If you don’t live in a part of the world with a lot of hummingbirds, it’s easy to regard them as not quite of this earth. With their wide array of shimmering colors and frenetic yet eerily stable manner of flight, they can seem like quasi-fantastical creatures even to those who encounter them in reality. They certainly captured the imagination of English ornithologist John Gould, who between the years of 1849 and 1887 created A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Humming-Birds, a catalog of all known species of hummingbird at the time. As you might expect, this is just the kind of old book you can peruse at the Internet Archive, but now there’s also an online restoration that returns Gould’s illustrations to their original glory.
A Monograph of the Trochilidæ “is considered one of the finest examples of ornithological illustration ever produced, as well as a scientific masterpiece,” writes the site’s creator, Nicholas Rougeux (previously featured here on Open Culture for his digital restorations of British & ExoticMineralogy and Euclid’s Elements).
“Gould’s passion for hummingbirds led him to travel to various parts of the world, such as North America, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, to observe and collect specimens. He also received many specimens from other naturalists and collectors.” Taken together, the work’s five volumes — one of them published as a supplement years after his death — catalog 537 species, documenting their appearance with 418 hand-colored lithographic plates.
All these images were “analyzed and restored to their original vibrant colors in a process that took nearly 150 hours to complete. As much of the original plate was preserved — including the delicate colors of the scenic backgrounds in each vignette.” You can view and download them at the site’s illustrations page, where they come accompanied by Gould’s own text and classified according to the same scheme he originally used. You may not know your Phaëthornis from your Sphenoproctus, to say nothing of your Cyanomyia from your Smaragdochrysis, but after seeing these small wonders of the natural world as Gould did (all arranged into a chromatic spectrum by Rougeux to make a striking poster), you may well find yourself inspired to learn the differences — or at least to put a feeder outside your window.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Today, the name Judith hardly calls to mind a woman capable of great violence. Things seem to have been different in antiquity: “The Biblical story from the Book of Judith tells how the beautiful Israelite widow Judith bravely seduces and then kills the sexually aggressive Assyrian general Holofernes in order to save her people,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the Great Art Explained video above. “It was seen as a symbol of triumph over tyranny, a sort of female David and Goliath.” It thus made the ideal subject matter for the painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who followed in the footsteps of her father Orazio Gentileschi, and who gained notoriety at a young age for her involvement in a major sex-crime trial.
As Rebecca Mead writes in the New Yorker, “Artemisia was raped by a friend of Orazio’s: the artist Agostino Tassi,” who had been hired to tutor her. Though Tassi promised to marry her after that and subsequent encounters, he never made good — and indeed married another woman — which prompted Orazio Gentileschi to seek recompense for the family’s lost honor in court. In our time, “the assault has inevitably, and often reductively, been the lens through which her artistic accomplishments have been viewed. The sometimes savage themes of her paintings have been interpreted as expressions of wrathful catharsis.” This is truer of none of her works than Judith Beheading Holofernes, the subject of Payne’s video.
“Even for seventeenth-century Florence, this painting was unusually gruesome,” he says, “and even more unusual was that it was painted by a woman.” What’s more, it came a couple of decades after a rendition of the same Biblical event by no less a master than Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. “Caravaggio dominated the art scene in the seventeenth century, and he was also a good friend of Gentileschi’s father,” which means that Artemisia could have received his influence directly. Both of their images of Holofernes’ death at Judith’s hands are “pure Baroque paintings: exaggerated movement, high contrast light set off by deep dark shadows, contorted features and violent gestures, a focus on the theatrical.”
Yet with its intense physicality — as well as its frankness about Judith and her maidservant’s concentration on their murderous task — Artemisia’s painting makes a greater impact on viewers. Mead notes that it “was for decades hidden from public view, presumably on the ground that it was distasteful” and that it moved nineteenth-century art historian Anna Brownell Jameson to wish for “the privilege of burning it to ashes.” Though the artist fell into obscurity after her death, the culture of the twenty-first century has elevated her out of it: “on art-adjacent blogs, Artemisia’s strength and occasionally obnoxious self-assurance are held forth as her most essential qualities. She has become, as the Internet term of approval has it, a badass bitch.” Nor has her name hurt her brand. Artemisia: now there’s a formidable-sounding woman.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
With his dark suit, neat haircut, and bowler hat, René Magritte embodied early-twentieth-century Belgian normality. Yet the feelings his work stirred in their viewers were very much the opposite of normal. He had various ways of accomplishing this. One was “to combine two familiar objects and make a new one,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above. “Another method was to paint a solid object as if it were a see-through portal. In some paintings he would defy gravity and show heavy objects floating. He would give an unfamiliar name to familiar objects. He would change scale by making small objects huge and large objects impossibly tiny.”
