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I took a photograph of this Hispanic mother and her son in Lincoln Park in Chicago the weekend before Election Day in America. After taking the picture, I walked over and showed the mother the photograph on the screen of my camera, and her eyes twinkled, with the slightest bit of tears showing in the corners of her eyes. I touched her shoulder gently and smiled and then walked away.
This moment and this photograph is sticking in my mind. I have grandsons about the age of this young boy that I don't see except in rare circumstances. I thought of them when I took this photograph. I wondered what the distant gaze of this little boy meant. I could sense the tension in the mother and how she responded to my brief affection. Election Day was only a few days away, and for Hispanic families, I'm sure she was worried about the outcome of the election.
Allow me to express my opinion and take it for what it is worth to you. Here is what I believe. When God created the world, he didn't create it with borders and countries. He created it with the beauty of different skin colors, different languages, and different opportunities. I believe each of us have the opportunity to speak louder with our actions than we do with our words. As a disclaimer, I want you to know I've screwed up in both actions and words in my life and paid the price for those mistakes. But I can say that as time has passed, my heart is softer, my words are more measured, and I think about things now that never crossed my mind before.
Life is so much more than a border and a law and maybe a wall. I don't think God cares as much about our immigration laws as he does about what is in our hearts. I grew up in a rural midwest community that was virtually all white. Yet, I've never felt like someone with a different color skin was less of a person than me. I have dear friends with every color skin that exists. Good people come in all skin colors, and bad people come in all skin colors. It isn't the color of the skin that gets us in trouble, it is what is in our hearts.
I've learned a lot about hatred and anger and the consequences thereof, and I've learned a lot about love and how rich it can be over the course of my lifetime. There is no comparison between hatred and love. They are as distant as the north and south poles.
Yet, in the past months, I've witnessed family members shredding one another. I've seen endless social media posts filled with venom and hatred. Some have coined America as being in the midst of "whitelash". This breaks my heart. The polarization of Americans that exists is not indicative of hearts committed to the God that created the entire universe.
I wanted to hug this little Hispanic boy. I wanted to hug him because he reminded me of my grandsons. I wanted to hug him to help alleviate the fear he might be internalizing. I was a scared little boy long ago and I haven't forgotten what that feels like.
Where are we, America?
Constructivism is a theory of knowledge (epistemology) that argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas. During infancy, it was an interaction between human experiences and their reflexes or behavior-patterns. Piaget called these systems of knowledge schemata. Constructivism is not a specific pedagogy, although it is often confused with constructionism, an educational theory developed by Seymour Papert, inspired by constructivist and experiential learning ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's theory of constructivist learning has had wide ranging impact on learning theories and teaching methods in education and is an underlying theme of many education reform movements. Research support for constructivist teaching techniques has been mixed, with some research supporting these techniques and other research contradicting those results.
Constructivist theory[edit]
Formalization of the theory of constructivism is generally attributed to Jean Piaget, who articulated mechanisms by which knowledge is internalized by learners. He suggested that through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences. When individuals assimilate, they incorporate the new experience into an already existing framework without changing that framework. This may occur when individuals' experiences are aligned with their internal representations of the world, but may also occur as a failure to change a faulty understanding; for example, they may not notice events, may misunderstand input from others, or may decide that an event is a fluke and is therefore unimportant as information about the world. In contrast, when individuals' experiences contradict their internal representations, they may change their perceptions of the experiences to fit their internal representations. According to the theory, accommodation is the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences. Accommodation can be understood as the mechanism by which failure leads to learning: when we act on the expectation that the world operates in one way and it violates our expectations, we often fail, but by accommodating this new experience and reframing our model of the way the world works, we learn from the experience of failure, or others' failure.
It is important to note that constructivism is not a particular pedagogy. In fact, constructivism is a theory describing how learning happens, regardless of whether learners are using their experiences to understand a lecture or following the instructions for building a model airplane. In both cases, the theory of constructivism suggests that learners construct knowledge out of their experiences.
However, constructivism is often associated with pedagogic approaches that promote active learning, or learning by doing. There are many critics of "learning by doing" (a.k.a "discovery learning") as an instructional strategy (e.g. see the criticisms below). While there is much enthusiasm for Constructivism as a design strategy, according to Tobias and Duffy "... to us it would appear that constructivism remains more of a philosophical framework than a theory that either allows us to precisely describe instruction or prescribe design strategies. This is unfortunate because there is quite a bit of promise to the educational philosophy behind constructivism, but constructivists seem to be having difficulties defining testable learning theories.[citation needed]
The construction of knowledge is a dynamic, active process in which learners constantly strive to make sense of new information.
Over time, this sense-making activity is made up of conscious attention, organising and reorganising ideas, assimilating or accommodating to new ideas, and constant reshuffling and reorganising in efforts to connect ideas into coherent patterns.
I saw little boat sailing along river bank trying to hide from wild flow in the middle of river. I followed the boat which stop places to places. Till I I met him.
I stepped down from resort stair to watch closer. I sat on stair and my feet almost touch the river. I was only 1-2 meters far from him so I felt as if I was internalized with the scene. It was extraordinary moment for city people like me to be there with them. He sailed the boat in the morning to collect fish from local fishery tools entrapped at evening. He said to himself or maybe to let me know that.. there is no fish at all. The words seemed unsatified but in fact he didn't see this as problem. I talked something with him too.
He made me feel life is easy and everything is benefit to life. To get is benefit and not to get anything is just neutral.
He turned his face to talk to another fishery man about their fishing and kick water gently. He then picked up that tool up to the boat and placed it down to the river again somewhere near in order to start to catch fish again - the new fight.
For my understanding, in rainy season, it is deilghtful time for fishes to get new fresh water. It's season for breeding for new generation for new life. Along river bank, it is pleasant sanctuary for aquatic life as it is safe from high flow and there are lots of little trees and root for their restful and safeful ground. And human knows this secret, it's just the chain of life cycle..
It was not his day but it was a fish day. Another fight for life will start further. He may not be great like "The old Man and the Sea" , a famous Noble book, but almost for me " The Old Man and The River". He may not understand why his simple daily life becomes beautiful moment for me.
Mekong river, downstream of Pak Mun confluence
Tor Saeng Resort (ทอแสงรีสอร์ท โขงเจียม)
Khong Chiam, Ubonratchathani
Thailand
Die Stehende von Curt Beckmann wird entsprechend ihrem Standort im Innocentiapark zuweilen auch Innocentia genannt. Es handelt sich um einen Frauenakt. Der Künstler hat den Körper im Laufe mehrerer Monate direkt aus einem großen Steinblock geschlagen, ganz ohne Zuhilfenahme eines vorherigen Gipsmodells. Die Darstellung der jungen Frau ist idealisiert – und zeigt damit eher das verallgemeinerte Bild einer Frau als ein individuelles Porträt. Der Körper verlässt die Symmetrie durch die Stellung im klassischen Kontrapost mit dem leicht geknickten Spielbein, und der ein wenig unbestimmte, gesenkte Blick macht einen verinnerlichten Eindruck. Die vom Künstler ohne vorherigen Auftrag erstellte Arbeit wird 1949 durch die Hamburger Kunsthalle angekauft und im Park aufgestellt.
Curt Beckmann's standing figure is sometimes also called Innocentia because of its location in Innocentiapark. It is a female act. The artist carved the body directly from a large block of stone over the course of several months, without the aid of a previous plaster model. The depiction of the young woman is idealized - and thus shows the generalized image of a woman rather than an individual portrait. The body leaves the symmetry through the position in classical contrapposto with the slightly bent free leg, and the somewhat vague, lowered gaze makes an internalized impression. The work, created by the artist without a prior commission, was purchased by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 1949 and placed in the park.
Interesting theory i read about in Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point":
The broken windows theory:
Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.
The article received a great deal of attention and was very widely cited. A 1996 criminology and urban sociology book, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling and a co-author Catharine Coles, is based on the article but develops the argument in greater detail. It discusses the theory in relation to crime and strategies to contain or eliminate crime from urban neighborhoods.
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood.
The theory thus makes two major claims: that further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred, and that major crime will, as a result, be prevented. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus only on the latter claim.
A major factor in determining individual behavior is social norms, internalized rules about the appropriate way to act in a certain situation. Humans constantly monitor other people and their environment in order to determine what the correct norms are for the given situation. They also monitor others to make sure that the others act in an acceptable way. In other words, people do as others do and the group makes sure that the rules are followed. However, when there are no people around, as is often the case in an anonymous, urban environment, the monitoring of or by others does not work. In such an environment, criminals are much more likely to get away with robberies, thefts, and vandalism. When there are few or no other people around, individuals are forced to look for other clues—called signals—as to what the social norms allow them to do and how great is the risk of getting caught violating those norms. An ordered and clean environment sends the signal that this is a place which is monitored and people here conform to the common norms of non-criminal behavior; a disordered environment which is littered, vandalized, and not maintained sends the opposite signal: this is a place where people do as they please and get away with it without being detected. Therefore, as people tend to act the way they think others act, they are more likely to act "disorderly" in the disordered environment.
(wikipedia)
Haifa Museum
Boy's Craft show
www.hma.org.il/Museum/Templates/Showpage.asp?DBID=1&L...
I guess this was last year but I just saw this info so it's new to Me!
November 3, 2007 - March 23, 2008
Curator: Tami Katz-Freiman
"BoysCraft" focuses on the manual and labor-intensive aspects of artmaking, and on the use of handicraft traditions in contemporary art. This exhibition centers upon the sensory experience of excess, materiality and multiple details, and brings together works by local and international male artists who share an interest in traditional handicrafts formerly identified with the domain of "women's work," with "folk" art or with applied art.
This exhibition, which includes works by 41 Israeli and international artists, aims to shed light on the engagement with manual crafts as a cultural and sociopolitical practice. The artists participating in this exhibition present works composed of fabric, paper, beads, thread, wallpaper and other decorative materials in a range of techniques - including embroidery, weaving, beading, knitting and paper cutting. The imagery in most of these works is based on "male" or "macho" stereotypes, yet their creation involves techniques that are culturally associated with "female" or "childlike" forms of expression. The decorative, ornamental and sometimes obsessive qualities of these artworks allow for an examination of changing perceptions of masculinity, of beauty and of the relations between art and craft.
This wide range of works creates a rich tapestry of different cultures, styles and skills. The works of each of the participating artists are characterized by a demanding and time-consuming work process, which involves monotonous and repetitive actions based on age-old craft traditions. These practices, which were marginalized in previous decades outside of the modernist cannon, have penetrated into the heart of contemporary artmaking. The prominent artists now choosing to undermine accepted distinctions between these domains thus reflect a new cultural spirit imbued with nostalgia for the predigital age; for personal and "authentic" forms of expression; for art created in community-related contexts; and for values such as human fraternity and social healing.
"BoysCraft" reflects the complex processes that have taken place in the aftermath of the feminist revolution, and presents a new generation of artists who have internalized feminist, gender-related and postcolonial theories. By combining traditional techniques with an unconventional use of materials, these artists voice various forms of social criticism, shed light on the problematics and disruptions that characterize contemporary cultures and identities, undermine artistic conventions and raise questions concerning gender - from a male point of view. This exhibition thus points to the ways in which the gains of the gender revolution have been internalized by the "new man" in both local and international contexts with the gradual decline of machoism.
