In March, a Florida school principal lost her job when 6th graders encountered Michelangelo’s “David” during an art history lesson–even though the school ostensibly specializes in offering students “a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences.” Parents apparently found the Renaissance sculpture, um, “pornographic.”
Fast forward two months, and the former principal Hope Carrasquilla has now traveled to Florence and visited Michelangelo’s “David” in person. This came at the invitation of the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, and the director of the Galleria dell’Accademia, Cecilie Hollberg. Above you can see Hollberg on the left, and Carrasquilla on the right.
I’m very impressed. The thing that strikes me the most, and that I didn’t know, is that this whole gallery was built for him [Michelangelo’s “David”]. I think it’s beautiful, it looks like a church. And to me, that just represents really the purity of this figure and you see his humanity. There is nothing wrong with the human body. Michelangelo did nothing wrong. He could only sculpt it like this. It couldn’t be otherwise. He’s wonderful and I’m really happy to be here.
In her own statement, Hollberg said:
I am delighted to welcome her and show her the magnificence of our museum, as well as personally introduce her to David, a sculpture that I reiterate has nothing to do with pornography. It is a masterpiece representing a religious symbol of purity and innocence, the triumph of good over evil. His nudity is an outward manifestation of Renaissance thought, which considered man the centre of the universe. People from all over the world, including many Americans, make the pilgrimage to admire him every year. Currently, more than 50% of visitors are from the United States. I am certain that Ms. Carrasquilla will receive the welcome and solidarity she deserves here in Florence.
Florida may be canceling classical art and thought. Florence is decidedly not.
Today we think of the Renaissance as one of those periods when everything changed, and if the best-known artifacts of the time are anything to go by, nothing changed quite so much as art. This is reflected in obvious aesthetic differences between the works of the Renaissance and those created before, as well as in less obvious technical ones. Egg yolk-based tempera paints, for example, had been in use since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but in the fifteenth century they were replaced by oil paints. When chemical analysis of the work of certain Renaissance masters revealed traces of egg, they were assumed to be the result of chance contamination.
Now, thanks to a recent study led by chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, we have reason to believe that painters like Botticelli and Leonardo kept eggs in the mix deliberately. Oil replaced tempera because “it creates more vivid colors and smoother color transitions,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Teresa Nowakowski.
“It also dries slowly, so it can be used for longer after the initial preparation.” But “the colors darken more easily over time, and the paint is more susceptible to damage from light exposure. It also has a tendency to wrinkle as it dries,” visible in Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation below.
Putting in a bit of egg yolk may have been a way of using oil’s advantages while minimizing its disadvantages. Ranquet and her collaborators tested this idea by doing it themselves, re-creating two pigments used during the Renaissance, both with egg and without. “In the mayolike blend” produced by the former method, writes ScienceNews’ Jude Coleman, “the yolk created sturdy links between pigment particles, resulting in stiffer paint. Such consistency would have been ideal for techniques like impasto, a raised, thick style that adds texture to art. Egg additions also could have reduced wrinkling by creating a firmer paint consistency,” though the paint itself would take longer to dry.
In practice, Renaissance painters seem to have experimented with different proportions of oil and egg, and so discovered that each had its own strengths for rendering different elements of an image. Hyperallergic’s Taylor Michael writes that in The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, seen up top, “Botticelli painted Christ, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin, among others, with tempera, and the background stone and foregrounding grass with oil.” Thanks to the oxidization-slowing effects of phospholipids and antioxidants in the yolk — as scientific research has since proven — they’ve all come through the past five centuries looking hardly worse for wear.
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.
To find a visual definition of the nineteen-eighties, you need look no further than the windows of the nearest run-down hair or nail salon. There, “faded by time and years of sun damage,” remain on makeshift display the most widely recognized works of — or imitations of the works of — artist and illustrator Patrick Nagel, who specialized in images of women with “sleek black hair, paper-white skin, bold red lipstick and a look of mystery, power, and cool detachment.” So says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his new video essay above on the sudden rise and lasting cultural legacy of the “Nagel women.”
