Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (Circa 1482)

in Art, History | October 3rd, 2023

DaVinciResume

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 his achieve­ments, 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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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michelangelo’s Hand­writ­ten 16th-Cen­tu­ry Gro­cery List

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Note­books Get Dig­i­tized: Where to Read the Renais­sance Man’s Man­u­scripts Online

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renais­sance Man

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What Makes Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) Not Just Art, But Important Art

in Art, History | October 2nd, 2023

Who cre­at­ed the first work of abstract art has long been a fraught ques­tion indeed. Bet­ter, per­haps, to ask who first said of a work of art that a kid could have made it. A strong con­tender in that divi­sion is the Russ­ian artist Véra Pes­tel, whom his­to­ry remem­bers as hav­ing react­ed to Kaz­imir Male­vich’s 1915 paint­ing Black Square with the words “Any­one can do this! Even a child can do this!” Yes, writes nov­el­ist Tatyana Tol­staya a cen­tu­ry lat­er in the New York­er, “any child could have per­formed this sim­ple task, although per­haps chil­dren lack the patience to fill such a large sec­tion with the same col­or.” And in any case, time hav­ing tak­en its toll, Male­vich’s square does­n’t look quite as black as it used to.

Nor was the square ever quite so square as we imag­ine it. “Its sides aren’t par­al­lel or equal in length, and the shape isn’t quite cen­tered on the can­vas,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above. Instead, Male­vich placed the form slight­ly off-kil­ter, giv­ing it the appear­ance of move­ment, and the white sur­round­ing it a liv­ing, vibrat­ing qual­i­ty.”

Fair enough, but is it art? If you’d asked Male­vich him­self, he might have said it sur­passed art. In 1913,  he “real­ized that even the most cut­ting-edge artists were still just paint­ing objects from every­day life, but he was irre­sistibly drawn to what he called ‘the desert,’ where noth­ing is real except feel­ing.” Hence his inven­tion of the style known as Supre­ma­tism, “a depar­ture from the world of objects so extreme, it went beyond abstrac­tion.”

Male­vich made bold claims for Supre­ma­tism in gen­er­al and Black Square in par­tic­u­lar. “Up until now there were no attempts at paint­ing as such, with­out any attribute of real life,” he wrote. “Paint­ing was the aes­thet­ic side of a thing, but nev­er was orig­i­nal and an end in itself.” As Tol­staya puts it, he “once and for all drew an uncross­able line that demar­cat­ed the chasm between old art and new art, between a man and his shad­ow, between a rose and a cas­ket, between life and death, between God and the Dev­il. In his own words, he reduced every­thing to the ‘zero of form.’ ” She calls this zero’s emer­gence in such a stark form “one of the most fright­en­ing events in art in all of its his­to­ry of exis­tence.” If so, here we have an argu­ment for not let­ting young chil­dren see Black Square and endur­ing the con­se­quent night­mares — even if they could have paint­ed it them­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 144 Beau­ti­ful Books of Russ­ian Futur­ism: Mayakovsky, Male­vich, Khleb­nikov & More (1910–30)

The Tree of Mod­ern Art: Ele­gant Draw­ing Visu­al­izes the Devel­op­ment of Mod­ern Art from Delacroix to Dalí (1940)

Down­load Russ­ian Futur­ist Book Art (1910–1915): The Aes­thet­ic Rev­o­lu­tion Before the Polit­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

Steve Mar­tin on How to Look at Abstract Art

An Inter­ac­tive Social Net­work of Abstract Artists: Kandin­sky, Picas­so, Bran­cusi & Many More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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A Determined Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

in Art, Chemistry, History | September 28th, 2023

Some peo­ple talk to plants.

The Carnegie Muse­um of Art’s chief con­ser­va­tor Ellen Bax­ter talks to the paint­ings she’s restor­ing.

“You have to …tell her she’s going to look love­ly,” she says, above, spread­ing var­nish over a 16th-cen­tu­ry por­trait of Isabel­la de’ Medici pri­or to start­ing the labo­ri­ous process of restor­ing years of wear and tear by inpaint­ing with tiny brush­es, aid­ed with pipettes of var­nish and sol­vent.