Made for 2Lei Second Life "Don't Let Him Destroy You" photo campaign, with the song by Alicia Keys, "Girl on Fire" in mind:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=J91ti_MpdHA
"She's just a girl, and she's on fire
Hotter than a fantasy, lonely like a highway
She's living in a world, and it's on fire
filled with catastrophe, but she knows she can fly away
Oh, she got both feet on the ground
And she's burning it down
Oh, she got her head in the clouds
And she's not backing down
(Chorus)
This girl is on fire
This girl is on fire
She's walking on fire
This girl is on fire"
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Dear flickrites...
Don't mess with a woman who has burned in the repression of her need to be free and live her life how she needs.
I've made this picture for 2Lei, to support the idea that violence towards women is unacceptable and to show a woman taking the first brave steps to JUST GET OUT.
I have to believe that there are women who will be looking at these pictures who are trying to come to that difficult place of resolution to make a huge change and step out of the familiar, and enter into a freedom that seems more frightening than what they currently endure behind closed doors. Please make your changes after very good planning, making contacts who can help you get safe and secure. Don't let it turn you around to go back. You know you need to live your life.
The picture is symbolic, with the woman all on fire, finally, for her own purpose and needs. Her bravery to leave her home is symbolized by the tiger, and the house fire symbolizes the destructive relationship she has been in and all the THINGS that you fear losing, like your home, your livelihood and support, your familiar lifestyle. When intense emotion that others subject you to becomes internalized and takes over your whole reality, sometimes you eventually realize the positive side of anger is determination to resist and just to get out and leave because you can only find a better life when you are free.
Another song I was listening to is Lauryn Hill "Just Get Out".
"Your stinkin' resolution
Is no type of solution
Preventin' me from freedom
Maintainin' your pollution
I won't support your lie no more
I won't even try no more
If I have to die, oh Lord
That's how I choose to live
I won't be compromised no more
I can't be victimised no more
I just don't sympathize no more
Cause now I understand
You just wanna use me
You say 'love' then abuse me
You never thought you'd loose me
But how quickly we forget
That nothin' is for certain
You thought I'd stay here hurtin'
Your guilt trip's just not workin'
Repressin' me to death
Cause now I'm choosin' life, yo
I take the sacrifice, yo
If everything must go, then go
That's how I choose to live"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HdzTvH8mvw
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It is so hard to come to a place of acceptance that a bad relationship needs to end. The abuse starts early in a relationship in forms other than physical violence, and then it spirals as the abuser gets more comfortable to do it.
But it starts with mind control and being denied the right to speak and you are denied the right to be wrong. If you can't confront the person with your feelings and have a discussion without fearing serious consequences of any form, you are in an exploitative relationship and it's time to end it. It's hard for us to come to this place of seeing the need to move on though, as we are conditioned to accept our situation and to even feel we have no alternatives. I have a lot of compassion for people who feel trapped. I hope 2Lei ends up helping some people to understand their need to make a change for their own life to be better, as well as their children.
It works exactly the same way the development of a personality works: She will incrementally take in what she sees, hears and feels—in effect, what she lives–and that will shape her understanding of who she is in the world. From the time she’s little, everything she takes in–whether it be a healthy message, a shaming message or a lack of information–will slowly accumulate into an understanding of her sexuality.
A daughter’s open dialogue with her mother will stand her in good stead to develop trust and confidence in her mother and in herself.
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.......***** All images are copyrighted by their respective authors ......
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... marsmet525 photostream ... marsmet525 ...
m.flickr.com/#/photos/69858568@N07/
Thursday, April 3, 2014
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m.flickr.com/#/photos/69858568@N07/6350646621/
2014 - Black text on white background
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View photo size ... Large
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.... marsmet48 photo ... Frankie Laine meets the Queen ...item 9.. The Wayward Wind ...item 6.. Cool Water ...item 2.. They Call The Wind Maria..
m.flickr.com/#/photos/31474974@N07/3266006064/
2014 - Black text on white background
Thursday, April 3, 2014
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... marsmet48 photostream ...
www.flickr.com/photos/31474974@N07/?details=1
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.....item 1) ... Ms. Magazine blog ... msmagazine.com/blog
You are here: Home / Arts / How To Model Healthy Sexuality for Our Daughters
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img code photo ... Your Daughter's Bedroom ... Joyce T. McFadden ...
Insights for Raising Confident Women
msmagazine.com/blog/files/2011/07/YourDaughtersBedroomJou...
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How To Model Healthy Sexuality for Our Daughters
July 7, 2011 by Meika Loe
msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/07/07/how-to-model-healthy-...
As a toddler, my daughter started asking about body parts. Pretty soon it became apparent that she was the only 2-year-old at her daycare who knew and used the word vagina. Even her teachers changed the subject. Was I supposed to feel guilty about teaching her about her body? Joyce McFadden, psychoanalyst and author of Your Daughter’s Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women, says no.
After surveying more than 1,000 women on their sexuality, McFadden concludes that, even with the best intentions, generations of well-meaning mothers have ended up reinforcing sexist messaging. To counter this trend for a new generation, McFadden says, we need to nurture healthy sexuality from day one.
As a mother, I found this to be an insightful, courageous book full of practical advice. Let’s face it: Schools aren’t doing much sex education. So parents have to step up. And as a professor teaching courses on gender and sexuality, I believe McFadden’s interviews and survey data can also help to model candid conversation in the classroom.
I had a chance to talk with McFadden, below–and received a response from her 15-year-old daughter, as well!
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-----..What are some small things a mother can do for her daughter when it comes to nurturing a sense of confidence and bodily comfort?
Some of the things I’ve done to nurture healthy sexuality in our home have been:
.....teaching my daughter about her anatomy from the time she was little
.....answering honestly any question she’s ever asked me
.....explaining menstruation in the years before she would likely start
.....more recently, covering issues of safe sex and discussing the emotional components of sexuality–like mutual respect, an understanding that women’s pleasure is no less important than men’s, encouraging her to listen to her own instincts, and so on
I’ve also shared with her stories of my own mile markers—my first period, my first sexual encounter. In a lot of these conversations over the years I’ve explicitly conveyed to her that I want her to have a happy, healthy life that includes valuing her sexual vitality.
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-----..How do these conversations continue throughout a child’s life and development?
I think the most important thing, by far, is beginning to talk about sexuality simply and naturally when she’s a toddler, so that right off the bat, she knows it’s part of a dialogue the two of you can have. Keeping her ignorant about the fundamentals of her own body will set the stage for shame and guilt over her sexuality as she ages. If she’s old enough to know what her earlobe is, then she’s old enough to know what her vulva is, because it’s all pre-sexual in her understanding.
As she gets a little older, move from teaching her the correct names of body parts to explaining how they work (intercourse, how babies are made and delivered, masturbation, menstruation and so on). Later the learning should become more sophisticated and include concepts like intimacy, mutual respect, privacy, and ownership over her body and her sexual feelings and choices. It’s about always leaving the door open for these discussions so you can access each other as needed, not only when your daughter is young, but when you’re adult women together.
It’s also imperative that you don’t critique her body, your body, or those of other women in front of her. We have to model body confidence and the value of sexuality in the living of a life. I also make a point of making it clear how much I value her mind, her heart and her abilities so she’s less susceptible to buying into the idea all she’ll be valued for is her physicality.
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-----..How does having an open dialogue about sexuality at home shape a daughter’s sense of self?
It works exactly the same way the development of a personality works: She will incrementally take in what she sees, hears and feels—in effect, what she lives–and that will shape her understanding of who she is in the world. From the time she’s little, everything she takes in–whether it be a healthy message, a shaming message or a lack of information–will slowly accumulate into an understanding of her sexuality.
A daughter’s open dialogue with her mother will stand her in good stead to develop trust and confidence in her mother and in herself.
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-----..Sometimes when mothers and daughters sit down and discuss sexuality, these moments can be quite awkward. How has this worked for you? Are there ways to cut the awkwardness? Or is that discomfort just part of growing up in the U.S. with a puritanical ethic?
I strongly believe that, through our reluctance to be open and truthful when our girls are little, and in our difficulty in answering their questions without looking like a deer in the headlights, we introduce the awkwardness. Our daughters don’t introduce it—they learn it from us when they’re very young, then come to expect it each time the subject arises.
That being said, I think much of the awkwardness between a teenage daughter and her mother is endemic to being a teen. It’s developmentally appropriate and necessary for her to separate from her mother. But it’s still my job to teach my daughter what I feel is important for her to know; in the service of supporting the development of skills she’ll need to listen to her own voice and make good decisions.
She’s often really uncomfortable with what I want to teach her about sexuality. But she’s also really uncomfortable when I talk about alcohol, drugs, or curfews, and I can’t let her awkwardness keep me from having those discussions either.
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-----..What is your relationship with your daughter like?
We’re extremely close, but now that she’s a teenager she needs more space and independence, so I’m trying to shift accordingly. Sometimes in these moments when we’re navigating this new territory together, I feel like I just had a drink that was too stiff… a cocktail that’s one part excitement for her maturation and one part loss for all that’s past, and I get a little emotional hangover!
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-----..Are there moments when you have identified internalized sexism in yourself? Can you give an example and how you worked through this?
Absolutely. Whenever I wrestle with anything connected to negative body image or sexual self-consciousness, I consider internalized sexism to be the source of that thinking.
For example, I love being 49. You couldn’t pay me to be back in my twenties. I love the self-awareness, directness and the clarity of my priorities being 49 brings. But my body is undergoing its own little reapportionment program. The way districts of my body are represented is shifting according to the demands of the normal aging process. And there are times internalized sexism makes this feel sucky.
When I do find myself in these spots I tend to process the feelings on my own, because hate it when women critique themselves in front of each other, and have made a rule of trying never to do it in front of my daughter. Instead, whenever the opportunity arises, I’ll point out to her older women who catch my eye because they command my respect, or are distinctive, vibrant, compelling or gorgeous. And I also remind myself that the woman I most admired and modeled myself after was my grandmother, and I take great comfort in that.
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-----..Here’s what Joyce’s daughter had to say after reading this interview:
Joyce’s daughter (age 15): My mom and I disagree about stuff, but are very close. I know she loves me very much, and wishes us to always be the closest we can be. [An open dialogue at home] can help one to know the normality of sexuality, and help one to feel comfortable with it. Being able to talk about sexuality at home will help one to ask questions if curious, without feeling embarrassed to do so. I have always dreaded those discussions; there really is no way to cut the awkwardness in them. However, I do know I can talk to her about anything and that means a lot to me.
You can purchase your copy of Joyce McFadden’s book here.
Photo from Reader Store
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.....item 2).... youtube video ... Frankie Laine - They Call The Wind Maria ... 3:50 minutes ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbDFKC-jHQo&feature=related
Maria
Maria
They call the wind Maria
Away out here they got a name
For rain and wind and fire
The rain is Tess, the fire Joe,
And they call the wind Maria
Maria blows the stars around
And sends the clouds a’flyin’
Maria makes the mountains sound
Like folks were up there dying
Maria
Maria
They call the wind Maria
Before I knew Maria’s name
And heard her wail and whinin’
I had a girl and she had me
And the sun was always shinin’
But then one day I left my girl
I left her far behind me
And now I’m lost, so gone and lost
Not even God can find me
Maria
Maria
They call the wind Maria
Out here they got a name for rain
For wind and fire only
But when you’re lost and all alone
There ain’t no word but lonely
And I’m a lost and lonely man
Without a star to guide me
Maria blow my love to me
I need my girl beside me
Maria
Maria
They call the wind Maria
Maria
Maria!