One of Magritte’s particularly effective methods was “to obscure or to hide a face or an object, setting up a conflict between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.” The power of this technique is vividly showcased by The Lovers II, from 1928, in which Magritte takes the “cinematic cliché” of the kiss and “disrupts our voyeuristic pleasure by covering the faces in cloth. A moment of collection becomes one of isolation, of sexual frustration. An intimate moment becomes something dark and effortlessly disturbing, something hidden and anonymous.”
Might this have something to do with the death of his mother, who threw herself in a river when he was young? “When her body was eventually found, a nightdress had been dragged up over her naked body and was covering her face.”
The artist himself wouldn’t have thought so. “Psychology didn’t interest Magritte, who avoided any in-depth interpretation of his work,” Payne says, and yet his work “offers so much opportunity for armchair analysis.” Employing an “extreme contrast between the drabness of his style and the extraordinary subject matter,” he demonstrated his understanding that people want to see what’s hidden, that removing what they expect “creates a tension and an anxiety,” and that “if the style of the image doesn’t attract attention, the irrationality of the image becomes even more shocking.” Given Magritte’s current stature, it may come as a surprise to hear that his painting didn’t earn him much in his lifetime. But given his evident ability to manipulate viewers’ thoughts and feelings through visual means alone, it won’t come as a surprise to hear that he made his money running an advertising agency.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,” he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers.
Marquee name Surrealists like Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, René Magritte, and Max Ernst positioned the women in their circle as muses and symbols of erotic femininity, rather than artists in their own right.
As Méret Oppenheim, subject of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is seen remarking at the outset of Behind the Masterpiece’s introduction to “the fantastic women of Surrealism”, above, it was up to female Surrealists to free themselves of the narrowly defined role society — and their male counterparts — sought to impose on them:
A woman isn’t entitled to think, to express aggressive ideas.
The first artist Behind the Masterpiece profiles needs no introduction. Frida Kahlo is surely one of the best known female artists in the world, a woman who played by her own rules, turning to poetic, often brutal imagery as she delved into her own physical and mental suffering:
I paint self-portraits, because I paint my own reality. I paint what I need to. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and painting substituted for all of this… I am not sick, I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.
Their friendship was ultimately more satisfying and far longer lasting then their romantic attachments to Surrealist luminaries Ernst and poet Benjamin Péret. Carrington paid tribute to it in her novel,The Hearing Trumpet.
Carrington’s work is about tone and color and Varo’s is about line and form.
The name of Dorothea Tanning, like that of Leonora Carrington, is often linked to Max Ernst, though she made no bones about her desire to keep her artistic identity separate from that of her husband of 30 years.
Her work evolved several times over the course of a career spanning seven decades, but her first major museum survey was a posthumous one.
If I asked for two words that you associate with pin cushions, you would say sewing and craft, and you would associate those with the female in the house. Tanning played with the idea of wifely skills and took a very humble object and turned it into a fetish. She crafted her first one out of velvet in 1965 and randomly placed pins in it and aligned it with a voodoo doll. She says it ‘bristles’ with images. So she takes something fabulously familiar and makes it uncanny and strange to encourage us to think differently.
Tanning rejected the label of ‘woman artist’, viewing it as “just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist’.”
One wonders what he would have made of Object, the fur lined teacup, saucer and spoon that is Oppenheim’s best known work, for better or worse.
In an essay for Khan Academy’s AP/College Art History course Josh Rose describes how Museum of Modern Art patrons declared it the “quintessential” Surrealist object when it was featured in the influential 1936–37 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism:”
But for Oppenheim, the prestige and focus on this one object proved too much, and she spent more than a decade out of the artistic limelight, destroying much of the work she produced during that period. It was only later when she re-emerged, and began publicly showing new paintings and objects with renewed vigor and confidence, that she began reclaiming some of the intent of her work. When she was given an award for her work by the City of Basel, she touched upon this in her acceptance speech, (saying,) “I think it is the duty of a woman to lead a life that expresses her disbelief in the validity of the taboos that have been imposed upon her kind for thousands of years. Nobody will give you freedom; you have to take it.”
Or an artistically gifted woman of the same era, looking for a steady, respectable source of income.