Isabel­la had been wait­ing a long time for such ten­der atten­tion, con­cealed beneath a 19th-cen­tu­ry over­paint­ing depict­ing a dain­tier fea­tured woman reput­ed to be Eleanor of Tole­do, wife of Cosi­mo I de’ Medici, the sec­ond Duke of Flo­rence.

Louise Lip­pin­cott, the CMA’s for­mer cura­tor of fine arts, ran across the work in the museum’s base­ment stor­age. Record named the artist as Bronzi­no, court painter to Cosi­mo I, but Lip­pin­cott, who thought the paint­ing “awful”, brought it to Ellen Bax­ter for a sec­ond opin­ion.

As Cristi­na Rou­valis writes in Carnegie Mag­a­zine, Bax­ter is a “rare mix of left- and right-brained tal­ent”, a painter with a bachelor’s degree in art his­to­ry, minors in chem­istry and physics, and a master’s degree in art con­ser­va­tion:


(She) looks at paint­ings dif­fer­ent­ly than oth­er peo­ple, too—not as flat, sta­t­ic objects, but as three-dimen­sion­al com­po­si­tions lay­ered like lasagna.

The minute she saw the oil paint­ing pur­port­ed to be of Eleanor of Tole­do… Bax­ter knew some­thing wasn’t quite right. The face was too bland­ly pret­ty, “like a Vic­to­ri­an cook­ie tin box lid,” she says. Upon exam­in­ing the back of the paint­ing, she identified—thanks to a trusty Google search—the stamp of Fran­cis Leed­ham, who worked at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery in Lon­don in the mid-1800s as a “relin­er,” trans­fer­ring paint­ings from a wood pan­el to can­vas mount. The painstak­ing process involves scrap­ing and sand­ing away the pan­el from back to front and then glu­ing the paint­ed sur­face lay­er to a new can­vas.

An X‑Ray con­firmed her hunch, reveal­ing extra lay­ers of paint in this “lasagna”.

Care­ful strip­ping of dirty var­nish and Vic­to­ri­an paint in the areas of the por­trait’s face and hands began to reveal the much stronger fea­tures of the woman who posed for the artist. (The Carnegie is bank­ing on Bronzino’s stu­dent, Alessan­dro Allori, or some­one in his cir­cle.)

Lip­pin­cott was also busi­ly sleuthing, find­ing a Medici-com­mis­sioned copy of the paint­ing in Vien­na that matched the dress and hair exact­ly. Thus­ly did she learn that the sub­ject was Eleanor of Toledo’s daugh­ter, Isabel­la de’ Medici, the apple of her father’s eye and a noto­ri­ous, ulti­mate­ly ill-fat­ed par­ty girl. 

The His­to­ry Blog paints an irre­sistible por­trait of this mav­er­ick princess:

Cosi­mo gave her an excep­tion­al amount of free­dom for a noble­woman of her time. She ran her own house­hold, and after Eleanor’s death in 1562, Isabel­la ran her father’s too. She threw famous­ly rau­cous par­ties and spent lav­ish­ly. Her father always cov­ered her debts and pro­tect­ed her from scruti­ny even as rumors of her lovers and excess­es that would have doomed oth­er soci­ety women spread far and wide. Her favorite lover was said to be Troi­lo Orsi­ni, her hus­band Paolo’s cousin.

Things went down­hill fast for Isabel­la after her father’s death in 1574. Her broth­er Francesco was now the Grand Duke, and he had no inter­est in indulging his sister’s pec­ca­dil­loes. We don’t know what hap­pened exact­ly, but in 1576 Isabel­la died at the Medici Vil­la of Cer­re­to Gui­di near Empoli. The offi­cial sto­ry released by Francesco was that his 34-year-old sis­ter dropped dead sud­den­ly while wash­ing her hair. The unof­fi­cial sto­ry is that she was stran­gled by her hus­band out of revenge for her adul­tery and/or to clear the way for him to mar­ry his own mis­tress Vit­to­ria Acco­ram­boni.

