The Ancient Romans had a litany of holidays for all sorts of occasions. Every August 23 were the Vulcanalia, festivities honoring the Roman deity Vulcan, featured here in this palm-sized bronze relief from the 2nd or 3rd century CE.Worship of Vulcan shows the way that Romans often bifurcated their attitudes towards their deities. Vulcan was […]
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Time is relative: Einstein taught us that. What scientists measure with careful instruments and observation we know intuitively — our brains carefully examine novel experiences and gloss over the ordinary, so that even our own sense of what takes longer or shorter is subjective.Ainissa Ramirez posits that the malleable nature of time can also appear
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This is a post about two Irish songs that deal with memory. 1994 was the release date of The Cranberries’ “Zombie” and Sinead O’Connor’s “Famine,” and both emerged out of The Troubles, a period of about thirty years (late 1960s to 1998), when tension in Northern Ireland between forces that favored independence and those who
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With its emphasis on individualism and a legacy of folks who have imagined what a “perfect” society ought to look like, America has been a fertile ground for numerous Utopian communities. Here you see a picture of the first rural hippie commune in 1969: this was Drop City, Colorado.Formed in 1965 when three people —
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Time for an amusing Ancient Greek philosophers anecdote. This one is about the clash between Diogenes of Sinope (d 323 BCE) and the famed Athenian philosopher Plato.According to Diogenes Laëtius (no relation – he lived about 500 years after but preserved ancient sources), Plato had defined men as featherless bipeds. This provoked the OG Diogenes
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This is the sixteenth-century painter Federico Barocci’s _Aeneas’ _Flight from Troy_. If the composition looks unsettling and chaotic, it should: it attempts to capture the turmoil of a man having to flee his homeland because of war. The violence propelling the family of Aeneas to escape Troy is mostly offstage, but the billowing fabric, darkened
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The Victorians loved themselves a good Ancient Egyptian mummy, but it turns out that 16th and 17th century Europeans did too — as ingestible medicine. But let me not get ahead of myself.First, one must acknowledge the enormous usage of mummies that Victorians did indeed employ. Starting in the 16th century, “mummy brown” became prized
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Located in downtown Philadelphia’s iconic South Street, Philly’s Magic Gardens is an artistic spectacle. It’s a dazzling outdoor-and-indoor labyrinth crammed from top to bottom and all around with the mosaics of local artist Isaiah Zagar. If you walk around South Street, you will no doubt see other mosaics by Zagar, who has made it his
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Humorous, whimsical, profound, and thought-provoking — these are some of the major reactions to viewers exploring the 42 acre Seward Johnson “Grounds for Sculpture.” Seward Johnson founded the open-air museum in 1992 as a way to promote contemporary sculpture to the general public. Seward, part of the Johnson & Johnson family, never cottoned onto the
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Today I got to tour the Barnes Museum, which houses an amazing collection of art with particular highlights of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modernist works. The paintings reside in a relatively recent (2012) building in Philadelphia. The museum’s decor is spacious and allows for a great deal of outside lighting and comfortable seating in a glass-and-cement
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In the most remote parts of central Pennsylvania there are a string of state game lands that go by the name of “St Anthony’s Wilderness”. And on a mountain ridge, accessible only by hiking in, are the ruins of a small coal-mining community around the village known as Yellow Springs. An identifying sign along the
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This is one folio from the precious “Blue Qur’an,” dating from about 850-950 CE. The indigo-dyed parchment is adorned with gold and silver lettering, a treasured example of the heights to which the Arabic-speaking Muslim world brought the art of calligraphy. The era in which this copy of the Qur’an was written overlaps with the
Al-Kindī, Calligraphy and Cryptography in 9th c Middle East Read More »
There are many 19th-century paintings like this — where there are seemingly hundreds of minute figures, and you have to concentrate on the small patches of action in order to understand at all what is going on, instead of getting an impression of the whole and then spending time appreciating the details. This one is
This Romano-British mosaic of combating gladiators speaks to the tradition of these bloody contests. It turns out, they were sanguineous in multiple ways — not only with the frequent slayings of the losers, but also in the way gladiator blood was revered for medicinal purposes.First appearing in the records about 260 BCE, gladiator fights originally
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In 1888, all of Britain was captivated by a string of goulish murders of indigent women in London’s East End slums. The perpetrator was of course Jack the Ripper, Britain’s most famous serial killer. What went on in the Whitechapel District of London that year has captivated the imaginations of millions of people since.It is
This is a close-up picture that I took earlier this month near the Appalachian Trail in Central Pennsylvania of a very tiny fungus with an adorable moniker and a long pedigree for human use. Called “green elfcup” or “green wood cup,” the technical name of this mushroom is “Chloriciboria aeruginascens,” and although it is a
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This second-century BCE Etruscan urn shows the death of Actaeon. The myth was popular in the Ancient Mediterranean world and tells a story about a fated hunter, Actaeon, who gazed at the virginal Goddess Artemis/Diana. This forbidden act caused the Goddess to transform the man into a stag, and he was then devoured by his
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In the second century of the Common Era, China’s Han Dynasty oversaw an unusually long period of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, military conflicts punctuated the era, and often the elite aristocratic families were involved. The Wu Family Shrines document such events, and featured prominently in one of the stone chambers there, amidst many other bas-relief
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In the United States today is the Thanksgiving holiday, and a common symbol (besides a turkey cross-dressing as a Pilgrim) is the cornucopia, or “Horn of Plenty”. This sounds like a magical item from the modern gaming world, but it goes back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Here, for instance, is a fourth-century
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The Mattress Museum of Contemporary art was started in Pittsburgh in 1977, when an old mattress factory was turned into an unusually immersive art experience. The rooms have installations that are intended to be viewed in their particular locations, and the various tableaus and rooms are a mixture of permanent and artist-in-residence exhibits. The
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