Blow my love to me
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Wonderwerp #60
Studio Loos, Den Haag 2015
Based loosely on Ganzfeld experiments (a technique used in parapsychology in the 1970s as a way of invoking telepathy), Color Field Immersion involves masking the audience with semi-transparent blindfolds onto which light projections are mapped. Similar to sensory deprivation, Color Field Immersion provides perceptual deprivation, replacing the entirety of each audience member’s visual field with washes of color, line, and movement – often inducing hallucinations as the brain seeks to replace lost stimuli. Flipping the traditional performer-audience relationship, the internalized experience becomes the location of the performance. Combined with rich, textural soundscapes, Color Field Immersion creates a deeply immersive perceptual architecture of sound and vision.
Doron Sadja is an American artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Working primarily with multichannel spatialized sound – combining pristine electronics with lush romantic synthesizers, extreme frequencies, dense noise, and computer-enhanced acoustic instruments, Sadja creates post-human, hyper-emotive sonic architecture. Although each of Sadja’s works are striking in their singular and focused approach, his output is diverse: spanning everything from immersive multichannel sound pieces to sexually provacative performance / installation works, and stroboscopic smoke, mirror, laser, and projection shows. Doron has published music on 12k, ATAK, and Shinkoyo records, and has performed/exhibited at PS1 MoMa, Miami MOCA, D’amelio Terras Gallery, Cleveland Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, and Roulette amongst others. Sadja co-founded Shinkoyo Records and the West Nile performing arts venue in Brooklyn (RIP), and has curated various new music/sound festivals around NYC, including the multichannel SOUNDCORRIDORS Festival, Easy Not Easy, John Cage Musicircus, and more.
“Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one’s authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
This graphic illustrates the strong link between areas with high densities of industrial activity and zones of seasonally oxygen-depleted waters. There is a strong link between areas with high densities of industrial activity and zones of seasonal oxygen-depleted waters. In recent years there has been an increasing focus on treating and reducing municipal and industrial waste, and on reducing nitrogen levels in agricultural runoff. However, less attention has been paid to the continually increasing nitrogen emissions into the atmosphere. It is believed that between 10% and 70% of the fixed nitrogen input in many coastal regions is currently delivered by rain and the fallout of nitrogen compounds from the atmosphere. GESAMP (Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environment Protection) recommends that atmospheric nitrogen must be included among the nutrient sources assessed as part of the management of coastal water quality. Political factors are also of major significance, as the primary causes of atmospheric anthropogenic nitrogen result from energy generation and transportation, and thus from society’s economic and social activities (GESAMP, 2001). Urgent actions to control land-based activities: At the technical, management and policy levels, the most urgent actions needed, for controlling land-based activities, in order to improve the quality of the marine environment, are: - prevent habitat destruction and the loss of biodiversity through education, combined with the development and enforcement of legal, institutional and economic measures appropriate to local circumstances - establish protected areas for habitats and sites of exceptional scenic beauty or cultural value - devote primary management attention to the control of pollution from sewage, nutrients (especially nitrogen) and sediment mobilization - design national policies that take account of the economic value of environmental goods and services, and provide for the internalization of environmental costs - integrate the management of coastal areas and associated watersheds (GESAMP, 2001) It has been estimated that about 80% of all marine pollution originates from land-based activity, reaching the ocean directly, via rivers, or through atmospheric depositions: - Inputs of nitrates to the North Sea, for example, have risen four-fold, and phosphate inputs eight-fold, since the 1970s, causing eutrophication and tides of toxic algae that have killed stocks in offshore fish farms (Harrison and Pearce, 2001). - Severe eutrophication has been discovered in several enclosed or semi-enclosed seas (UNEP, 2002). - Eutrophication has been linked to the formation of ‘dead zones’ on the ocean floor. One of the largest known ’dead zones’ is found along the United States shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, which receives large volumes of fertilizer from the Mississippi River system (Harrison and Pearce, 2001). - The collapse of the Baltic Sea cod fishery in the early 1990s is blamed on oxygen loss in deep waters due to eutrophication, which interfered with the development of cod eggs. - Eutrophication can also cause harmful algal blooms (HABs), which can harm fish and shellfish, as well as the people who consume them. Some algae can cause negative effects when they appear in dense blooms, while others have such potent neurotoxins they do not need to be present in large numbers.
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This photo has been graciously provided to be used in the GRID-Arendal resources library by: Philippe Rekacewicz, February 2006
OLYMPUS DIGITAL
Painting Thangka in Lhasa, Tibet
A thangka, variously spelt as thangka, tangka, thanka, or tanka (Nepali pronunciation: [ˈथान्का]; Tibetan: ཐང་ཀ་; Nepal Bhasa: पौभा), is a Tibetan Buddhist painting on cotton, silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala. Thangkas are traditionally kept unframed and rolled up when not on display, mounted on a textile backing somewhat in the style of Chinese scroll paintings, with a further silk cover on the front. So treated, thangkas can last a long time, but because of their delicate nature, they have to be kept in dry places where moisture will not affect the quality of the silk. Most thangkas are relatively small, comparable in size to a Western half-length portrait, but some are extremely large, several metres in each dimension; these were designed to be displayed, typically for very brief periods on a monastery wall, as part of religious festivals. Most thangkas were intended for personal meditation or instruction of monastic students. They often have elaborate compositions including many very small figures. A central deity is often surrounded by other identified figures in a symmetrical composition. Narrative scenes are less common, but do appear.
Thangka serve as important teaching tools depicting the life of the Buddha, various influential lamas and other deities and bodhisattvas. One subject is The Wheel of Life (Bhavachakra), which is a visual representation of the Abhidharma teachings (Art of Enlightenment). The term may sometimes be used of works in other media than painting, including reliefs in metal and woodblock prints. Today printed reproductions at poster size of painted thangka are commonly used for devotional as well as decorative purposes. Many tangkas were produced in sets, though they have often subsequently become separated.
Thangka perform several different functions. Images of deities can be used as teaching tools when depicting the life (or lives) of the Buddha, describing historical events concerning important Lamas, or retelling myths associated with other deities. Devotional images act as the centerpiece during a ritual or ceremony and are often used as mediums through which one can offer prayers or make requests. Overall, and perhaps most importantly, religious art is used as a meditation tool to help bring one further down the path to enlightenment. The Buddhist Vajrayana practitioner uses a thanga image of their yidam, or meditation deity, as a guide, by visualizing "themselves as being that deity, thereby internalizing the Buddha qualities"[1] tangkas hang on or beside altars, and may be hung in the bedrooms or offices of monks and other devotees.
“You can come to your friends with a problem and they will most usually blurt out a set of orders based entirely upon their own lives, which they believe you should follow. There is no thought process that goes into it, no internalization, no ingestion of your own pain into their own stomachs. I believe this is why, about a million people come to me with their problems rather than turning to their closest friends and family members; because I'm like that ancient tree with protruding roots, you can sit under my branches and as you cry I will soak your tears into me. We don't actually need humans with their many thoughtless advices. We need to be sitting under trees, asking roots to share in our pains.”
― C. JoyBell C.
Objects like this were being sold in a flea market bin;
People of all races were seemingly indifferent to the contents within.
We can no longer accept this is okay;
We must remember the past and how we ended up this way.
The nightmare and horror dates back hundreds of years;
It’s after effects still linger as if no one really cares.
Human beings were captured and forced into servitude;
A reminder of our past and man’s moral turpitude.
Men’s and women’s own hopes and dreams;
Were replaced instead by blood curdling screams.
Packed by the hundreds into the bellies of ships;
Destined to be beaten by long leather whips.
Working the fields for hours on end;
The realities of which, we will never comprehend.
A sentence imposed with no end in sight,
As the world looked on, indifferent to their plight.
To think that some are capable of such brutality;
Fed by their hatred, violence and immorality.
It’s sad that some have long been oppressed;
While others have been simultaneously blessed.
A buddy of mine went to by a nice car;
But because he is black, he didn’t get far.
The police were called and made him put his hands on the hood;
It was a natural assumption that he was up to no good.
Aggressions like this happen every single day;
We need to open our eyes and fix this some way.
There are none so blind as those who will not see;
Nothing will change if we just let it be.
The point of these words is not to place blame;
But failure to acknowledge this atrocity would be a dammed shame.
We must find a way to make things right;
Which means taking action and being contrite.
Regardless of our race, we all share DNA;
Let’s commit to each other to do better each day.
I ask my brothers and sisters to give us a chance;
So that together we can share a better circumstance.
~ By John Dyer
I was asked by a hairdresser friend to take photos of her clients with dreadlocks..
She got the 7 women together, ages ranging from late sixties to early forties, and we set up a make shift studio out the back of her salon.
My first thoughts when I see or think of dreadlocks, is dirty, hippie, alternate lifestyle. You get my drift....well how wrong was I.
So yes they are a bit hippie but I'm a bit country so who am I to judge and yep they have an alternate lifestyle but alternate in the sense that they care for the planet and want to sustain and look after it as long as possible. The dirty part I got completely wrong. These woman really care about their looks and appearance and dirty they are not.
I was curious to find out, why? Why dreadlocks? What did they mean to them? and What made them decide to get them?
What I found out is that these dreadlocks give these woman confidence and made them believe they can be the person they want to be.
I found out they are extremely self-conscious not just about their looks but about their abilities but by having the dreads somehow gives them the confidence to believe in themselves.
I guess we are all the same and most of us internalize our insecurities where these women externalize it.
I also found out that they didn't want to be ordinary.
The session opened my eyes and made me realise that my perception of things isn't always right. I got to know these woman in the 6 hours we had together and I got to know a side of them that I hope I was able to get across with a photo. As much as the shoot was all about the hair, it turned into something far more complex.
*To get dreads like this a person would have to sit 12 hours in the hairdressers chair. I for one couldn't do it. Half an hour in the chair is 25 minutes too long.
I have no idea if this young woman is an MIT student -- but I hope she won't mind if I use her to illustrate another bit of ancient MIT folklore:
Of the 900 incoming students each year, approximately 30 were female (I have no idea if that ratio is still true, but it was fairly consistent from one year to the next, while I was there).
We did not refer to them as females, or girls, or women; instead they were known as "coeds." As far as I know, no insult was intended; I think the point was that their presence demonstrated that MIT was no longer a single-sex university, but was legitimately coeducational.
Still, it did not surprise us to learn that, while all 900 freshmen were members of the intellectual elite, the coeds were really special.
I recall meeting only one coed during my freshman year -- actually, during an orientation party where we insecure, anti-social geeks were supposed to become acquainted with one another. She was 16 years old, she was incredibly sexy, she smoked a pipe, and her IQ was several hundred points higher than mine. Or so it seemed...
Note: this photo was published in a Jan 16, 2012 Traveling in US blog titled "Once upon a time, she was known as a “coed”," with the same caption and detailed notes that I had written here on this Flickr page. It was also published in an undated (early Jan 2012) blog titled "The State of Young America: Millennials Need More Expensive Education to Succeed." It was also published in an Apr 4, 2012 Jaggi blog, with the same caption that I had written on this Flickr page. And it was published in a Dec 10, 2012 blog titled "Should schools be allowed to separate boys and girls into one-gender classrooms?"
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It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave.
"Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve."
When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room.
Welcome to MIT.
I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.)
Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details...
I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit.
But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept.
But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them all in this Flickr set; the photos were taken at sunset one evening, and dawn the following morning. But they'll give you an idea of what it was like, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... and what it's still like today.
Below is an edited version of a conversation I had via email this morning with my important teach at Auburn, Robert Faust:
I am writing to him in response to his thoughts on our planned rendezvous this weekend at Auburn. A reunion of sorts, and a time for Bob and me and a few others to reflect on where we have been, our paths over the last forty-five years, and how we got to where we are now . . .