Bax­ter not­ed that the urn Isabel­la holds was not part of the paint­ing to begin with, though nei­ther was it one of Leedham’s revi­sions. Its resem­blance to the urn that Mary Mag­da­lene is often depict­ed using as she annoints Jesus’ feet led her and Lip­pin­cott to spec­u­late that it was added at Isabella’s request, in an attempt to redeem her image.

“This is lit­er­al­ly the bad girl see­ing the light,” Lip­pin­cott told Rou­valis.

Despite her fond­ness for the sub­ject of the lib­er­at­ed paint­ing, and her con­sid­er­able skill as an artist, Bax­ter resist­ed the temp­ta­tion to embell­ish beyond what she found:

I’m not the artist. I’m the con­ser­va­tor. It’s my job to repair dam­ages and loss­es, to not put myself in the paint­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch a 17th-Cen­tu­ry Por­trait Mag­i­cal­ly Get Restored to Its Bril­liant Orig­i­nal Col­ors

A Restored Ver­meer Paint­ing Reveals a Por­trait of a Cupid Hid­den for Over 350 Years

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

Watch the Renais­sance Paint­ing, The Bat­tle of San Romano, Get Brought Beau­ti­ful­ly to Life in a Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Photos That Explore the Roman Empire

in History | September 25th, 2023

This month, more than a few Tik­Tok-using women have asked the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire. And to the aston­ish­ment of these women, more than a few of these men have respond­ed that they think about it on a dai­ly basis, or even more often than that. By now, this par­tic­u­lar man­i­fes­ta­tion of mutu­al incom­pre­hen­sion between the sex­es has swept sev­er­al social-media plat­forms, and accord­ing to reportage in the New York Times and Wash­ing­ton Post, it actu­al­ly began on Insta­gram. “Ladies, many of you do not real­ize how often men think about the Roman Empire,” post­ed a Swedish ancient-Rome reen­ac­tor who calls him­self Gaius Flav­ius. “Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother — you will be sur­prised by their answers!”

Even if you’re not a hus­band, boyfriend, father, or broth­er, you may count your­self among these Rome-enrap­tured men. You may think about Rome prac­ti­cal­ly all day, every day, and not be a man at all. Or per­haps you’re one of the women who, hith­er­to unaware of the appar­ent­ly wide­spread Roman intel­lec­tu­al pro­cliv­i­ties among the oppo­site sex, have begun to feel a twinge of curios­i­ty about the sub­ject.

If so, you could do worse than start your his­tor­i­cal jour­ney to antiq­ui­ty’s might­i­est empire — the ances­tor of today’s West­ern civ­i­liza­tion — with this twen­ty-minute primer nar­rat­ed by Suc­ces­sion’s Bri­an Cox. Con­sid­er also accom­pa­ny­ing it with this ani­mat­ed map visu­al­iz­ing both the Roman Empire’s rise to cov­er half the known world and its sub­se­quent fall — or this ver­sion with a scrolling time­line of the face of every emper­or.

The word “Rome” com­mon­ly stands for the Roman Empire, but, of course, it can also refer to the great cap­i­tal itself. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured vir­tu­al tours and fly­overs, as well as a phys­i­cal scale mod­el, of the ancient city of Rome at its peak. You can also watch a re-cre­ation of the destruc­tion of Pom­peii, whose ash-pre­served ruins have taught us a great deal about life in the Roman Empire. That empire could hard­ly have extend­ed as far as it did with­out the tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel of Roman roads, which you can learn about through videos on their con­struc­tion, sub­way-style maps, and even a trip-plan­ning web appli­ca­tion. Even the con­crete used to build those roads — not to men­tion the Roman Empire’s for­mi­da­ble aque­ducts — has been an object of fas­ci­na­tion, not least because the secret of their dura­bil­i­ty has only recent­ly come to light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY_3ggKg0Bc

