why don’t you look into the soulful deep brown eyes of my parrot and calm down.
uh oh. I think this castle has a dragon...
a sweetheart.
feels evil to deny my bird a cookie. She manages to look like she’s standing on her back legs when of course she only has one set of those anyway. But she raises up her entire belly and her neck gets looong…her expression expectant and hopeful… but i can’t share, there’s chocolate in there. I’m so sorry friend.
uh oh. I think this castle has a dragon…
saffron I grew and plucked today. 😊
saffron
my first saffron harvest 💜
even or especially when i take a bad picture of my bird she looks like she belongs like in one of those glittery frame animated gifs. even the dirty lens just looks like soft focus…. there should be little floating hearts around her.
sorry that’s the best i can do right now.
So a few months ago I came across this very odd 'bird-man' vase, which the Met site said 'almost certainly relates to Aristophanes’ well-known comedy The Birds (first produced in 415/414 B.C.) and may represent the costume that would have been worn by members of the chorus in the fifth century B.C.'
Then today I saw this figure on the museum-digital.de site which is identified as an 'actor in bird costume' wearing a feathered costume and flapping his arms like wings. He's not wearing a mask, but they still identify it as a possible costume for the choir in Aristophanes' play. Quite a different costume if so! This hides the hands where the other one shows arms with wings like a cape over them, and this one shows his face where the other one seems to depict a mask. It is of course also possible neither of these objects depict actors at all! That play is hardly the only reason to create strange half-bird figures.
I wonder what the costumes really looked like (and how much variation there was between different stagings).
(Terracotta amphoriskos (flask) in the form of a bird-man, late 5th century Greece (Attic)
(Terracotta man in bird costume)
Okay, so I was right to think, "that's weird," but was far too willing to take the Met's claim that it "almost certainly relates to Aristophanes..." uncritically, when I knew we "almost certainly" have more accurate representations of The Birds' chorus from other vases.
"Relates to" may be doing some heavy lifting.
Late 5th century kalyx krater aka The Vase Formerly Known As 82.AE.83 Getty, Perseus), repatriated in 2007. I approve of returning looted items, but worry that I can't find any trace of it since, although maybe that's US-based search engines catering to user bias.
And then there's this, Emory 2008.004.001, which the catalog page dates to 430-420BCE — was this painted by Doctor Who? The Birds debuted in spring 414— by a slightly more skilled painter. Note the body tastefully turned to hide one of the strap-on leather dongs.
Thank you for looking into this!! Really interesting, and I enjoyed seeing the costumes on the vases –yet another mysterious feathered figure!
made a tiny polymer clay minoan fresco dolphin… thinking about what to do with it? might make more tiny ancient fresco creatures and make a very small diorama. :)
when you look at the actual fresco it is so fragmentary though! I think the restoration is beautiful but it is very imaginative. look at how little of it is original
the sketch/the subject. ^^
my little manuscript bird :)
oh i forgot to say but I was of course thinking of (a restoration of) the blue bird fresco from 17th century BC Knossos, which i’m using as the header of this blog because it is exactly one of the blues of my bird (who contains a multitude of blues, but also this perfect summer’s day someone back then loved in Crete).
the sketch/the subject. ^^
quickly painted a flying Vaiya (and questionable strawberries) on some old drawers. not sure she’s a fan. :’)