Bob,
I read your email again this morning before breakfast, from my usual sunrise brooding spot in the corner of my living room, sitting in my Eames chair. (This chair, always desired and only purchased, finally, a few years ago, has always represented for me, when I look at it, some curious memory of my early years of considering architecture as a way of considering the world.) (As I read your words and thought about them, I turned my head and made a picture, attached – above – for your consideration of my morning drift.)
I then made some notes in response to what you wrote. I will offer some of those here, though you may hear them again soon. These thoughts are somewhat random:
☛ I believe my first recognition – and it was a true epiphany – at Auburn of a direction for making, truly making in the way you frame the question, Bob, came to me somewhere during my fourth year at Auburn, in conversation with my classmate Glenn Currie (in your absence as my teacher, Bob, I probably learned more from Glenn than anyone else at Auburn). Glenn advised me that the impulse to architecture exists in what he called the second look. That is, that we move every instant through a swamp of images, absorbing what we can. Suddenly one image appears, arrests our attention (and he demonstrated in gestures) which stops us in our tracks. We turn briefly away, then suddenly turn back, to look again. It is in that turn, that second look (and here he turned his head to fix this idea in my culpable yet still impressionable twenty-year-old brain) that architecture exists.
☛ My second such epiphany (yes, there is often a long dry spell between true epiphanies) came to me twelve years later, in my first masters’ studio at Harvard (I had done my apprenticing and had my own practice for six years in Mississippi before for some mad reason I decided to go to graduate school) when my great teacher Stanley Tigerman said to me and my fellow travelers, on our first meeting day: “Life is fabulous. If only architecture could be more like it.” Stanley’s gauntlet went through me like a red heat, and has never left me since.
☛ Maybe in some semblance to the thinking of Herb Greene, Adrian Stokes has inspired me through the years. Stokes said that art (architecture – architecture being, as Auburn teacher Robert Samuelson first said to me, the mother of all art) is a form of externalization. I took this externalization as necessarily following Currie’s second look and Tigerman’s great wish as the prerequisite internalizations of living an observant life. Attentive architects observe the world as a dazzling, mystifying panoply of enchantments. Those architects worthy of the name see the enchantments of the world as what must surely be answers to infinite questions, from the quite commonplace to the primordial, and the nature of their making must then be the attempt, never ending, never satisfied, to make concrete not the answers, but the questions.
☛ My most important teacher at Harvard, not unlike Currie at Auburn, was my dear friend and classmate Douglas Darden (who died in 1996), who admonished me to never forget (and admonished me quite literally until the day he died): “Architecture can never touch bottom.”
☛ Darden’s essentialist thought echoes that of perhaps the first teacher of my adulthood, William Faulkner: “If you ever got it right, you’d have nothing left to do but slit your wrists.”
☛ I’ll close this morning’s drifting with a thought on my continuing self-doubtings, this one being, why I did not accept offers from several STARchitets to work with them, so that I too could become a STARchitect. The response to what seems to me my general refusal to accomplish such a thing comes from E.B. White: “A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”
These are the kinds of things I think about when I sit cuddled in my mornings in Charles Eames's leather and plywood arms, and which I may talk about during our show and tell this weekend . . .
Hormonal sentience, first described by Robert A. Freitas Jr., describes the information processing rate in plants, which are mostly based on hormones instead of neurons like in all major animals (except sponges). Plants can to some degree communicate with each other and there are even examples of one-way-communication with animals.
Acacia trees produce tannin to defend themselves when they are grazed upon by animals. The airborne scent of the tannin is picked up by other acacia trees, which then start to produce tannin themselves as a protection from the nearby animals. When attacked by caterpillars, some plants can release chemical signals to attract parasitic wasps that attack the caterpillars.
A similar phenomenon can be found not only between plants and animals, but also between fungus and animals. There exists some sort of communication between a fungus garden and workers of the leaf-cutting ant Atta sexdens rubropilosa. If the garden is fed with plants that are poisonous for the fungus, it signals this to the ants, which then will avoid fertilizing the fungus garden with any more of the poisonous plant.The Venus flytrap, during a 1- to 20-second sensitivity interval, counts two stimuli before snapping shut on its insect prey, a processing peak of 1 bit/s. Mass is 10-100 grams, so the flytrap's SQ is about +1. Plants generally take hours to respond to stimuli though, so vegetative SQs (Sentience Quotient) tend to cluster around -2.In theory even an organism with a hormonal system instead of a nervous system could be intelligent in some degree, but it would be an extremely slow brain, to say the least.And yet, at least higher plants are able to produce electrical signals, even if they do not use them in the same way animals do. František Baluška from the University of Bonn in Germany is one of the authorities on plant neurobiology.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormonal_sentience
Plants do not have a brain or neuronal network, but reactions within signalling pathways may provide a biochemical basis for learning and memory in addition to computation and problem solving.Controversially, the brain is used as a metaphor in plant intelligence to provide an integrated view of signalling.Plants respond to environmental stimuli by movement and changes in morphology. They communicate while actively competing for resources. In addition, plants accurately compute their circumstances, use sophisticated cost–benefit analysis and take tightly controlled actions to mitigate and control diverse environmental stressors. Plants are also capable of discriminating positive and negative experiences and of "learning" (registering memories) from their past experiences. Plants use this information to update their behaviour in order to survive present and future challenges of their environment.Plant physiology studies the role of signalling, communication, and behaviour to integrate data obtained at the genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cellular levels with the physiology, development, and behaviour of individual organisms, plant ecosystems, and evolution. The neurobiological view sees plants as information-processing organisms with rather complex processes of communication occurring throughout the individual plant organism. It studies how environmental information is gathered, processed, integrated and shared (sensory plant biology) to enable these adaptive and coordinated responses (plant behaviour); and how sensory perceptions and behavioural events are 'remembered' in order to allow predictions of future activities upon the basis of past experiences. Plants, it is claimed by some plant physiologists, are as sophisticated in behaviour as animals but this sophistication has been masked by the time scales of plants' response to stimuli, many orders of magnitude slower than animals'.It has been argued that although plants are capable of adaptation, it should not be called intelligence, as plant neurobiologists are relying primarily on metaphors and analogies to argue that complex responses in plants can only be produced by intelligence.[32]"A bacterium can monitor its environment and instigate developmental processes appropriate to the prevailing circumstances, but is that intelligence? Such simple adaptation behaviour might be bacterial intelligence but is clearly not animal intelligence." However, plant intelligence fits a definition of intelligence proposed by David Stenhouse in a book about evolution and animal intelligence where he described it as "adaptively variable behaviour during the lifetime of the individual".Critics of the concept have also argued that a plant cannot have goals once it is past the development stage of plantlet because, as a modular organism, each module seeks its own survival goals and the resultant whole organism behavior is not centrally controlled.[33] This view, however, necessarily accommodates the possibility that a tree is a collection of individually intelligent modules cooperating with, competing with and influencing each other, thus determining organism level behavior from the base up. The development into a larger organism whose modules must deal with different environmental conditions and challenges is not universal across plant species either, as smaller organisms might be subject to the same conditions across their bodies, at least, when the below and above ground parts are considered separately. Moreover, the claim that central control of development is completely absent from plants is readily falsified by apical dominance.Charles Darwin studied the movement of plants and in 1880 published a book The Power of Movement in Plants. In the book he concludes:It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed [..] acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being situated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.In philosophy, there are few studies of the implications of plant perception. Michael Marder put forth a phenomenology of plant life based on the physiology of plant perception.Paco Calvo Garzon offers a philosophical take on plant perception based on the cognitive sciences and the computational modeling of consciousness.Comparison to neurobiology:.A plant's sensory and response system has been compared to the neurobiological processes of animals. Plant neurobiology, an unfamiliar misnomer, concerns mostly the sensory adaptive behaviour of plants and plant electrophysiology. Indian scientist J. C. Bose is credited as the first person to research and talk about neurobiology of plants. Many plant scientists and neuroscientists, however, view this as inaccurate, because plants do not have neurons.The ideas behind plant neurobiology were criticised in a 2007 article published in Trends in Plant Science by Amedeo Alpi and other scientists, including such eminent plant biologists as Gerd Jürgens, Ben Scheres, and Chris Sommerville. The breadth of fields of plant science represented by these researchers reflects the fact that the vast majority of the plant science research community reject plant neurobiology. Their main arguments are that:"Plant neurobiology does not add to our understanding of plant physiology, plant cell biology or signaling".
