The Medieval Elephant in Art

Drawing an elephant when you’ve never seen one is testing, as these images drawn by Medieval artist prove. Uli Westphal’s Elephas Anthropogenus project shows us European illustrations of elephants between the fall of Rome to the end of the Renaissance. Around that period sightings of elepahants in what is now modern day Wigan or Oslo were rare. He writes:

After the fall of the Roman Empire, elephants virtually disappeared from Western Europe. Since there was no real knowledge of how this animal actually looked, illustrators had to rely on oral and written transmissions to morphologically reconstruct the elephant, thus reinventing an actual existing creature. This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.

An album of Medieval elephants can be seen here.

Anorak

Posted: 4th, April 2020 | In: Strange But True | Comment

Art and design re-imagined for the isolation era

As Coronavirus turns us into hermits, we look at art re-imagined by José Manuel Ballester’s Concealed Spaces reimagines iconic works of art with the people gone:

Anorak

Posted: 26th, March 2020 | In: The Consumer | Comment

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper – the Coronavirus Years

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper – the Coronavirus years.

Spotter: https://www.facebook.com/anticajaepetrella

Anorak

Posted: 13th, March 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment

Demons in the bedroom – illuminated Medieval intrigue and the birth of Merlin

These images from illuminated Medieval manuscript tell the story of the birth of Merlin. Upset by so many souls being released from Satan’s bondage thanks to Christ’s harrowing of Hell, demons plotted to undo Christ’s work by breeding an antichrist, a figure who will perform as their puppet in the world. So a demon squires a virtuous sleeping woman. But the plot is ruined because she is so true of heart and a priest named Blaise baptises the boy at birth. The child is, of course, Merlin, who lives to do good deeds.

Spotter: Sleeping With the Devil – Medieval Illuminations of Demonic Sex

Anorak

Posted: 2nd, March 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment

Smithsonian releases 2.8million images to the public domain

The Smithsonian Institution has released 2.8 million images into the public domain. The open access online platform is free to use and use it however they see fit. Expect to see the very best of them on Flashbak.

“Being a relevant source for people who are learning around the world is key to our mission,” says Effie Kapsalis, who is heading up the effort as the Smithsonian’s senior digital program officer. “We can’t imagine what people are going to do with the collections. We’re prepared to be surprised.”

Image: Cat In The Yard – Thomas Eakins, American, b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1844–1916.

Spotter: FlashbakShop

Anorak

Posted: 27th, February 2020 | In: News, The Consumer | Comment

Spank the Peacock: The Songbook of Zeghere van Male

The Songbook of Zeghere van Male, also known by its call number MS 125-128 in Cambrai’s Mediathèque Municipale, consists of four complementary part-books: Superius, Altus, Tenor, & Bass. The chansonnier became part of this public collection after the French Revolution, beforehand it was in the Bibliothèque de Saint-Sépulcre, also in Cambrai.

The MS contains 229 compositions, extremely varied, some of them present only in this source. The special aspect of this manuscript is its marriage of music, art and culture: drawings adorn each folio. Executed by quill and with lively colors the drawings describe realistic scenes of daily life, leisurely activities, and include animals and monstrous creatures, obscene depictions and vegetal decorations. With mixed elements inherited from the Middle-Ages, the Antiquity and the vogue of the grotesque, they are a testimony of the prevailing taste in Flemish civil society in the first half of the 16th century”

Text via here.

Anorak

Posted: 19th, February 2020 | In: Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment

The Entartete Kunst – when Nazis banned ‘degenerate’ art and music

The Nazis were not ones for jazz and free expression. They damned all as entartete kunst (degenerate art). To let fellow Ubermensch know what wrong thinking looked like, the Nazis created a travelling exhibition called – predictably – Entartete Kunst. The show opened in Munich in 1937, displaying works deemed to be “an insult to German feeling”. How they flocked to be educated and disgusted by stuff purged from museums and stolen by the State for the common good. More than two million visitors attended the exhibition from July 19 to November 30, 1937, in Munich alone.

Part of the purge was listed in the 10 Rules for Combatting Jazz. The whole shebang of depravity formed a brochure, of which London’s V&A holds the only known copy of a complete inventory of Entartete Kunst.

The museum notes:

The list of more than 16,000 artworks was produced by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in 1942 or thereabouts. It seems that the inventory was compiled as a final record, after the sales and disposals of the confiscated art had been completed in the summer of 1941. The inventory’s two typescript volumes provide crucial information about the provenance, exhibition history and fate of each artwork.

The inventory consists of 482 pages (including blank pages and a missing page), split into two volumes. The entries are organised alphabetically by city, institution and artist’s name. Volume 1 covers the cities Aachen to Görlitz, while Volume 2 covers Göttingen to Zwickau.

It’s pretty much a guide to everything you should enjoy.

Spotter: Flashbak

Anorak

Posted: 30th, January 2020 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians, Strange But True | Comment

Italian street artist Blu creates animated graffiti mural

Italian street artist Blu has been enlivening Bologna since 1999. In Big Bang Big Boom, Blu gives us a “short animated story about evolution and consequences”.