime 1477 Sandro Botticelli. This wonderful and famous work of art by great Botticelli was painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The Medici was a very important Florentine banking family and later royal house of Tuscany. Critics are divided over the date of the work. Anyway it was certainly painted between 1477 and 1482.The Primavera (or the Allegory of Spring) is full of allegorical meanings, whose interpretation is difficult and still uncertain. Among the many theories proposed over the last decades, the one that seems to be the most corroborated is the interpretation of the painting as the realm of Venus, sung by the ancient poets and by Poliziano (famous scholar at the court of the Medici). On the right Zephyrus (the blue faced young man) chases Flora and fecundates her with a breath. Flora turns into Spring, the elegant woman scattering her flowers over the world. Venus, in the middle, represents the “Humanitas” (the benevolence), which protects men. On the left the three Graces dance and Mercury dissipates the clouds. The Allegory of Spring is a very refined work of art. The naturalistic details of the meadow (there are hundreds of types of flowers), the skillful use of the color, the elegance of the figures and the poetry of the whole, have made this important and fascinating work celebrated all over the world.

A Portrait of Sir Issac Newton by Jean-Leon Huens (1921 – 1982).

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer 1653 , Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn) (Dutch, Leiden 1606–1669 Amsterdam). The founder of empirical philosophy, Aristotle is shown here as a living being, richly dressed, his gold chain unambiguously alluding to his world-dominating pupil and patron, Alexander the Great. The aging philosopher rests his hand on a marble bust of the father of Western literature, the blind poet, Homer, who was an archivist of human hopes and immortal deeds, and a personification of the creative spirit. Theirs is a silent, transgenerational dialogue—between life and art, between world and spirit—and thanks to Rembrandt, we, too, in contemplating them all, are drawn inexorably into the conversation.

Calves’ Heads and Brains or a Phrenological Lecture 1826. In the 1800s, phrenology became popular with large numbers of people but soon became controversial within medical circles. Phrenologists believed that the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and therefore the overlying skull) determined personality. This print shows a caricature of a phrenologist who is lecturing to a crowded audience in room filled with plaster heads, books, skulls and pictures. Some of the audience are examining the shape of their own heads. The contents of the shelves include a bottle of Gall. This is a reference to Franz Gall (1758 –1828), a German physician and the founder of phrenology, who had lectured in London in 1823. He had worked with Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), whose plaster cast model head is in the bottom right of the print. The lecturer may be George Combe (1788-1858), an Edinburgh phrenologist who published Elements of Phrenology in 1824. The second edition of the book was attacked in the Edinburgh Review, September 1826. The print is signed by the ‘artists’ “L. Bump” and “J. Lump” – another way of mocking phrenologists. Paul Feyerabend demonstrated that in reality there are numerous factors that drive the scientific process of any individual. The irrational factors like emotions, passions, politics and individual ability do not allow for any model of an objective unchanging method. And in this Feyerabend is absolutely correct; the evidence falsifies any theory of an objective unchanging method. But Feyerabend takes this to mean that science itself cannot be a rational enterprise. His assertion is based purely on his assumption that Truth and Reason do not exist, and that science therefore has no superiority to any other belief system.

Oliver Deussen and Thomas Lindemeier/Univ. of Konstanz

The Descent from the Cross was painted in accordance with the guidelines of the Catholic Council of Trent, that sought to make Biblical art more relevant to the needs of the congregation. Thus it was created on a large scale (roughly 14 x 16 feet), it was colourful, with a clear composition, and it stimulated both the piety and the visual imagination of the faithful. Jesuit teaching placed particular emphasis on the need to foster a believer’s ability to imagine Biblical scenes as though they were real. The crucifixion and its aftermath was a scene of great spiritual intensity and a vital element of Christian theology, and – along with the illustration of Catholic dogma such as The Transfiguration of Christ, The Immaculate Conception and so on – continued to be a highly-approved subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_from_the_Cross_(Rubens) http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/descent-from-the-cross-rubens.htm http://totallyhistory.com/the-descent-from-the-cross/ http://www.peter-paul-rubens.org/descent-from-the-cross/