"There is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses or a brain in plants".The common occurrence of plasmodesmata in plants which "poses a problem for signaling from an electrophysiological point of view" since extensive electrical coupling would preclude the need for any cell-to-cell transport of a ‘neurotransmitter-like’ compounds.The authors call for an end to "superficial analogies and questionable extrapolations" if the concept of "plant neurobiology" is to benefit the research community.There were several responses to the criticism clarifying that the term "plant neurobiology" is a metaphor and metaphors have proved useful on several previous occasions.[37][38] Plant ecophysiology describes this phenomenon.Parallels in other taxa. As described above in the case of a plant, similar mechanisms exist in a bacterial cell, a choanoflagellate, a fungal hypha, or a sponge, among the many other examples. All of these individual organisms of the respective taxa, despite being devoid of a brain or nervous system, are capable of sensing their immediate and momentary environment and responding accordingly. In the case of single-celled life, the sensory pathways are even more primitive in the sense that they take place on the surface of a single cell, as opposed to a network of many cells.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_perception_(physiology)
Recent surprising similarities between plant cells and neuronsPlant cells and neurons share several similarities, including non-centrosomal microtubules, motile post-Golgi organelles, separated both spatially/structurally and functionally from the Golgi apparatus and involved in vesicular endocytic recycling, as well as cell-cell adhesion domains based on the actin/myosin cytoskeleton which serve for cell-cell communication. Tip-growing plant cells such as root hairs and pollen tubes also resemble neurons extending their axons. Recently, surprising discoveries have been made with respect to the molecular basis of neurodegenerative disorders known as Hereditary Spastic Paraplegias and tip-growth of root hairs. All these advances are briefly discussed in the context of other similarities between plant cells and neurons.There are very prominent similarities between tip-growing plant cells and the extending axons of neurons. However, recent advances reveal that these visible similarities stretch beyond the tip-growing plant cells and include plant tissue cells generating action potentials3 and accomplishing vesicle trafficking and recycling, typically at actin/myosin enriched cell-cell adhesion domains resembling neuronal synapses. Moreover, plant cells and neurons are similar from the cellular perspective, when most of their microtubules and Golgi apparatus organelles are not associated with the perinuclear centrosomes.In plant cells, Golgi stacks and Trans-Golgi Networks (TGNs) are motile organelles extending through the whole plant cells. Similarly in neurons centrosome-independent cortical microtubules are abundant in axons. They transport, among other cargo, so-called Golgi Outposts—which correspond to the TGNs of plant cells toward neuronal synapses. In both plant cells and neurons, TGNs act as independent organelles separated both spatially/structurally and functionally from the Golgi apparatus.Intriguingly, similarly as in neurons, also the TGN of plant cells is the inherent part of the endosomal/vesicular recycling pathways, supporting the dynamic and communicative nature of plant synapses.Plant action potentials (electric spikes) run in an axial direction, along the longitudinal axis of any plant organ, and the highest spike activity was scored in the transition zone of the root apex in maize.Hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) represents a heterogeneous group of genetic neurodegenerative disorders affecting the longest neurons of the human body, extending from the brain along the spinal cord /down to the legs.21 In the HSP disorders, axons of these long neurons degenerate causing problems in controlling leg muscles. One of the major genes in which mutation results in the HSP is Atlastin. Recent study has reported that Atlastin is homologous to the RHD3 protein of Arabidopsis.RHD3 protein is essential for proper growth and development of root hairs in Arabidopsis.Moreover, RHD3 is also important for the proper arrangement of root cell files which underlies the direction of root growth.In order to maintain their ordered cell files, root apex cross-walls (plant root synapses) perform active vesicle recycling. Both Arabidopsis RHD3 and Drosophila Atlastin are important for shaping tubular ER networks.RHD3 is also known to be required for the proper arrangement of the actin cytoskeleton and cell wall maintenance via vesicle trafficking.Moreover, similarly as Atlastin in neurons,RHD3 is important for the GA morphogenesis in plant cells too Importantly, both RHD3 and Atlastin are implicated in membrane tubulation and vesiculation whereas rhd3 mutant line emerges to be less active in endocytic internalization of FM endocytic tracer.Drosophila Atlastin regulates the stability of muscle microtubules and is required for both the axonal maintenance and synapse development. All this suggest that Arabidopsis emerges as an attractive and useful model object for investigations of mechanisms underlying HSP disorders in humans.Glutamate is one of the best understood and the most widespread excitatory .neurotransmitter which is perceived via glutamate receptors at brain synapses in animals and humans. These neuronal receptors have, in fact, deep evolutionary origin in prokaryotic bacteria, and are present also in plants., Importantly, the plant glutamate receptors have all the features of neuronal ones, and glutamate induces plant action potentials., All this strongly suggest that glutamate serves in neurotransmitter-like cell-cell communication in plants too. Interestingly in this respect, especially the root apices are target of the neuronal-like activity of glutamate in plants, with effects on cell development, root growth, morphogenesis, and behavior. The transition zone cells, localized between the apical meristem and basal cell elongation zone, respond to glutamate with rapid depolarization of the plasma membrane and this response is blocked by a specific antagonist of ionotropic glutamate receptors, 2-amino-5-phosphonopentanoate.Cells of the transition zone, also known as the distal elongation zone or the basal meristem, are crucial for root primordia priming,and exogenous glutamate is known to decrease primary root growth and increase lateral root proliferation.Beta-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) is a neurotoxic amino acid, derived from cycads, which is well-known to act as agonists and antagonists of mammalian glutamate receptors. BMAA inhibits root growth, cotyledon opening, and it stimulates elongation of light-grown hypocotyls in Arabidopsis.BMAA affects growth of Arabidopsis organs at very low concentrations, and these BMAA-induced effects are reversed by the addition of glutamate.This is consistent with a scenario wherein BMAA acts to block plant-specific glutamate receptors.Similarly to glutamate, aluminium also induces very rapid plasma membrane depolarization specifically in cells of the root apex transition zone. Moreover, glutamate and aluminium both induce rapid and strong calcium spikes with unique signatures in cells of the transition zone.These root cells represent the primary target for the aluminium toxicity in plants, whereas aluminium is not toxic to root cells which have already entered the rapid elongation region.Similarly, although aluminium is not so toxic in most plant cells, neuronal-like tip-growing root hairs and pollen tubes1,2 are sensitive to aluminium similarly as are the transition zone cells. In these latter cells, aluminium is specifically internalized via endocytosis. Internalized endocytic aluminium interferes with vesicle trafficking/recycling and endocytosis, inhibiting the PIN2-driven basipetal auxin transport in the transition zone of root apices.Aluminium targets specifically the auxinsecreting plant synapses and affects the polar auxin-transport-based root cell patterning. Moreover, aluminium affects also nitric oxide (NO) production which is highest in cells of the the distal portion of the transition zone. Importantly, the rapidly elongating root cells are not sensitive towards aluminium and neither is there internalization of aluminium into rapidly elongating root cells. In support of the endocytosis of aluminium being the primary process linked to the aluminium toxicity in root cells, endocytosis of aluminium and its toxicity is lowered in the Arabidopsis mutant over-expressing the DnaJ domain protein auxillin which regulates the clathrin-based endocytosis.In animals and humans, neuronal cells are extremely sensitive towards aluminium which is internalized via endocytosis specifically in these cells. Aluminium was found to be enriched in lysosomes, similarly like Alzheimer’s amyloid β-peptide plaque depositions. These are also internalized from cell surface and aluminium was reported to inhibit their degradation.In conclusion, in both transition zone root cells and neurons, endocytosis of aluminium emerges as relevant to its high biotoxicity. In plants, the aluminium toxicity is the most important limiting factor for crop production in acid soil environments worldwide. Further studies on these cells might give us crucial clues not only for plant biology and agriculture but also for our still limited understanding of the Alzheimer disease. In line with the original proposal of Charles and Francis Darwin, root apices of plants represent neuronal/anterior pole of plant bodies
Chitra, also spelled as Citra, is an Indian genre of art that includes painting, sketch and any art form of delineation. The earliest mention of the term Chitra in the context of painting or picture is found in some of the ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism and Pali texts of Buddhism
NOMENCLATURE
Chitra (IAST: Citra, चित्र) is a Sanskrit word that appears in the Vedic texts such as hymns 1.71.1 and 6.65.2 of the Rigveda. There, and other texts such as Vajasaneyi Samhita, Taittiriya Samhita, Satapatha Brahmana and Tandya Brahmana, Chitra means "excellent, clear, bright, colored, anything brightly colored that strikes the eye, brilliantly ornamented, extraordinary that evokes wonder". In the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, it means "picture, sktech, dilineation", and is presented as a genre of kala (arts). Many texts generally dated to the post-4th-century BCE period, use the term Chitra in the sense of painting, and Chitrakara as a painter. For example, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini in verse 3.2.21 of his Astadhyayi highlights the word chitrakara in this sense. Halls and public spaces to display paintings are called chitrasalas, and the earliest known mention of these are found in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
A few Indian regional texts such as Kasyapa silpa refer to painting by others words. For example, abhasa – which literally means "semblance, shining forth", is used in Kasyapa-shilpa to mean as a broader category of painting, of which chitra is one of three types. The verses in section 4.4 of the Kasyapa-silpa state that there are three types of images – those which are immovable (walls, floor, terracota, stucco), movable, and those which are both movable-immovable (stone, wood, gems).[5] In each of these three, states Kasyapa-shipa, are three classes of expression – ardhacitra, citra, and citra-abhasa. Ardhacitra is an art form where a high relief is combined with painting and parts of the body is not seen (it appears to be emerging out of the canvas). The Citra is the form of picture artwork where the whole is represented with or without integrating a relief. Citrabhasha is the form where an image is represented on a canvas or wall with colors (painting). However, states Commaraswamy, the word Abhasa has other meanings depending on the context. For example, in Hindu texts on philosophy, it implies the "field of objective experience" in the sense of the intellectual image internalized by a person during a reading of a subject (such as an epic, tale or fiction), or one during a meditative spiritual experience.
In some Buddhist and Hindu texts on methods to prepare a manuscript (palm leaf) or a composition on a cloth, the terms lekhya and alekhya are also used in the context of a chitra. More specifically, alekhya is the space left while writing a manuscript leaf or cloth, where the artist aims to add a picture or painting to illustrate the text.
HISTORY
The earliest explicit reference to painting in an Indian text is found in verse 4.2 of the Maitri Upanishad where it uses the phrase citrabhittir or "like a painted wall". The Indian art of painting is also mention in a number of Buddhist Pali suttas, but with the modified spelling of Citta. This term is found in the context of either a painting, or painter, or painted-hall (citta-gara) in Majjhima Nikaya 1.127, Samyutta Nikaya 2.101 and 3.152, Vinaya 4.289 and others. Among the Jain texts, it is mentioned in Book 2 of the Acaranga Sutra as it explains that Jaina monk should not indulge in the pleasures of watching a painting.
The Kamasutra, broadly accepted to have been complete by about the 4th-century CE, recommends that the young man should surprise the girl he courts with gifts of color boxes and painted scrolls. The Viddhasalabhanjika – another Hindu kama- and kavya–text uses chitra-simile in verse 1.16, as "pictures painted by the god of love, with the brush of the mind and the canvas of the heart".
The nature of a chitra (painting), how the viewer's mind projects a two dimensional artwork into a three dimensional representation, is used by Asanga in Mahayana Sutralamkara – a 3rd to 5th-century Sanskrit text of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, to explain "non-existent imagination" as follows:
Just as in a picture painted according to rules, there are neither projections nor depressions and yet we see it in three dimensions, so in the non-existent imagination there is no phenomenal differentiation, and yet we behold it.
— Mahayana Sutralamkara 13.7, Translated in French by Sylvain Levi
According to Yoko Taniguchi and Michiyo Mori, the art of painting the caves at the c. 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan site in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban Muslims in the late 1990s, were likely introduced to this region from India along with the literature on early Buddhism.
TEXTS
There are many important dedicated Indian treatises on chitra. Some of these are chapters within a larger encyclopedia-like text. These include:
Chitrasutras, chapters 35–43 within the Hindu text Vishnudharmottara Purana (the standard, and oft referred to text in the Indian tradition)
Chitralaksana of Nagnajit (a classic on classical painting, 5th-century CE or earlier making it the oldest known text on Indian painting; but the Sanskrit version has been lost, only version available is in Tibet and it states that it is a translation of a Sanskrit text)
Samarangana Sutradhara (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Aparajitaprccha (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Manasollasa (an encyclopedia, contains chapters on paintings)
Abhilashitartha chinatamani
Sivatatva ratnakara
Chitra Kaladruma
Silpa ratna
Narada silpa
Sarasvati silpa
Prajapati silpa
Kasyapa silpa
These and other texts on chitra not only discuss the theory and practice of painting, some of them include discussions on how to become a painter, the diversity and the impact of a chitra on viewers, of aesthetics, how the art of painting relates to other arts (kala), methods of preparing the canvas or wall, methods and recipes to make color pigments. For example, the 10th-century Chitra Kaladruma presents recipe for making red color paint from the resin of lac insects. Other colors for the historic frescoes found in India, such as those in the Ajanta Caves, were obtained from nature. They mention earthy and mineral (inorganic) colorants such as yellow and red ochre, orpigment, green celadonite and ultramarine blue (lapis lazuli). The use of organic colorants prepared per a recipe in these texts have been confirmed through residue analysis and modern chromatographic techniques.
THEORY
The Indian concepts of painting are described in a range of texts called the shilpa shastras. These typically begin by attributing this art to divine sources such as Vishvakarma and ancient rishis (sages) such as Narayana and Nagnajit, weaving some mythology, highlighting chitra as a means to express ideas and beauty along with other universal aspects, then proceed to discuss the theory and practice of painting, sketching and other related arts. Manuscripts of many these texts are found in India, while some are known to be lost but are found outside India such as in Tibet and Nepal. Among these are the Citrasutras in the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana manuscripts discovered in India, and the Citralaksana manuscript discovered in Tibet (lost in India). This theory include early Indian ideas on how to prepare a canvas or substrate, measurement, proportion, stance, color, shade, projection, the painting's interaction with light, the viewer, how to captivate the mind, and other ideas.
According to the historic Indian tradition, a successful and impactful painting and painter requires a knowledge of the subject – either mythology or real life, as well as a keen sense of observation and knowledge of nature, human behavior, dance, music, song and other arts. For example, section 3.2 of Visnudharmottara Purana discusses these requirements and the contextual knowledge needed in chitra and the artist who produces it. The Chitrasutras in the Vishnudharmottara Purana state that the sculpture and painting arts are related, with the phrase "as in Natya, so in Citra". This relationship links them in rasa (aesthetics) and as forms of expression.