In 1886, long before color photography was a viable option, the US Department of Agriculture engaged approximately 21, mostly female illustrators to create realistic renderings of hundreds of fruit varieties for lithographic reproduction in USDA articles, reports, and bulletins.
According to the Division of Pomology’s first chief, Henry E. Van Deman, the artists’ mandate was to capture “the natural size, shape, and color of both the exterior and interior of the fruit, with the leaves and twigs characteristic of each.”
If a specimen was going bad, the artist was under strict orders to represent the damage faithfully — no prettying things up.
As Alice Tangerini, staff illustrator and curator for botanical art in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History writes, “botanical illustrators and their works serve the scientist, depict(ing) what a botanist describes, acting as the proofreader for the scientific description:”
Digital photography, although increasingly used, cannot make judgements about the intricacies of portraying the plant parts a scientist may wish to emphasize and a camera cannot reconstruct a lifelike botanical specimen from dried, pressed material… the thought process mediating that decision of every aspect of the illustration lives in the head of the illustrator.
…the illustrator also has an eye for the aesthetics of botanical illustration, knowing that a drawing must capture the interest of the viewer to be a viable form of communication. Attention to accuracy is important, but excellence of style and technique used is also primary for an illustration to endure as a work of art and science.
(Fruit breeders’ rights were formally protected with the establishment of the Plant Patent Act of 1930, which decreed that anyone who “invented or discovered and asexually reproduced any distinct and new variety of plant” could receive a patent.)
The collection’s 7,497 watercolors of realistically-rendered fruits capture both the commonplace and the exotic in mouthwatering detail.
Both aesthetically and as a scientific database, the Pomological Watercolor Collection is the berries — specifically, Gandy, Chesapeake, Excelsior, Manhattan, and Gabara to namecheck but a few types of Fragaria, aka strawberries, preserved therein.
Other fruits remain lesser known on our shores. The USDA sponsored global expeditions specifically to gather specimens such as the ones below.
The thick, square-ended Popoulu banana would never be mistaken for a Chiquita from the outside. According to The World of Bananas in Hawai’i: Then and Now, its lineage dates back tens of thousands of years to the Vanuatu archipelago.
If you celebrate the harvest festival Sukkot, you likely encountered an etrog within the last month. The notoriously fiddly crop has been cultivated domestically since 1980, when a yeshiva student in Brooklyn, seeking to keep costs down and ensure that kosher protocols were maintained, convinced a third-generation California citrus grower by the name of Fitzgerald to give it a go.
If you were to see Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s L’Escarpolette, or TheSwing, at the Wallace Collection, you might not think particularly hard about it. Though all the subtle light effects that make the young woman in pink pop out of the lush garden that surrounds her are impressive, granted — and they’ve become even more so since the painting’s recent restoration — there doesn’t seem to be much else of interest at first glance. But take a second glance, and you may well get a sense of what, back in the seventeen-sixties, made this commission “so raunchy, many artists wouldn’t have done it for all the money in the world.”
So says the narrator of the Art Deco video above, which promises an explanation of why The Swing “isn’t as innocent as it seems.” Take, for example, the young man reclining in the canvas lower-left corner, whose ecstatic expression can perhaps be explained by what’s entered his line of sight. But “forget about the fact that he can see up her skirt: her ankle is showing, a very erotic gesture at the time.”
All of this intensifies when we know the story behind the painting, and specifically that “the man who commissioned the painting is the man in the bush, and he’s also the woman’s lover, not her husband.” Is her husband the older fellow crouched in the opposite corner, clutching the swing’s reins? Perhaps, but like any piece of art worth regarding, this one leaves room for interpretation.
Still, if you understand something of the mores of its time and place, there’s no mistaking its titillating intent. None of Fragonard’s contemporaries could have imagined that this painting would one day hang in a public gallery for all the world to see, commissioned as it was for display only in a private home. Many paintings were in the time of Rococo, “a style of art that comes out of the Baroque,” as art historian Steven Zucker says in the Smarthistory video just above, which despite having “jettisoned the seriousness, the morality” of its predecessor, nevertheless retained “a sense of energy, a sense of movement.” The Swing remains “a perfect expression of the frivolity, the luxury, and the indulgence of the Rococo” — and a reminder, as the Art Deco video puts it, that “whatever happens in the mystical garden, stays in the mystical fairy garden.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four ‘court’ cards: King, Queen, Jack, and Knight.” The latter figure has “mysteriously disappeared from today’s playing cards,” though examples of Knight playing cards exist in the fossil record. The modern Jack is a survival of the Page cards in the Tarot. (See examples of Tarot court cards here from the 1910 Rider-Waite deck.) The similarities between the two types of decks are significant, yet no one but adepts seems to consider using their Gin Rummy cards to tell the future.
The eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung, however, might have done so.
As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are “really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism.
They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” The cards, said Jung, “combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of mankind.” This, too, is how Tarot works—with the added dimension of “symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations.” The images—the hanged man, the tower, the sun—“are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature.”
Thus far, Jung hasn’t said anything many orthodox Jungian psychologists would find disagreeable, but he goes even further and claims that, indeed, “we can predict the future, when we know how the present moment evolved from the past.” He called for “an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.” He compared this process to the Chinese I Ching, and other such practices. As analyst Marie-Louise von Franz recounts in her book Psyche and Matter:
Jung suggested… having people engage in a divinatory procedure: throwing the I Ching, laying the Tarot cards, consulting the Mexican divination calendar, having a transit horoscope or a geometric reading done.
Content seemed to matter much less than form. Invoking the Swedenborgian doctrine of correspondences, Jung notes in his lecture, “man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious.”
What he aimed at through the use of divination was to accelerate the process of “individuation,” the move toward wholeness and integrity, by means of playful combinations of archetypes. As another mystical psychologist, Alejandro Jodorowsky, puts it, “the Tarot will teach you how to create a soul.” Jung perceived the Tarot, notes the blog Faena Aleph, “as an alchemical game,” which in his words, attempts “the union of opposites.” Like the I Ching, it “presents a rhythm of negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light.”
Much later in 1960, a year before his death, Jung seemed less sanguine about Tarot and the occult, or at least downplayed their mystical, divinatory power for language more suited to the laboratory, right down to the usual complaints about staffing and funding. As he wrote in a letter about his attempts to use these methods:
Under certain conditions it is possible to experiment with archetypes, as my ‘astrological experiment’ has shown. As a matter of fact we had begun such experiments at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, using the historically known intuitive, i.e., synchronistic methods (astrology, geomancy, Tarot cards, and the I Ching). But we had too few co-workers and too little means, so we could not go on and had to stop.
Later interpreters of Jung doubted that his experiments with divination as an analytical technique would pass peer review. “To do more than ‘preach to the converted,’” wrote the authors of a 1998 article published in the Journal of Parapsychology, “this experiment or any other must be done with sufficient rigor that the larger scientific community would be satisfied with all aspects of the data taking, analysis of the data, and so forth.” Or, one could simply use Jungian methods to read the Tarot, the scientific community be damned.
You can see images of each of Wang’s cards here. His books purport to be exhaustive studies of Jung’s Tarot theory and practice, written in consultation with Jung scholars in New York and Zurich. Sallie Nichols’ Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey is less voluminous and innovative—using the traditional, Pamela Coleman-Smith-illustrated, Rider-Waite deck rather than an updated original version. But for those willing to grant a relationship between systems of symbols and a collective unconscious, her book may provide some penetrating insights, if not a recipe for predicting the future.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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We know that Michelangelo wrote grocery lists; now we have evidence that Leonardo wrote resumes. “Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer, an armorer, a maker of things that go ‘boom,’ ” writes Marc Cendella on his blog about job-searching and recruitment advice. “Like you, he had to put together a resume to get his next gig. So in 1482, at the age of 30, he wrote out a letter and a list of his capabilities and sent it off to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan.” Having yet to establish his reputation as perhaps the Italian Renaissance’s most respected polymath, Leonardo spelled himself out, in translation, as follows:
Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.
1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.
3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.
9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.
10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.
11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.
And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.
Even the densest fifteenth-century Duke, I wager, could see the use in a man able to make portable bridges, get water out of trenches, destroy rock built upon rock, fling a storm of stones, fortify vessels, pass under rivers, and make everything from “big guns,” catapults, mangonels, and trabocchi to unattackable covered chariots. Though Leonardo understandably concentrates on his wartime engineering skills, he also touches on the range of other disciplines — Renaissance man, remember — he has mastered, like architecture, sculpture, and painting. Perhaps most impressively of all, he rattles off all these points without seeming particularly boastful. “You’ll notice he doesn’t recite past achievements,” Cendella adds, “because those are about hisachievements, and not about the Duke’s needs.” Still, he might have added that, given just a few more years, he could design a pretty captivating organ.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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