Ancient Romans were so used to human brutality and violence that they took its existence for granted. Whether the violence was directed by slave owners to their human property, on display at the regular games and gladiator matches, or observed at the very public slaughtering of animals for religious sacrificial purposes, it was normalized. […]
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This post is three days past the memorial day of the person featured here, Saint Agatha of Sicily. She’s one of my favorite regulars in the history of Christian artwork — right along the arrows all over St Sebastian and St Lucy with her eyeballs or Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel or John with
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You are looking at one of the most puzzled over artistic products of Early Medieval Britain — it is one panel of a rectangular container known as the Franks Casket. Made in 7th-century Northumbria in northern England, it has a fascinating hodgepodge of Germanic/Celtic/Ancient Roman influences, and scholars still debate the exact meanings of the
One of my favorite periods in history is when the Germanic- and Celtic- speaking peoples were Christianizing yet kept up a lot of their indigenous religious world views and culture. The Ruthwell Cross, probably dating to the early 700s, is one of the most beautiful products of this era. Ruthwell is now in Scotland, but
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This extraordinary scene from a 348-long muslin painting called “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley” was done by an American artist named John J. Egan in 1850. Looking carefully at the details, you can see that white Americans are using their black slaves to open up an American Indian burial mound. The
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Malaria is, like COVID, a largely preventable death: so long as the patient gets the right treatment at the right time. Many still do not have access to good medical care. For instance, in 2019, 409,000 people in Africa — mostly babies and toddlers — died of this disease. But malaria is not a
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The Carpathian Mountains in Western Ukraine are some of the traditional homelands of the Hutsul peoples. Although their roots extend back hundreds of years, the term “Hutsul” first appears in written sources in 1816, when it was used by outsiders — in fact, the term’s etymology, although uncertain, might derive from the critical words for
This painting, from Ukrainian artist “AveOko”, is called “Mofar (3)”, and is a modern rendition of a figure from the Hutsul culture. The Hutsuls, a mountain- and- forest- dwelling people in Western Ukraine, consider mofars to be a type of shamen, using herbalism and folk magic. Mofars are considered neither evil nor good per se,
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Is this the face of the Slavic pagan Goddess Mokosh? If so, it would be one of the only remaining images of the powerful fertility deity whose influence eroded with the arrival of Christianity among the Kievan or Kyivan Rus in the 10th century. Much about this period is unknown, but the Kievan/Kyivan Rus
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Here are three close up images from one of the most famous Chinese ink paintings ever created, the _Nine Dragons_, by Chen Rong. Chen Rong produced this handscroll in 1244, and it is massive — over ten meters long! (32 feet) The aesthetic qualities are immediately grasped even if you don’t know a darn
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Let’s talk about apotheoses in domes in art, shall we? This term comes from Ancient Greek and means “to make into a God.” Some heroes of Classical myths ended up ascending into the heavens to be with the other Olympians, such as Hercules. In Ancient Rome, emperors beloved by the Senate could be given the
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This strange building, rendered by contemporary artist Yasen Stoilov, is the moveable homestead of the legendary Baba Yaga of Slavic origin. Her stories probably go back much farther in time than our written sources permit us to see, so scholars have argued about the meaning of her tales. Baba Yaga appears as an old
What do all three of the women in these three images have in common? A: they each depict the American Revolutionary war heroine Molly Pitcher, and B: none of them are real. Real, as in, there was no OG Molly Pitcher historians can trace. Stories about about a woman called “Captain Molly” who served
I adore Medieval flora and fauna mistakes! When they got things wrong, they were so extra about it. So here’s an example of a made-up species that Medieval people thought existed, called the “Barnacle Goose,” or “Branta leucopsis”. Much like the “Lamb of Tartary,” which I did a different post about, the Barnacle Geese
M.C. Escher was an amazing surrealist artist whose works were frequently inspired by mathematics. Here is his 1963 work, “Moebius Strip II,” which shows ants crawling along the single-surface loop. First discovered by astronomer and mathematician August Möbius in 1858 (although it had been described in unpublished literature a few years prior by a
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The grumpy faces you see here belong to invaders captured by the Pharaoh Ramses III (about 1186-1154 BCE). Many scholars have interpreted these men as the infamous “Sea Peoples,” about whom little is known for certain, but to whom historians have attributed the collapse of many civilizations in the Bronze Age. The Sea Peoples
This is a late 12th-century illustration of “the Witch of Endor,” a prophetess from the Bible who could raise the spirits of the dead and talk to them. Artists have enjoyed illustrating her almost as much as religious people have enjoyed debating about her powers. In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament First Book of Samuel
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In the late 1400s, Japanese Zen monks brought a particular style of splashed-ink painting to its acme. Here, you see a scene that looks like an embankment with trees, a fence, and a building: or is it just a random oddly arranged page of smudges? The Zen monk who painted this, Josui Sōen, was a
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This is a statue in the Smithsonian Museum’s Freer Gallery of the Buddha Vairochana: a.k.a. The Cosmic Buddha. It really is a fantastic piece, with the artful designs on the Buddha’s clothing depicting various “Realms of Existence” — different planes that made up the cosmos of the Mahayana Buddhist universe. Created in the
My favorite time period in Japan (and there are many) is the Muromachi era, when a militarized aristocracy ruled in a de-centralized state. The shōgun were just coming on the scene, and they had aspersions of refinement but lacked the intellectual legacy of the ruling class they had usurped. Into this world entered Zen Buddhism,
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