THE PAINTING
A chitra is a form of expression and communication. According to Aparajitaprccha – a 12th-century text on arts and architecture, just like the water reflects the moon, a chitra reflects the world. It is a rupa (form) of how the painter sees or what the painter wants the viewer to observe or feel or experience.
A good painting is one that is alive, breathing, draws in and affects the viewer. It captivates the minds of viewers, despite their diversity. Installed in a sala (hall or room), it enlivens the space.
The ornaments of a painting are its lines, shading, decoration and colors, states the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana. It states that there are eight gunas (merits, features) of a chitra that the artist must focus on: posture; proportion; the use of the plumb line; charm; detail (how much and where); verisimilitude; kshaya (loss, foreshortening) and; vrddhi (gain). Among the dosas (demerits, faults) of a painting and related arts, states Chitrasutra, are lines that are weak or thick, absence of variety, errors in scale (oversized eyes, lips, cheeks), inconsistency across the canvas, deviations from the rules of proportion, improper posture or sentiment, and non-merging of colors.
LIMBS OF THE PAINTING
Two historical sets called "chitra anga", or "limbs of painting" are found in Indian texts. According to the Samarangana Sutradhara – an 11th-century Sanskrit text on Hindu architecture and arts, a painting has eight limbs:
Vartika – manufacture of brushes
Bhumibandhana – preparation of base, plaster, canvas
Rekhakarma – sketching
Varnakarma – coloring
Vartanakarma – shading
lekhakarana – outlining
Dvikakarma – second and final lining
Lepyakarma – final coating
According to Yashodhara's Jayamangala, a Sanskrit commentary on Kamasutra, there are sadanga (six limbs)[note 5] in the art of alekhyam and chitra (drawing and painting):
Rupa-bhedah, or form distinction; this requires a knowledge of characteristic marks, diversity, manifested forms that distinguish states of something in the same genus/class
Pramanani, or measure; requires knowledge of measurement and proportion rules (talamana)
Bhava yojanam, or emotion and its joining with other parts of the painting; requires understanding and representing the mood of the subject
Lavanya yojanam, or rasa, charm; requires understanding and representing the inner qualities of the subject
Sadrsyam, or resemblance; requires knowledge of visual correspondence across the canvas
Varnika-bhanga or color-pigment-analysis; requires knowledge how colors distribute on the canvas and how they visually impact the viewer.
These six limbs are arranged stylistically in two ways. First as a set of compound (Rupa-bhedah and Varnika-bhanda), a set of joining (middle two yojnam), and a set of single words (Pramanani and Sadrsyam). Second, states Victor Mair, the six limbs in this Hindu text are paired in a set of differentiation skills (first two), then a pair of aesthetic skills, and finally a pair of technical skills. These limbs parallel the 12th-century Six principles of Chinese painting of Xie He. {refn|group=note|The Hua Chi of Teng Ch'un, a 12th-century Chinese text, mentions the Buddhist temple of Nalanda with frescoes about the Buddha painted inside. It states that the Indian Buddhas look different from those painted by Chinese, as the Indian paintings have Buddha with larger eyes, their ears are curiously stretched and the Buddhas have their right shoulder bare. It then states that the artists first make a drawing of the picture, then paint a vermilion or gold colored base. It also mentions the use of ox-glue and a gum produced from peach trees and willow juice, with the artists preferring the latter. According to Coomaraswamy, the ox-glue in the Indian context mentioned in the Chinese text is probably the same as the recipe found in the Sanskrit text Silparatna, one where the base medium is produced from boiling buffalo skin in milk, followed by drying and blending process.
The six limbs in Jayamangala likely reflect the earliest and more established Hindu tradition for chitra. This is supported by the Chitrasutras found in the Vishnudharmottara Purana. They explicitly mention pramanani and lavanya as key elements of a painting, as well as discuss the other four of the six limbs in other sutras. The Chitrasutra chapters are likely from about the 4th or 5th-century. Numerous other Indian texts touch upon the elements or aspects of a chitra. For example, the Aparajitaprccha states that the essential elements of a painting are: citrabhumi (background), the rekha (lines, sketch), the varna (color), the vartana (shading), the bhusana (decoration) and the rasa (aesthetic experience).
THE PAINTER
The painter (chitrakara, rupakara) must master the fundamentals of measurement and proportions, state the historic chitra texts of India. According to these historic texts, the expert painter masters the skills in measurement, characteristics of subjects, attributes, form, relative proportion, ornament and beauty, states Isabella Nardi – a scholar known for her studies on chitra text and traditions of India. According to the Chitrasutras, a skilled painter needs practice, and is one who is able to paint neck, hands, feet, ears of living beings without ornamentation, as well as paint water waves, flames, smoke, and garments as they get affected by the speed of wind. He paints all types of scenes, ranging from dharma, artha and kama. A painter observes, then remembers, repeating this process till his memory has all the details he needs to paint, states Silparatna. According to Sivatattva Ratnakara, he is well versed in sketching, astute with measurements, skilled in outlining (hastalekha), competent with colors, and ready to diligently mix and combine colors to create his chitra. The painter is a creative person, with an inner sense of rasa (aesthetics).
THE VIEWER
The painter should consider the diversity of viewers, states the Indian tradition of chitra. The experts and critics with much experience with paintings study the lines, shading and aesthetics, the uninitiated visitors and children enjoy the vibrancy of colors, while women tend to be attracted to the ornamentation of form and the emotions. A successful painter tends to captivate a variety of minds. A painter should remember that the visual and aesthetic impact of a painting triggers different responses in different audiences.
The Silparatna – a Sanskrit text on the arts, states that the painting should reflect its intended place and purpose. A theme suitable for a palace or gateway is different from that in a temple or the walls of a home. Scenes of wars, misery, death and suffering are not suitable paintings within homes, but these can be important in a chitrasala (museum with paintings). Auspicious paintings with beautiful colors such as those that cheer and enliven a room are better for homes, states Silparatna.
PRACITICE
According to the art historian Percy Brown, the painting tradition in India is ancient and the persuasive evidence are the oldest known murals at the Jogimara caves. The mention of chitra and related terms in the pre-Buddhist Vedic era texts, the chitra tradition is much older. It is very likely, states Brown, the pre-Buddhist structures had paintings in them. However, the primary building material in ancient India was wood, the colors were organic materials and natural pigments, which when combined with the tropical weather in India would naturally cause the painting to fade, damage and degrade over the centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that sample paintings and historic evidence for chitra practice are unusual. The few notable surviving examples of chitra are found hidden in caves, where they would be naturally preserved a bit better, longer and would be somewhat protected from the destructive effects of wind, dust, water and biological processes.
Some notable, major surviving examples of historic paintings include:
Murals at Jogimara cave (eight panels of murals, with a Brahmi inscription, 2nd or 1st century BCE, Hindu), oldest known ceiling paintings in India in remote Ramgarh hills of northern Chhattisgarh, below on wall of this cave is a Brahmi inscription in Magadhi language about a girl named Devadasi and a boy named Devadina (either they were lovers and wrote a love-graffiti per one translation, or they were partners who together converted natural caves here into a theatre with painted walls per another translation)
Mural at Sitabhinji Group of Rock Shelters (c. 400 CE Ravanachhaya mural with an inscription, near a Shiva temple in remote Odisha, a non-religious painting), the oldest surviving example of a tempera painting in eastern states of India
Murals at Ajanta caves (Jataka tales, Buddhist), 5th-century CE, Maharashtra
Murals at Badami Cave Temples (Hindu), 6th-century CE, Karnataka (secular paintings along with one of the earliest known painting of a Hindu legend about Shiva and Parvati inside a Vaishnava cave)
Murals at Bagh caves (Hallisalasya dance, Buddhist or Hindu), Madhya Pradesh
Murals at Ellora caves (Flying vidyadharas, Jain), Maharashtra
Frescoes at Sittanavasal cave (Nature scenes likely representing places of Tirthankara sermons, Jain), Tamil Nadu
Frescoes at Thirunadhikkara cave temple (Flowers and a woman, likely a scene of puja offering to Ganesha, another of Vishnu, Hindu), Travancore region, Kerala-Tamil Nadu
Paintings at the Brihadisvara temple (Dancer, Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Manuscript paintings (numerous states such as Gujarat, Kashmir, Kerala, Odisha, Assam; also Nepal, Tibet; Buddhist, Jain, Hindu
Vijayanagara temples (Hindu), Karnataka
Chidambaram temple (Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Chitrachavadi (Hindu, a choultry–mandapa near Madurai with Ramayana frescoes)
Pahari paintings (Hindu), Himachal Pradesh and nearby regions
Rajput paintings (Hindu), Rajasthan
Deccan paintings (Hindu, Jain)
Kerala paintings (Hindu)
Telangana paintings (Hindu)
Mughal paintings (Indo-Islamic)
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Kalamkari (Hindu)
Pattas (Jain, Hindu)
WIKIPEDIA
Chitra, also spelled as Citra, is an Indian genre of art that includes painting, sketch and any art form of delineation. The earliest mention of the term Chitra in the context of painting or picture is found in some of the ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism and Pali texts of Buddhism
NOMENCLATURE
Chitra (IAST: Citra, चित्र) is a Sanskrit word that appears in the Vedic texts such as hymns 1.71.1 and 6.65.2 of the Rigveda. There, and other texts such as Vajasaneyi Samhita, Taittiriya Samhita, Satapatha Brahmana and Tandya Brahmana, Chitra means "excellent, clear, bright, colored, anything brightly colored that strikes the eye, brilliantly ornamented, extraordinary that evokes wonder". In the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, it means "picture, sktech, dilineation", and is presented as a genre of kala (arts). Many texts generally dated to the post-4th-century BCE period, use the term Chitra in the sense of painting, and Chitrakara as a painter. For example, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini in verse 3.2.21 of his Astadhyayi highlights the word chitrakara in this sense. Halls and public spaces to display paintings are called chitrasalas, and the earliest known mention of these are found in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
A few Indian regional texts such as Kasyapa silpa refer to painting by others words. For example, abhasa – which literally means "semblance, shining forth", is used in Kasyapa-shilpa to mean as a broader category of painting, of which chitra is one of three types. The verses in section 4.4 of the Kasyapa-silpa state that there are three types of images – those which are immovable (walls, floor, terracota, stucco), movable, and those which are both movable-immovable (stone, wood, gems).[5] In each of these three, states Kasyapa-shipa, are three classes of expression – ardhacitra, citra, and citra-abhasa. Ardhacitra is an art form where a high relief is combined with painting and parts of the body is not seen (it appears to be emerging out of the canvas). The Citra is the form of picture artwork where the whole is represented with or without integrating a relief. Citrabhasha is the form where an image is represented on a canvas or wall with colors (painting). However, states Commaraswamy, the word Abhasa has other meanings depending on the context. For example, in Hindu texts on philosophy, it implies the "field of objective experience" in the sense of the intellectual image internalized by a person during a reading of a subject (such as an epic, tale or fiction), or one during a meditative spiritual experience.
In some Buddhist and Hindu texts on methods to prepare a manuscript (palm leaf) or a composition on a cloth, the terms lekhya and alekhya are also used in the context of a chitra. More specifically, alekhya is the space left while writing a manuscript leaf or cloth, where the artist aims to add a picture or painting to illustrate the text.