If Rome was about noth­ing but con­quer­ing emper­ors and sprawl­ing infra­struc­ture, it would be easy to explain its being a pre­dom­i­nant­ly male inter­est. But we’ve also fea­tured numer­ous oth­er aspects of its cul­ture, from the sound of Roman music and the Latin lan­guage to the col­ors of its stat­ues. Like all human beings, ancient Romans ate food — whether by fol­low­ing recipes at home or going out to “snack bars” — and wore shoes (and san­dals, alas, with socks). Our own fas­ci­na­tion with its civ­i­liza­tion has its own his­tor­i­cal roots, as under­scored by these nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry pho­tographs of Roman ruins. Nor does that fas­ci­na­tion know cul­tur­al bound­aries. I live in Korea, and recent­ly a man told me about his younger days as a sol­dier in KATUSA, the Kore­an Aug­men­ta­tion to the Unit­ed States Army. Why did he enlist in that par­tic­u­lar pro­gram? “I want­ed to know what it would be like to serve the mod­ern Roman Empire.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Most Dis­tant Places Vis­it­ed by the Romans: Africa, Scan­di­navia, Chi­na, India, Ara­bia & Oth­er Far-Flung Lands

When Iggy Pop Pub­lished an Essay, “Cae­sar Lives,” in an Aca­d­e­m­ic Jour­nal about His Love for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1995)

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

The Splen­did Book Design of the 1946 Edi­tion of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome: Get a Glimpse from a TED-ED Ani­ma­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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An Introduction to Chinoiserie: When European Monarchs Tried to Build Chinese Palaces, Houses & Pavilions

in Architecture, Design, History, Travel | September 25th, 2023

Today it would be viewed as cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion writ large, but when Louis XIV ordered the con­struc­tion of a 5‑building plea­sure pavil­ion inspired by the Porce­lain Tow­er of Nan­jing (a 7th Won­der of the World few French cit­i­zens had viewed in per­son) as an escape from Ver­sailles, and an exot­ic love nest in which to romp with the Mar­quise de Mon­tes­pan, he ignit­ed a craze that spread through­out the West.

Chi­nois­erie was an aris­to­crat­ic Euro­pean fan­ta­sy of lux­u­ri­ous East­ern design, what Dung Ngo, founder of AUGUST: A Jour­nal of Trav­el + Design, describes as “a West­ern thing that has noth­ing to do with actu­al Asian cul­ture:”

Chi­nois­erie is a lit­tle bit like chop suey. It was whole­sale invent­ed in the West, based on cer­tain per­cep­tions of Asian cul­ture at the time. It’s very watered down.

And also way over the top, to judge by the rap­tur­ous descrip­tions of the inte­ri­ors and gar­dens of Louis XIV’s Tri­anon de Porce­laine, which stood for less than 20 years.

Image by Hervé Gre­goire, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The blue-and-white Delft tiles meant to mim­ic Chi­nese porce­lain swift­ly fell into dis­re­pair and Madame de Montespan’s suc­ces­sor, her children’s for­mer gov­erness, the Mar­quise de Main­tenon, urged Louis to tear the place down because it was “too cold.”

Her lover did as request­ed, but else­where, the West’s imag­i­na­tion had been cap­tured in a big way.

The bur­geon­ing tea trade between Chi­na and the West pro­vid­ed access to Chi­nese porce­lain, tex­tiles, fur­nish­ings, and lac­quer­ware, inspir­ing West­ern imi­ta­tions that blur the bound­aries between Chi­nois­erie and Roco­co styles

This blend is in evi­dence in Fred­er­ick the Great’s Chi­nese House in the gar­dens of Sanssouci (below).

Image by Johann H. Addicks, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Dr Samuel Wit­twer, Direc­tor of Palaces and Col­lec­tions at the Pruss­ian Palaces and Gar­dens Foun­da­tion, describes how the gild­ed fig­ure atop the roof “is a mix­ture of the Greek God Her­mes and the Chi­nese philoso­pher Con­fu­cius:”

His Euro­pean face is more than just a sym­bol of intel­lec­tu­al union between Asia and Europe…The fig­ure on the roof has an umbrel­la, an Asian sym­bol of social dig­ni­ty, which he holds in an east­ern direc­tion. So the famous ex ori­ente lux, the good and wise Con­fu­cian light from the far east, is blocked by the umbrel­la. Fur­ther down, we notice that the foun­da­tions of the build­ing seem to be made of feath­ers and the Chi­nese heads over the win­dows, rest­ing on cush­ions like tro­phies, turn into a mon­key band in the inte­ri­or. The fres­coes in the cupo­la main­ly depict mon­keys and par­rots. As we know, these par­tic­u­lar ani­mals are great imi­ta­tors with­out under­stand­ing.