As Puschak tells the story, the figure responsible for launching Nagel and his women into the zeitgeist was publisher Karl Bornstein, who “had been in Europe admiring the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard, Parisian poster artists of the late nineteenth century, and came back to America looking for an artist of his own time when Nagel walked into his life.”
Around this same time, “the manager of the English new-wave band Duran Duran saw Nagel’s work in Playboy, and commissioned a picture for the cover of their 1982 album Rio” — which, apart from all those salon windows, gave most of us our first look at a Nagel woman.
These and other pop-cultural associations “helped to cement the Nagel woman as an emblem of the decade.” For years after Nagel’s death in 1984, his “chic, fashionable, independent” women continued to serve as “aspirational images,” but eventually, amid market saturation and changing sensibilities, their bold look of glamor and professionalism began to seem tacky. Nevertheless, rediscovery always follows desuetude, and sufficient distance from the actual eighties has allowed us to appreciate Nagel’s technique. “Day by day, little by little, Nagel removed details until he arrived at the fewest number of lines that would still capture the spirit of his models,” using rigorous minimalism to evoke — and forever crystallize — a time of brazen excess.
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.
Perhaps we would have felt differently in the early 19th-century, when silhouettes offered a quick and affordable alternative to oil portraits, and photography had yet to be invented.
Self-taught silhouette artist William Bache traveled the eastern seaboard, and later to New Orleans and Cuba, plying his trade with a physiognotrace, a device that helped him outline subjects’ profiles on folded sheets of light paper.
Once a profile had been captured, Bache carefully cut inside the tracing and affixed the “hollow-cut” surrounding sheet to black paper, creating the appearance of a hand-cut black silhouette on a white background.
Customers could purchase four copies of these shadow likenesses for 25¢, which, adjusted for inflation, is about the same amount as a photo strip in one of New York City’s vintage photobooths these days — $5.
Bache was an energetic promoter of his services, advertising that if customers found it inconvenient to visit one of his pop-up studios, he would “at the shortest notice, wait upon them at their own Dwellings without any additional expense.”
Naturally, people were eager to lay hands on silhouettes of their children and sweethearts, too.
One of Bache’s competitors, Raphaelle Peale assumed the perspective of a satisfied male customer to tout his own business:
‘Tis almost herself, Eliza’s shade,
Thus by the faithful facietrace pourtray’d!
Her placid brow and pouting lips, whose swell
My fond impatient ardor would repell.
Let me then take that vacant seat, and there
Inhale her breath, scarce mingled with the air:
And thou blest instrument! which o’er her face
Did’st at her lips one moment pause, retrace
My glowing form and leave, unequall’d bliss!
Borrow’d from her, a sweet etherial Kiss.
Hot stuff, though hopefully besotted young lovers refrained from pressing their lips to the silhouettes they loved best. Conservators in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which houses Bache’s sample book, a ledger filled with likenesses of some 1,800 sitters, discovered it to be suffused with arsenic, presumably meant to repel invading rodents and insects.
Most of the heads in Bache’s album arrived unidentified, but by combing through digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills, marriage certificates and Ancestry.com, lead curator Robyn Asleson and Getty-funded research assistant Elizabeth Isaacson have managed to identify over 1000.
There are some whose names — and profiles — remain well known more than 200 years later. Can you identify George Washington, Martha Washington, and Thomas Jefferson on the album page below?
Some pages contain entire families. Pedro Bidetrenoulleau coughed up $1.25 for his own likeness, as well as those of his wife, and children Félix, Adele, and Zacharine, numbers 638 through 642, below.