HISTORY
The earliest explicit reference to painting in an Indian text is found in verse 4.2 of the Maitri Upanishad where it uses the phrase citrabhittir or "like a painted wall". The Indian art of painting is also mention in a number of Buddhist Pali suttas, but with the modified spelling of Citta. This term is found in the context of either a painting, or painter, or painted-hall (citta-gara) in Majjhima Nikaya 1.127, Samyutta Nikaya 2.101 and 3.152, Vinaya 4.289 and others. Among the Jain texts, it is mentioned in Book 2 of the Acaranga Sutra as it explains that Jaina monk should not indulge in the pleasures of watching a painting.
The Kamasutra, broadly accepted to have been complete by about the 4th-century CE, recommends that the young man should surprise the girl he courts with gifts of color boxes and painted scrolls. The Viddhasalabhanjika – another Hindu kama- and kavya–text uses chitra-simile in verse 1.16, as "pictures painted by the god of love, with the brush of the mind and the canvas of the heart".
The nature of a chitra (painting), how the viewer's mind projects a two dimensional artwork into a three dimensional representation, is used by Asanga in Mahayana Sutralamkara – a 3rd to 5th-century Sanskrit text of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, to explain "non-existent imagination" as follows:
Just as in a picture painted according to rules, there are neither projections nor depressions and yet we see it in three dimensions, so in the non-existent imagination there is no phenomenal differentiation, and yet we behold it.
— Mahayana Sutralamkara 13.7, Translated in French by Sylvain Levi
According to Yoko Taniguchi and Michiyo Mori, the art of painting the caves at the c. 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan site in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban Muslims in the late 1990s, were likely introduced to this region from India along with the literature on early Buddhism.
TEXTS
There are many important dedicated Indian treatises on chitra. Some of these are chapters within a larger encyclopedia-like text. These include:
Chitrasutras, chapters 35–43 within the Hindu text Vishnudharmottara Purana (the standard, and oft referred to text in the Indian tradition)
Chitralaksana of Nagnajit (a classic on classical painting, 5th-century CE or earlier making it the oldest known text on Indian painting; but the Sanskrit version has been lost, only version available is in Tibet and it states that it is a translation of a Sanskrit text)
Samarangana Sutradhara (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Aparajitaprccha (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Manasollasa (an encyclopedia, contains chapters on paintings)
Abhilashitartha chinatamani
Sivatatva ratnakara
Chitra Kaladruma
Silpa ratna
Narada silpa
Sarasvati silpa
Prajapati silpa
Kasyapa silpa
These and other texts on chitra not only discuss the theory and practice of painting, some of them include discussions on how to become a painter, the diversity and the impact of a chitra on viewers, of aesthetics, how the art of painting relates to other arts (kala), methods of preparing the canvas or wall, methods and recipes to make color pigments. For example, the 10th-century Chitra Kaladruma presents recipe for making red color paint from the resin of lac insects. Other colors for the historic frescoes found in India, such as those in the Ajanta Caves, were obtained from nature. They mention earthy and mineral (inorganic) colorants such as yellow and red ochre, orpigment, green celadonite and ultramarine blue (lapis lazuli). The use of organic colorants prepared per a recipe in these texts have been confirmed through residue analysis and modern chromatographic techniques.
THEORY
The Indian concepts of painting are described in a range of texts called the shilpa shastras. These typically begin by attributing this art to divine sources such as Vishvakarma and ancient rishis (sages) such as Narayana and Nagnajit, weaving some mythology, highlighting chitra as a means to express ideas and beauty along with other universal aspects, then proceed to discuss the theory and practice of painting, sketching and other related arts. Manuscripts of many these texts are found in India, while some are known to be lost but are found outside India such as in Tibet and Nepal. Among these are the Citrasutras in the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana manuscripts discovered in India, and the Citralaksana manuscript discovered in Tibet (lost in India). This theory include early Indian ideas on how to prepare a canvas or substrate, measurement, proportion, stance, color, shade, projection, the painting's interaction with light, the viewer, how to captivate the mind, and other ideas.
According to the historic Indian tradition, a successful and impactful painting and painter requires a knowledge of the subject – either mythology or real life, as well as a keen sense of observation and knowledge of nature, human behavior, dance, music, song and other arts. For example, section 3.2 of Visnudharmottara Purana discusses these requirements and the contextual knowledge needed in chitra and the artist who produces it. The Chitrasutras in the Vishnudharmottara Purana state that the sculpture and painting arts are related, with the phrase "as in Natya, so in Citra". This relationship links them in rasa (aesthetics) and as forms of expression.
THE PAINTING
A chitra is a form of expression and communication. According to Aparajitaprccha – a 12th-century text on arts and architecture, just like the water reflects the moon, a chitra reflects the world. It is a rupa (form) of how the painter sees or what the painter wants the viewer to observe or feel or experience.
A good painting is one that is alive, breathing, draws in and affects the viewer. It captivates the minds of viewers, despite their diversity. Installed in a sala (hall or room), it enlivens the space.
The ornaments of a painting are its lines, shading, decoration and colors, states the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana. It states that there are eight gunas (merits, features) of a chitra that the artist must focus on: posture; proportion; the use of the plumb line; charm; detail (how much and where); verisimilitude; kshaya (loss, foreshortening) and; vrddhi (gain). Among the dosas (demerits, faults) of a painting and related arts, states Chitrasutra, are lines that are weak or thick, absence of variety, errors in scale (oversized eyes, lips, cheeks), inconsistency across the canvas, deviations from the rules of proportion, improper posture or sentiment, and non-merging of colors.
LIMBS OF THE PAINTING
Two historical sets called "chitra anga", or "limbs of painting" are found in Indian texts. According to the Samarangana Sutradhara – an 11th-century Sanskrit text on Hindu architecture and arts, a painting has eight limbs:
Vartika – manufacture of brushes
Bhumibandhana – preparation of base, plaster, canvas
Rekhakarma – sketching
Varnakarma – coloring
Vartanakarma – shading
lekhakarana – outlining
Dvikakarma – second and final lining
Lepyakarma – final coating
According to Yashodhara's Jayamangala, a Sanskrit commentary on Kamasutra, there are sadanga (six limbs)[note 5] in the art of alekhyam and chitra (drawing and painting):
Rupa-bhedah, or form distinction; this requires a knowledge of characteristic marks, diversity, manifested forms that distinguish states of something in the same genus/class
Pramanani, or measure; requires knowledge of measurement and proportion rules (talamana)
Bhava yojanam, or emotion and its joining with other parts of the painting; requires understanding and representing the mood of the subject
Lavanya yojanam, or rasa, charm; requires understanding and representing the inner qualities of the subject
Sadrsyam, or resemblance; requires knowledge of visual correspondence across the canvas
Varnika-bhanga or color-pigment-analysis; requires knowledge how colors distribute on the canvas and how they visually impact the viewer.
These six limbs are arranged stylistically in two ways. First as a set of compound (Rupa-bhedah and Varnika-bhanda), a set of joining (middle two yojnam), and a set of single words (Pramanani and Sadrsyam). Second, states Victor Mair, the six limbs in this Hindu text are paired in a set of differentiation skills (first two), then a pair of aesthetic skills, and finally a pair of technical skills. These limbs parallel the 12th-century Six principles of Chinese painting of Xie He. {refn|group=note|The Hua Chi of Teng Ch'un, a 12th-century Chinese text, mentions the Buddhist temple of Nalanda with frescoes about the Buddha painted inside. It states that the Indian Buddhas look different from those painted by Chinese, as the Indian paintings have Buddha with larger eyes, their ears are curiously stretched and the Buddhas have their right shoulder bare. It then states that the artists first make a drawing of the picture, then paint a vermilion or gold colored base. It also mentions the use of ox-glue and a gum produced from peach trees and willow juice, with the artists preferring the latter. According to Coomaraswamy, the ox-glue in the Indian context mentioned in the Chinese text is probably the same as the recipe found in the Sanskrit text Silparatna, one where the base medium is produced from boiling buffalo skin in milk, followed by drying and blending process.
The six limbs in Jayamangala likely reflect the earliest and more established Hindu tradition for chitra. This is supported by the Chitrasutras found in the Vishnudharmottara Purana. They explicitly mention pramanani and lavanya as key elements of a painting, as well as discuss the other four of the six limbs in other sutras. The Chitrasutra chapters are likely from about the 4th or 5th-century. Numerous other Indian texts touch upon the elements or aspects of a chitra. For example, the Aparajitaprccha states that the essential elements of a painting are: citrabhumi (background), the rekha (lines, sketch), the varna (color), the vartana (shading), the bhusana (decoration) and the rasa (aesthetic experience).
THE PAINTER
The painter (chitrakara, rupakara) must master the fundamentals of measurement and proportions, state the historic chitra texts of India. According to these historic texts, the expert painter masters the skills in measurement, characteristics of subjects, attributes, form, relative proportion, ornament and beauty, states Isabella Nardi – a scholar known for her studies on chitra text and traditions of India. According to the Chitrasutras, a skilled painter needs practice, and is one who is able to paint neck, hands, feet, ears of living beings without ornamentation, as well as paint water waves, flames, smoke, and garments as they get affected by the speed of wind. He paints all types of scenes, ranging from dharma, artha and kama. A painter observes, then remembers, repeating this process till his memory has all the details he needs to paint, states Silparatna. According to Sivatattva Ratnakara, he is well versed in sketching, astute with measurements, skilled in outlining (hastalekha), competent with colors, and ready to diligently mix and combine colors to create his chitra. The painter is a creative person, with an inner sense of rasa (aesthetics).
THE VIEWER
The painter should consider the diversity of viewers, states the Indian tradition of chitra. The experts and critics with much experience with paintings study the lines, shading and aesthetics, the uninitiated visitors and children enjoy the vibrancy of colors, while women tend to be attracted to the ornamentation of form and the emotions. A successful painter tends to captivate a variety of minds. A painter should remember that the visual and aesthetic impact of a painting triggers different responses in different audiences.
The Silparatna – a Sanskrit text on the arts, states that the painting should reflect its intended place and purpose. A theme suitable for a palace or gateway is different from that in a temple or the walls of a home. Scenes of wars, misery, death and suffering are not suitable paintings within homes, but these can be important in a chitrasala (museum with paintings). Auspicious paintings with beautiful colors such as those that cheer and enliven a room are better for homes, states Silparatna.
PRACITICE
According to the art historian Percy Brown, the painting tradition in India is ancient and the persuasive evidence are the oldest known murals at the Jogimara caves. The mention of chitra and related terms in the pre-Buddhist Vedic era texts, the chitra tradition is much older. It is very likely, states Brown, the pre-Buddhist structures had paintings in them. However, the primary building material in ancient India was wood, the colors were organic materials and natural pigments, which when combined with the tropical weather in India would naturally cause the painting to fade, damage and degrade over the centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that sample paintings and historic evidence for chitra practice are unusual. The few notable surviving examples of chitra are found hidden in caves, where they would be naturally preserved a bit better, longer and would be somewhat protected from the destructive effects of wind, dust, water and biological processes.