Frederick’s enthu­si­asm for chi­nois­erie led him to engage archi­tect Carl von Gontard to fol­low up the Chi­nese House with a pago­da-shaped struc­ture he named the Drag­on House (below) after the six­teen crea­tures adorn­ing its roof.

Image by Rig­o­rius, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Drag­ons also dec­o­rate the roof of the Great Pago­da in London’s Kew Gar­dens, though the gild­ed wood­en orig­i­nals either suc­cumbed to the ele­ments or were sold off to set­tle George IV’s gam­bling debts in the late 18th cen­tu­ry.

Image by MX Granger, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There are even more drag­ons to be found on the Chi­nese Pavil­ion at Drot­tning­holm, Swe­den, an archi­tec­tur­al con­fec­tion con­struct­ed by King Adolf Fredrik as a birth­day sur­prise for his queen, Louisa. The queen was met by the entire court, cos­play­ing in Chi­nese (or more like­ly, Chi­nese-inspired) gar­ments.

Not to be out­done, Russia’s Cather­ine the Great resolved to “cap­ture by caprice” by build­ing a Chi­nese Vil­lage out­side of St. Peters­burg.

Image by Макс Вальтер, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Archi­tect Charles Cameron drew up plans for a series of pavil­ions sur­round­ing a nev­er-real­ized octag­o­nal-domed obser­va­to­ry. Instead, eight few­er pavil­ions than Cameron orig­i­nal­ly envi­sioned sur­round a pago­da based on one in Kew Gar­dens.

Hav­ing sur­vived the Nazi occu­pa­tion and the Sovi­et era, the Chi­nese Vil­lage is once again a fan­ta­sy play­thing for the wealthy. A St. Peters­burg real estate devel­op­er mod­ern­ized one of the pavil­ions to serve as a two-bed­room “week­end cot­tage.”

Giv­en that no record of the orig­i­nal inte­ri­ors exists, design­er Kir­ill Istomin wasn’t ham­strung by a man­date to stick close to his­to­ry, but he and his client still went with “numer­ous chi­nois­erie touch­es” as per a fea­ture in Elle Decor:

Pan­els of antique wall­pa­pers were framed in gild­ed bam­boo for the mas­ter bed­room, and vin­tage Chi­nese lanterns, pur­chased in Paris, hang in the din­ing and liv­ing rooms. The star pieces, how­ev­er, are a set of 18th-cen­tu­ry porce­lain teapots, which came from the estate of the late New York socialite and phil­an­thropist Brooke Astor.

Explore cul­tur­al crit­ic Aileen Kwun and the Asian Amer­i­can Pacif­ic Islander Design Alliance’s per­spec­tive on the still pop­u­lar design trend of chi­nois­erie here.

h/t Allie C!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Ver­sailles: Six Min­utes of Ani­ma­tion Show the Con­struc­tion of the Grand Palace Over 400 Years

How the Ornate Tapes­tries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Free: Down­load 70,000+ High-Res­o­lu­tion Images of Chi­nese Art from Taipei’s Nation­al Palace Muse­um

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How Big Ben Works: A Detailed Look Inside London’s Beloved Victorian Clock Tower

in Architecture, History | September 22nd, 2023

If asked to name the best-known tow­er in Lon­don, one could, per­haps, make a fair case for the likes of the Shard or the Gherkin. But what­ev­er their cur­rent promi­nence on the sky­line, those works of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry star­chi­tec­ture have yet to devel­op much val­ue as sym­bols of the city. If sheer age were the decid­ing fac­tor, then the Tow­er of Lon­don, the old­est intact build­ing in the cap­i­tal, would take the top spot, but for how many peo­ple out­side Eng­land does its name call a clear image to mind? No, to find Lon­don’s most beloved ver­ti­cal icon, we must look to the Vic­to­ri­an era, the only his­tor­i­cal peri­od that could have giv­en rise to Big Ben.