Bache’s travels to New Orleans and Cuba make for a racially diverse collection, though little is known about most of the Black sitters. Dr. Asleson suspects some of these might be the only existing portraits of these individuals, particularly in the case of New Orleanians in mixed-race relationships, whose descendants destroyed strategic evidence in the effort to “pass” as white:
As I was learning more and more about this history, I really began to hope that some of the people who are trying to find their heritage today, who realize it might have been deliberately eradicated to protect their ancestors from oppression, might have the chance to discover an image of a great-great-grandfather or grandmother.
Readers, if you are the caretaker of passed down family silhouettes, perhaps you can help the curators get closer to putting a name to someone who currently exists as little more than a shadow in interesting headgear.
Even if you’re not in possession of a silhouette, you may well be one of the tens of thousands living in the United States today connected to the album by blood.
It’s telling that the avian participants in a recent study wherein pet parrots, assisted by their owners, learned to make video calls to others of their kind were recruited from the online educational forum Parrot Kindergarten.
In the above footage, the humans’ hopeful, high-pitched cajoling, as they encourage their birds to interact with a new “friend”, carries a strong whiff of those Mommy and Me classes where a dozen or so adults sit crosslegged in a circle, shaking tambourines and brightly warbling “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” while an equal number of toddlers wander around, markedly less invested in the proceedings.
Though, really, who am I to judge? I don’t have a parrot, and it’s been over two decades since my youngest child required parental interference to foment social interaction…
Eighteen pet parrots enrolled in the study, hanging out with one another during self-initiated video chats, to see how and if such interactions might improve their quality of life.
No one was forced to make a call if they weren’t feeling it, or to remain on the line after their interest flagged.
I’m hunching the average parrot’s preoccupation with modern technology clocks in far south of the average American toddler’s, which may explain why they completed a mere 147 calls over the course of two months (and 1000 hours of combined footage.)
That said, I can easily imagine a scenario in which the average human toddler, having successfully gotten their beak, excuse me, hands on a touchscreen tablet, loses all interest in FaceTiming with a peer, preferring the solitary pleasures of Balloon Pop or Peek-a-Zoo.
Typically, human toddlers have more opportunities for “interspecies ethical enrichment” than creatures whose lives are primarily spent in a cage. As the authors of the study note, “over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs.”
The parrot participants may not have thrown themselves into the proceedings with the vigor of Bye Bye Birdie’s teenaged telephone chorus, but all placed calls, the majority exhibited “high motivation and intentionality”, and their humans indicated that they would gladly continue to facilitate this social experiment.
The human contribution is not inconsiderable here. It took vast amounts of time and patience to orient the birds to the system, and careful monitoring to make sure calls didn’t run off the rails. Nothing like having your iPad screen smashed by a parrot who’s got beef in an online forum…
Several legit friendships formed over the course of the experiment — a Goffin’s cockatoo and an African grey who made each other’s virtual acquaintance during the pilot study were still chatting, a year after they met.
Data collected in the field shows that the number and duration of outgoing calls were closely tied to the number and duration of incoming calls. The most popular birdies did not take their connections for granted.
It’s a finding humans would do well to absorb if we are to combat feelings of isolation from within our own species.
At the moment, I happen to be planning some time in France, with a side trip to Belgium included. Modern intra-European train travel makes arranging the latter quite convenient: Thalys, the high-speed rail service connecting those two countries, can get you from Paris to Brussels in about an hour and half. This stands in contrast to the time of the Roman Empire, which despite its political power lacked high-speed rail, and indeed lacked rail of any kind. But it did have an expansive network of roads, some of which you can still walk today, imagining what it would have been like to travel Europe two millennia ago. And now, using the website OmnesViae, you can get historically accurate directions as well.
Though not quite geographically accurate, it does offer a detailed view of which cities in the empire were connected and how. “Geolocating thousands of points from Peutinger, OmnesViae reformats the roads and destinations on the scroll onto a more familiarly landscaped map. The shortest route between two (ancient) points is calculated using the distances traveled over Roman rather than modern roads, also taking into account the rivers and mountains the network must cross.”
