art history will be like "this is the most revolutionary painting of its time!" and you will look at it and is just a normal painting of a lady sitting under a tree and then an art historian will explain "this is the first time a painting ever used this specific shade of blue which challenged all understood conventions of how to depict light and launched a movement known as auzureism, and also the lady is looking at a sparrow which in its time it was a sign of fierce sexual liberation and it was considered scandalous" and then you find out the painter was expelled from the academy of art of stockholm because of the painting and that the king of sweeden paid three thousand marcs (equivallent to ten million dollars now a days) to have the painting in his room and the painting still looks like a generic painting of a lady under a tree

So, I volunteer at my kids' school, and they have this lovely program where, once a month, parent volunteers come in and do a little presentation about a famous artists and supervise a related art project. Last year, I was tasked to introduce third-graders to Leonardo da Vinci.

Of course, you cannot do this without talking about the Mona Lisa. As soon as I projected the image, they recognised it because the Mona Lisa is everywhere. But this was a high-res photo from the Louvre's website and I showed them how as you walk past the painting, her eyes follow you the entire time. And they LOST it.

Yes, it's just a painting of a lady. But it is SO much more, and so much richer if you take the time to learn its context.

I bring sort of a 'peasants of the past were not as debased,uneducated and dirty as a lot of pesudo-medieval fiction makes them out to be but this new wave of attempting to sweep the very real indentured servitude, corporal ownership, poverty and lack of basic human rights under the rug isn't achieving what you think it's achieving' vibe to the party that people don't really like

in Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical Christmas there's an evil pipe organ voiced by Tim Curry. many of you will remember this. however, i think many of us (including, embarrassingly, myself) overlooked that he is a magic pipe organ. huh. none of the other servants got magic powers. why does that guy have magic powers now? did the enchantress like him? did her magic interfere with his own pre-existing sorcerous powers? was the existing pipe organ magical and when he was meshed with that pipe organ he got some part of the powers it already possessed? i ask this because he also has my favorite motivation of any DTV disney villain: he wants to stay an evil pipe organ that can do magic. i fuck with that honestly.

everything about this makes sense. it's a midquel. given the structure of the existing movie, it's hard for the villain to be someone from the village. it would also be a bit awkward for it to be a stranger because the whole story is predicated on it being wrong to turn strangers away (the enchantress). so you have to have someone inside the castle, i guess. disney writers sitting around thinking, ok though. but if it's someone in the castle, they're all on the same team, right? they want Beast and Belle to get together so they can be human again. the reason they're working together even with meaningfully different personalities is because they are united in common cause. So, you need someone who doesn't want to return to their former form.

this is how you get Forte, explained elegantly thus:

alright so his motivations check out. If he's just an organist he's going to get old and he could easily be replaced. there's no security in his world. thanks to the enchantress, he now IS the pipe organ. by the way the internet summarized this to me as a man who wants to "remain in organ form". we recognize this as classic pervert behavior.

anyway though! magic! what's that about

i get being a weird organ pervert who wants to stay an evil pipe organ forever. anyway with the addition of magic this is an easy choice (evil magic pipe organ voiced by tim curry; ideal lifestyle and absolute jackpot win). but WHY!! why is he also a witch! did you make a saucy little face when the Prince threw out the enchantress and you two locked eyes and she was like can you Believe this guy and you were like Oh i Know, like Don't Even Tell me About It and she was like yeah you can be telekinetic!! evil pipe organ

anyway hashtag #lifegoals!

Full-time court musician, part-time pervert and magician; sounds like your average Enlightenment-era intellectual to me. Probably writing a picaresque novel or two on the side and keeping up a lively correspondence with Benjamin Franklin.

Exactly, this 100% checks out with the way that the musical patronage system in Europe at the time Beauty and the Beast takes place (18th century) works: your entire livelihood was based on getting money from royalty and nobility, which included commissions, but ideally meant being one particular titled VIP's "court composer" since that had the greatest stability. Falling out of favor could mean losing your livelihood. (All of this was about to change in a few decades as the Industrial Revolution created an urban middle and non-titled-rich class and also established music conservatories, so we got the composer-as-job model that we have now of being either a professor or running a municipal orchestra, but obviously nobody knew this; the winds of change in the music world wouldn't make themseles known until the 19th century.) It's really easy to envision some Salieri type (as in the character in Amadeus, not the real historical guy) getting turned into a pipe-organ-who-does-magic and being like, actually, this is way better! I don't have to worry about young upstart stealing my thunder and my commissions and my court composer job. I can fulfill my sacred mission from God of serving him by making music, forever. Also, a lot of musicians in general are weird little freaks and would probably enjoy being transformed into an immortal music-producing vessel, especially in the form of an instrument with a gigantic range that is prized for its ornateness and for its historical importance (organs are one of the modern instruments with the longest histories in Western classical music, being used in churches even long before any other instrumental music was permitted) and that has a history of being carefully preserved over centuries. To paraphrase a famous Ralph Vaughan Williams quote: why just write music when you can BE music?

I feel like there's no way that the actual movie can live up to these posts and now I want to see the hypothetical movie that does

Trapped in the talkative cycle

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Artists RPF, 16th Century CE RPF Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Michelangelo Buonarroti & Vittoria Colonna Characters: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vittoria Colonna, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri Additional Tags: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Having Faith, I did a lot of hand-wringing over whether to use & or / in the relationship tag, Their relationship is platonic but in a really intense and intimate way Summary:

Rome, February 25, 1547: Michelangelo bids farewell to his dearest friend.

–

I have committed fic again! I don’t know why all my Renaissance artist fic is about people at the deathbeds of someone they love but I GUESS IT IS. A gift for @skeleton-richard – hope this makes up for the disappointment of the equivalent scene in The Agony and the Ecstasy.

(the novel–the movie only covers the Sistine Chapel stuff)

Reblogging for the morning crowd!

Got inspired by this incredible little manuscript guy

@shredsandpatches

Mark Rothko, Earth Green (detail), 1955

I hate working on drawing scenes or just drawing more than one character so im pushing myself to redraw 'devils gambit' with mephistopheles and faustus (and less tiny details im not built for that i fear) its in very early stages rn but I hope i actually finish this

well, what i was getting at was really more like you should get out of the house more, socialize, meet people, these are all proven ways to deal with depression, try to distract yourself with fun activities, i get this is what you work as but there is a difference between performing and watching someone else perform, my point is, surely there are other clowns in town mr pagliacci

trompe-l'œil

illusions of three-dimensionality (trompe-l'œil) in manuscript illuminatons from a codex containing st. jerome's translation of the chronicon of eusebius of caesarea. produced in padua or venice, c. 1480

source: Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. lat. 49, ff. 10r, 11r, and 13r

Opera (Without an Opera House)

Watching and listening to opera, even if there's no opera house near you, is more accessible than you might expect. I post a fortnightly list of upcoming opera video streams, but that focuses on newly-available content. There's much more to see beyond that.

Below the cut is an extensive but non-comprehensive list of resources for watching and listening to opera all over the world. Many of these streams are free, others are available on a rental or subscription basis. English captions are available unless otherwise specified.

yes... ha ha ha... yes!

OH MY GOD IT’S @shredsandpatches AND ME

Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna for @shredsandpatches

I like that she has glasses like my glasses ❤️