We must first clar­i­fy that Big Ben is not a tow­er. The build­ing you’re think­ing of has been called the Eliz­a­beth Tow­er since Queen Eliz­a­beth II’s Dia­mond Jubilee in 2012, but before that its name was the Clock Tow­er. That was apt enough, since tow­er’s defin­ing fea­ture has always been the clock at the top — or rather, the four clocks at the top, one for each face.

You can see how they work in the ani­mat­ed video from Youtu­ber Jared Owen above, which pro­vides a detailed visu­al and ver­bal expla­na­tion of both the struc­ture’s con­text and its con­tent, includ­ing a tour of the mech­a­nisms that have kept it run­ning near­ly with­out inter­rup­tion for more than a cen­tu­ry and a half.

Only by look­ing into the tow­er’s bel­fry can you see Big Ben, which, as Owens says, is actu­al­ly the name of the largest of its bells. Its announce­ment of each hour on the hour — as well as the ring­ing of the oth­er, small­er bells — is acti­vat­ed by a sys­tem of gear trains ulti­mate­ly dri­ven by grav­i­ty, har­nessed by the swing­ing of a large pen­du­lum (to which occa­sion­al speed adjust­ments have always been made with the reli­able method of plac­ing pen­nies on top of it). Owens does­n’t clar­i­fy whether or not this is the same pen­du­lum Roger Miller sang about back in the six­ties, but at least now we know that, tech­ni­cal­ly speak­ing, we should inter­pret the fol­low­ing lyrics as not “the tow­er, Big Ben” but “the tow­er; Big Ben.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Growth of Lon­don, from the Romans to the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Prague Mon­u­ment Dou­bles as Artist’s Can­vas

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Why Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Gas Station in Minnesota (1958)

in Architecture, History | September 21st, 2023

In the small town of Clo­quet, Min­neso­ta stands a piece of urban utopia. It takes the sur­pris­ing form of a gas sta­tion, albeit one designed by no less a vision­ary of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture than Frank Lloyd Wright. He orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived it as an ele­ment of Broad­acre City, a form of mech­a­nized rur­al set­tle­ment intend­ed as a Jef­fer­son­ian democ­ra­cy-inspired rebuke against what Wright saw as the evils of the over­grown twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry city, first pub­licly pre­sent­ed in his 1932 book The Dis­ap­pear­ing City. “That’s an aspi­ra­tional title,” says archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Richard Kro­n­ick in the Twin Cities PBS video above. “He thought that cities should go away.”

Cities did­n’t go away, and Broad­acre City remained spec­u­la­tive, though Wright did pur­sue every oppor­tu­ni­ty he could iden­ti­fy to bring it clos­er to real­i­ty. “In 1952, Ray and Emma Lind­holm com­mis­sioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build them a home on the south side of Clo­quet,” writes pho­tog­ra­ph­er Susan Tre­go­ning.

When Wright “dis­cov­ered that Mr. Lind­holm was in the petro­le­um busi­ness, he men­tioned that he was quite inter­est­ed in gas sta­tion design.” When Lind­holm decid­ed to rebuild a Phillips 66 sta­tion a few years lat­er, he accept­ed Wright’s design pro­pos­al, call­ing it “an exper­i­ment to see if a lit­tle beau­ty couldn’t be incor­po­rat­ed in some­thing as com­mon­place as a ser­vice sta­tion” — though Wright him­self, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, was­n’t think­ing in quite such hum­ble terms.

Wright’s R. W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion incor­po­rates a can­tilevered upper-lev­el “cus­tomer lounge,” and the idea, as Kro­n­ick puts it, “was that cus­tomers would sit up here and while their time away wait­ing for their cars to be repaired,” and no doubt “dis­cuss the issues of the day.” In Wright’s mind, “this lit­tle room is where the details of democ­ra­cy would be worked out.” As with South­dale Cen­ter, Vic­tor Gru­en’s pio­neer­ing shop­ping mall that had opened two years ear­li­er in Min­neapo­lis, two hours south of Clo­quet, the com­mu­ni­ty aspect of the design nev­er came to fruition: though its win­dows offer a dis­tinc­tive­ly Amer­i­can (or to use Wright’s lan­guage, Uson­ian) vista, the cus­tomer lounge has a bare, dis­used look in the pic­tures vis­i­tors take today.