You can use OmnesViae just like any other way-finding application, except you enter your origin and destination into fields labeled “ab” and “ad” rather than “from” and “to.” And though “for some cities current day names are understood,” as the instructions note, it works better — and feels so much more authentic — if you type in cities like “Roma” and “Londinio.” The resulting journey between those two great capitals looks arduous indeed, passing at least three mountainous areas, thirteen rivers, and countless smaller settlements. And according to OmnesViae, no roads led to Brussels: the closest an ancient traveler could get to the location of the modern-day seat of the European Union was the Walloon village of Liberchies — which, as the birthplace of Django Reinhardt, remains an important stop for the jazz-loving traveler of Europe today.
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.
So you think you know your way around a potato, eh?
No doubt you excel at boiling, mashing, roasting, baking and twice baking …
You may make a mean potato chip or pomme frite…
Perhaps you’ve perfected some tricks with a microwave or air fryer.
But before you’re puffed too full of bragging rights, have you ever thought to subject this humble root vegetable to a blow torch, an iron, a dishwasher, a juicer or a gasoline powered generator plugged into a giant dimmer switch?
No?
Congratulations on having avoided some truly dreadful methods for preparing a potato, judging by the results of some of Bon Appétit Contributing Editor Amiel Stanek’s more outré, tongue-in-cheek experiments, above.
Wait, maybe there aren’t really 63 ways to cook potatoes?
The preparation we’re legitimately eager to try is pickling, for spuds Stanek declares “very sweet, salty, acidic”, a welcome addition to a cheese board or a crudité plate.
And there’s an argument to be made for turning a waffle iron into a dual purpose device by making hash browns in it.
Stanek fares less well, piping pre-mashed potatoes into a Rollie ® Eggmaster, “a weird, made-for-TV device that is made expressly for cooking eggs:”
Ewww, no, why is it like that? This is disgusting!!!
If you’re wondering how that Rollie ® does with its intended ingredient, Stanek’s got an answer for you:
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh my god, it looks like it’s in a condom. This is the most disgusting egg thing we have made all day…it tastes like bad seafood. I don’t know why, it tastes plastic‑y. This is horrible!
Meanwhile, those in long term relationships with partners holding different views on the best way to scramble, fry or poach an egg may find themselves feeling vindicated by this episode.
Either that or horribly betrayed.
Other than potatoes and eggs, the only episode of the 10 in the Almost Everyseries not exclusively geared toward cooking flesh is the one devoted to pizza, which at 32 methods, ties with chicken breast. (Only whole chicken, at 24 methods, has fewer options.)
Perhaps a visit to Moonburger, a meatless Hudson Valley chain where Stanek is Culinary Consultant and the shakes are dairy free is in order?
Those craving ever more offbeat attacks, however, will find themselves entertained by Stanek’s efforts involving an Easy-Bake Oven (yeah, nope, not good at all), a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Pizza Machine (the whole cheese sitch looks a little bit demented…bummer, dude), and a crust that’s baked around a silicone cone, then filled with a “molten, dangerous slurry” of sauce and cheese (this thing looks demonic to me, like an animal horn meant for a Satanic ritual…)
If that’s not our cue to seek out a restaurant with a wood burning oven, perhaps it’s a signal we should order out.
Almost two and a half centuries after its first publication, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is much better known as simply The Wealth of Nations. Had he written it today, the text itself, which runs between a formidable 500–700 pages in most editions, would also be considerably shorter. It’s not just that writers in Smith’s day went in for length per se (though many now read as if they did), but that graphs hadn’t been invented yet. Much of what he’d discovered about the nature of economics could have been expressed more concisely — and much more clearly — in pictures rather than words.
As it happens, the kind of informational graphs we know best today would be invented by Smith’s fellow Scot William Playfair in 1786, just a decade after The Wealth of Nations came out. “Data visualization is everywhere today, but when Playfair first created them over 200 years ago, using shapes to represent numbers was largely sneered at,” says Adam Rutherford in the Royal Society video above.