Image by Library of Con­gress, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There are many such vis­i­tors, who arrive from not just all around the coun­try but all around the world. But when it was last sold in 2018, the buy­er it found was rel­a­tive­ly local: Min­neso­ta-born Andrew Vol­na, own­er of such Min­neapo­lis oper­a­tions as vinyl-record man­u­fac­tur­er Noise­land Indus­tries and the once-aban­doned, now-ren­o­vat­ed Hol­ly­wood The­ater. “Wright saw the sta­tion as a cul­tur­al cen­ter, some­where to meet a friend, get your car fixed, and have a cup of cof­fee while you wait­ed,” writes Tre­go­ning, though he nev­er did make it back out to the fin­ished build­ing before he died in 1959. These six­ty-odd years lat­er, per­haps Vol­na will be the one to turn this unlike­ly archi­tec­tur­al hot spot into an even less like­ly social one as well.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Hous­es Offer Vir­tu­al Tours: Hol­ly­hock House, Tal­iesin West, Falling­wa­ter & More

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invent­ed Lin­coln Logs, “America’s Nation­al Toy” (1916)

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Dog­house, His Small­est Archi­tec­tur­al Cre­ation (1956)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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The 500-Year-Old Chinese “Bagel” That Helped Win a War

in Food & Drink, History | September 20th, 2023

As a gen­er­al rule, you can gain a decent under­stand­ing of any part of the world by eat­ing its region­al spe­cial­ties. This holds espe­cial­ly true in a coun­try like Chi­na, with its great size and deep his­to­ry. Trav­el to the south­east­ern province of Fujian, for instance, and you’ve got to try guang bing or “shiny bis­cuit,” the Chi­nese equiv­a­lent of the bagel. “With flour, dietary alka­li and salt, the cake, no big­ger than a palm, can be sim­ply cooked, and sells for about 1 yuan ($0.14) on the streets,” says Chi­na Dai­ly. “Locals love it, not only because of the crispy and salty taste, but also because of a leg­endary sto­ry.”

The dis­tinc­tive dish­es of bor­der or coastal areas always seem to have par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigu­ing his­to­ries, and so it is with the one behind Fujian’s guang bing. “Dur­ing the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), Gen­er­al Qi Jiguang brought an army to fight Japan­ese invaders in Fujian. Because of con­tin­u­ous rain, they could not cook for the sol­diers, so Qi cre­at­ed a kind of cake with a small hole in the mid­dle. Sol­diers could string the cakes togeth­er and car­ry them while fight­ing the ene­my.”

The result looks — and pre­sum­ably tastes — like a neck­lace of bagels, the prepa­ra­tion of which could be accom­plished in under­ground ovens that did­n’t give away the sol­diers’ posi­tion as clear­ly as open camp­fires would.

You can learn more about this bagel-pow­ered vic­to­ry of five cen­turies ago from the Great Big Sto­ry video at the top of the post, and more about the con­tin­ued prepa­ra­tion and sale of guang bing by a few ded­i­cat­ed bak­ers in the Atlas Obscu­ra video just above. Though plen­ty of Fujianese take them straight, “some like to add pork, or dried shrimp and Chi­nese chives in it; some fry it with chit­ter­lings, duck­’s giz­zard or green been; and some break it into pieces and boil it with soup.” Writ­ten records of the bagel as West­ern­ers know it date back to ear­ly sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Poland, with appar­ent pre­de­ces­sors seen in that coun­try as ear­ly as the late four­teenth cen­tu­ry. It may nat­u­ral­ly occur to an Amer­i­can trav­el­er in Chi­na to unite these two long but dis­tant culi­nary tra­di­tions, in which case he’d do well to pack his own with lox and cream cheese.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Dumplings: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

When Ital­ian Futur­ists Declared War on Pas­ta (1930)

Bob Dylan Pota­to Chips, Any­one?: What They’re Snack­ing on in Chi­na

Phi­los­o­phy Explained with Donuts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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