“How could drawings truly represent solid scientific data? But now, data visualization has become an art form of its own.” There follow “five graphs that changed the world,” beginning with the map of water pumps that physician John Snow used to determine the cause of a cholera epidemic in 1850s London, previously featured here on Open Culture.
We’ve also posted W. E. B. Du Bois’ “handmade charts showcasing the educational, social, and business accomplishments of black Americans in the 35 years since slavery had been officially abolished.” The other world-changing graphs here include Florence Nightingale’s “coxcomb” that showed how unsanitary hospital conditions killed more soldiers during the Crimean War than did actual fighting; the so-called Kallikak Family Tree, a fraudulent visual case for removing the “feeble-minded” from society; and Ed Hawkins’ more recent red-and-blue “warming stripes” designed to present the effects of climate change to a non-scientific audience. Using just blocks of color, with neither numbers nor text, Hawkins’ bold graph harks back to an earlier golden era of data visualization: after Playfair, but before PowerPoint.
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.
Speaking at TED, Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of Pussy Riot, has a powerful message for Russians today: Resisting the authority of Vladimir Putin is an option. It’s a choice. Of that, Tolokonnikova has already provided ample proof. For more than a decade, the members of Pussy Riot have staged high-profile protests in Russia … and paid the price, with time served in prison. As she puts it, “Courage is an ability to act in the face of fear. And some of us have chosen to live courageously.” That example is what makes her a threat:
The reason why I became a threat to the system, not because of any actual physical power that I have, but because courage is contagious. And any act of speaking the truth can cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness. And we all have this power. It’s a moral act to use this power. You may or may not achieve the results that you wanted, but there is eternal beauty in trying to find truth, in risking everything you’ve got for what’s right…
As always, she saves choice words for Putin: “Vladimir Vladimirovich, the Kremlin walls became your prison walls. You have already lost. You know it. That’s why you’re so afraid. You lost in spirit.” Now we just need Russians at home, and Ukrainians on the battlefield, to make the implicit explicit.
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We here at Open Culture heartily endorse the practice of viewing art, whether in a physical museum, in the pages of a book, or online. For some, however, it tends to have one serious shortcoming: all the colors are already filled in. If you’re itching to use your own colored pencils, crayons, watercolors, or other tools of choice on drawings, paintings, and a variety of other works besides in the possession of well-known art institutions, these past few months are a time of year to savor thanks to the initiative Color Our Collections.
“Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016,” says its about page, it hosts an “annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.”
The de-colored pictures you see here offer just a taste of all you can find in this year’s Color Our Collections crop. Some of the participating institutions provide colorable selections from across their holdings, some stick to a certain theme, and some contribute actual volumes, digitized whole or created for the occasion. Take, for instance, the Ol’ Medical ColouringBook from Queen’s University Library, which promises hours of fun with pages like “anterior view of the skeletal system,” “ventral view of the brain,” and “urinary system shown on the female form.”
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.
Note: Yesterday Harry Belafonte, the civil rights activist, singer and actor, passed away at age 96. In his memory, we’re bringing back a post from our archive, one that features Belafonte and other legends discussing the March on Washington, back in August, 1963. The film above is now made available by the US National Archives.
On the day of the historic “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” (August 28, 1963), known today as The Great March on Washington, CBS aired a 30-minute roundtable discussion featuring Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Sidney Poitier.
The whole segment is fascinating, even and perhaps especially because the speakers pursue their sometimes divergent agendas (Heston speaks optimistically about peaceful dissent, Brando hopes the Civil Rights movement may lead to reparations for Native Americans, while Belafonte warns ominously that the United States has now reached a “point of no return”). But it may be Joseph Mankiewicz, the sharp-witted writer/director of All About Eve, who provides one of the discussion’s pithiest lines: “Freedom, true freedom,” he says, “is not given by governments; it is taken by the people.”
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