Some notable, major surviving examples of historic paintings include:
Murals at Jogimara cave (eight panels of murals, with a Brahmi inscription, 2nd or 1st century BCE, Hindu), oldest known ceiling paintings in India in remote Ramgarh hills of northern Chhattisgarh, below on wall of this cave is a Brahmi inscription in Magadhi language about a girl named Devadasi and a boy named Devadina (either they were lovers and wrote a love-graffiti per one translation, or they were partners who together converted natural caves here into a theatre with painted walls per another translation)
Mural at Sitabhinji Group of Rock Shelters (c. 400 CE Ravanachhaya mural with an inscription, near a Shiva temple in remote Odisha, a non-religious painting), the oldest surviving example of a tempera painting in eastern states of India
Murals at Ajanta caves (Jataka tales, Buddhist), 5th-century CE, Maharashtra
Murals at Badami Cave Temples (Hindu), 6th-century CE, Karnataka (secular paintings along with one of the earliest known painting of a Hindu legend about Shiva and Parvati inside a Vaishnava cave)
Murals at Bagh caves (Hallisalasya dance, Buddhist or Hindu), Madhya Pradesh
Murals at Ellora caves (Flying vidyadharas, Jain), Maharashtra
Frescoes at Sittanavasal cave (Nature scenes likely representing places of Tirthankara sermons, Jain), Tamil Nadu
Frescoes at Thirunadhikkara cave temple (Flowers and a woman, likely a scene of puja offering to Ganesha, another of Vishnu, Hindu), Travancore region, Kerala-Tamil Nadu
Paintings at the Brihadisvara temple (Dancer, Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Manuscript paintings (numerous states such as Gujarat, Kashmir, Kerala, Odisha, Assam; also Nepal, Tibet; Buddhist, Jain, Hindu
Vijayanagara temples (Hindu), Karnataka
Chidambaram temple (Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Chitrachavadi (Hindu, a choultry–mandapa near Madurai with Ramayana frescoes)
Pahari paintings (Hindu), Himachal Pradesh and nearby regions
Rajput paintings (Hindu), Rajasthan
Deccan paintings (Hindu, Jain)
Kerala paintings (Hindu)
Telangana paintings (Hindu)
Mughal paintings (Indo-Islamic)
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Kalamkari (Hindu)
Pattas (Jain, Hindu)
WIKIPEDIA
Challenge: wire a dynamo headlight, taillight, and stem-cap USB charger. Use with or without fenders. Keep wires hidden. Make fenders removable in less than 5 minutes. Make connections solid.
Enter, the ground bus. Generator, headlight, taillight and USB will all ground independently via 2mm banana plugs to this bus attached to the fork crown fender mount. The tube next to the bolt will route the wiring through the washer stack up the steerer to the USB charger, completely internalized.
How many Christians are doers of the faith or living a Godly life as required by God ?
How many fall into apostasy or fallen from faith , they fail to even realized it .
I had a chat with someone who goes regularly or piously to an Anglican church
every Sunday. Then our conversation went into issues of legalize abortion,
gay marriage, which then about the infallibility of the Bible as the word
of God. What shocked me most ,to discover was this person's mindset
is aligned with those who have doubts about the Bible, those who believe
the Bible isn't true quite contrary to his routine being a regular /active
church goer. He believes the Bible is
flawed as it is written by men. He doesn't believe of Adam and Eve of
Genesis backed on his string belief of science has proved it wrong through
Evolution . Even theory of evolution still has loopholes. They still haven't
found yet what they call the missing link which weakens its theoretical
grounds . I cant believe a confessing Christian who goes to church every Sunday would
believe all those without searching for the truth. What's the point of believing God when
you can't even believe in his WORD. If his church shared the
anointed truth of the word of God, and has the Holy Spirit guiding him
to all the truth , there's no way this person would ever accept and
internalize all those deceptions feed on him.
It made me wonder then why this person kept going to a church every
Sunday, so active in the church and continued his Christianity, when he
has doubts even to his faith . If I were on that platform of uncertainty,
I must already have left and into different faith . If his God can not be
trusted in his word, if his God can not be reliable, then he must be standing
on weaker grounds of faith. If we believe the word of God is flawed , then
its logical to understand in the end it diminishes our own belief and faith
of power of the Word of God and the faith of God. But how can you say you
have strong faith, but you still have doubts about the purity of God's words.
God has proven His word in the Bible to be true through many
fulfilled prophecies , that a number of them now are happening
before our very
eyes , finding them in the pages of today's news papers. Other
religions don't have prophecies
which had been fulfilled to the dot. Israel being made as a nation in
1948 through Balfour Declaration , alone will attest 100% reliability
of the Bible , the Word of God spoken thousands of years before it
happened . So true of today to its nature,
Israel as a " burdensome stone" as being spoken by the Word of God.
Through our conversation, I felt sorry for this man, as he
sounds truly deceived , he didn't even realize it.
I even wonder how many billions of confessing Christians fall into the same trap.
When going to church is simply like going to a social club .....
This isn't criticism or judgement of the person's character and leave him lost, but as discernment. As a believer we should all seek the gifts of the spirit and one of them is discernment. We should know the spirits by testing them. From this man's confessions I know he isn't born-again with the spirit of God. He is attending church as by tradition or by expectation that he should do so. I was burdened of this person and he is
in my intercessions of deliverance , breaking the spiritual chains of bondage and blindness that he will find true salvation in Christ, and would truly know Christ .
We aren't fighting against flesh and blood but by principalities , powers of darkness in heavenly places ...(Ephesians 6:12 ).
For Christians pray for your love ones , friends and people....
James 1 :22 states :
"But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. "
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SIGNS OF THE TIMES :
*Breaking News Syria Targets Israel By Steven De Noon
*Japan Drones "NSA"? / Venezuela
Believes Obama Plots Bringing Down Government ! By Paul Begley (YT)
*BREAKING: USA Will Strike Expanded Target List Syria!!
*The Feast of Trumpets & The RAPTURE!! - A Perspective from 2013
The Prosperity Gospel Ruined My Life
*John MacArthur on the charismatic movement
*Why Does God Allow Evil - John MacArthur
*Are Catholics Saved? By John MacArthur
*Is Speaking in Tongues Demonic? By John MacArthur
*John MacArthur - The Pre-Tribulation Rapture Of The Church
*How to Recognize a Real Church, Part 1
*UFO's And The End Times by Stan Deyo
Egyptian Media Claims Obama Is A Member Of The Muslim Brotherhood. Surprised?! NO!
September 5 2013 The Final Hour Last Days End Times Middle East Ground Zero 9-5-13
Putin Prepares To Arm Texas Separatists As Iran Orders 50,000 Troops To Syria
Snowden Revelations Strike Fear Into Putin
Report: US Training Syrian Rebels From the WND .
What's Coming In the Middleast and the Psalm 83 War
Biblical doom of Damascus 'right before our eyes'
Why I abominate the prosperity gospelBy John Piper
Ezekiel Prophecy : Iran v Israel, Fallen Angels & Nazi Ocultism
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Location : Balanan Lake, Siaton , Negros Oriental
Philippines
Swimming in Balanan Lake isn't allowed. They have swimming pools
specially made for visitors who like to dip in water, but not into the lake.
There are boats for rental people can paddle around the lake
Chitra, also spelled as Citra, is an Indian genre of art that includes painting, sketch and any art form of delineation. The earliest mention of the term Chitra in the context of painting or picture is found in some of the ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism and Pali texts of Buddhism
NOMENCLATURE
Chitra (IAST: Citra, चित्र) is a Sanskrit word that appears in the Vedic texts such as hymns 1.71.1 and 6.65.2 of the Rigveda. There, and other texts such as Vajasaneyi Samhita, Taittiriya Samhita, Satapatha Brahmana and Tandya Brahmana, Chitra means "excellent, clear, bright, colored, anything brightly colored that strikes the eye, brilliantly ornamented, extraordinary that evokes wonder". In the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, it means "picture, sktech, dilineation", and is presented as a genre of kala (arts). Many texts generally dated to the post-4th-century BCE period, use the term Chitra in the sense of painting, and Chitrakara as a painter. For example, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini in verse 3.2.21 of his Astadhyayi highlights the word chitrakara in this sense. Halls and public spaces to display paintings are called chitrasalas, and the earliest known mention of these are found in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
A few Indian regional texts such as Kasyapa silpa refer to painting by others words. For example, abhasa – which literally means "semblance, shining forth", is used in Kasyapa-shilpa to mean as a broader category of painting, of which chitra is one of three types. The verses in section 4.4 of the Kasyapa-silpa state that there are three types of images – those which are immovable (walls, floor, terracota, stucco), movable, and those which are both movable-immovable (stone, wood, gems).[5] In each of these three, states Kasyapa-shipa, are three classes of expression – ardhacitra, citra, and citra-abhasa. Ardhacitra is an art form where a high relief is combined with painting and parts of the body is not seen (it appears to be emerging out of the canvas). The Citra is the form of picture artwork where the whole is represented with or without integrating a relief. Citrabhasha is the form where an image is represented on a canvas or wall with colors (painting). However, states Commaraswamy, the word Abhasa has other meanings depending on the context. For example, in Hindu texts on philosophy, it implies the "field of objective experience" in the sense of the intellectual image internalized by a person during a reading of a subject (such as an epic, tale or fiction), or one during a meditative spiritual experience.
In some Buddhist and Hindu texts on methods to prepare a manuscript (palm leaf) or a composition on a cloth, the terms lekhya and alekhya are also used in the context of a chitra. More specifically, alekhya is the space left while writing a manuscript leaf or cloth, where the artist aims to add a picture or painting to illustrate the text.
HISTORY
The earliest explicit reference to painting in an Indian text is found in verse 4.2 of the Maitri Upanishad where it uses the phrase citrabhittir or "like a painted wall". The Indian art of painting is also mention in a number of Buddhist Pali suttas, but with the modified spelling of Citta. This term is found in the context of either a painting, or painter, or painted-hall (citta-gara) in Majjhima Nikaya 1.127, Samyutta Nikaya 2.101 and 3.152, Vinaya 4.289 and others. Among the Jain texts, it is mentioned in Book 2 of the Acaranga Sutra as it explains that Jaina monk should not indulge in the pleasures of watching a painting.
The Kamasutra, broadly accepted to have been complete by about the 4th-century CE, recommends that the young man should surprise the girl he courts with gifts of color boxes and painted scrolls. The Viddhasalabhanjika – another Hindu kama- and kavya–text uses chitra-simile in verse 1.16, as "pictures painted by the god of love, with the brush of the mind and the canvas of the heart".
The nature of a chitra (painting), how the viewer's mind projects a two dimensional artwork into a three dimensional representation, is used by Asanga in Mahayana Sutralamkara – a 3rd to 5th-century Sanskrit text of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, to explain "non-existent imagination" as follows:
Just as in a picture painted according to rules, there are neither projections nor depressions and yet we see it in three dimensions, so in the non-existent imagination there is no phenomenal differentiation, and yet we behold it.
— Mahayana Sutralamkara 13.7, Translated in French by Sylvain Levi
According to Yoko Taniguchi and Michiyo Mori, the art of painting the caves at the c. 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan site in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban Muslims in the late 1990s, were likely introduced to this region from India along with the literature on early Buddhism.
TEXTS
There are many important dedicated Indian treatises on chitra. Some of these are chapters within a larger encyclopedia-like text. These include:
Chitrasutras, chapters 35–43 within the Hindu text Vishnudharmottara Purana (the standard, and oft referred to text in the Indian tradition)
Chitralaksana of Nagnajit (a classic on classical painting, 5th-century CE or earlier making it the oldest known text on Indian painting; but the Sanskrit version has been lost, only version available is in Tibet and it states that it is a translation of a Sanskrit text)
Samarangana Sutradhara (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Aparajitaprccha (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Manasollasa (an encyclopedia, contains chapters on paintings)
Abhilashitartha chinatamani
Sivatatva ratnakara
Chitra Kaladruma
Silpa ratna
Narada silpa
Sarasvati silpa
Prajapati silpa
Kasyapa silpa
These and other texts on chitra not only discuss the theory and practice of painting, some of them include discussions on how to become a painter, the diversity and the impact of a chitra on viewers, of aesthetics, how the art of painting relates to other arts (kala), methods of preparing the canvas or wall, methods and recipes to make color pigments. For example, the 10th-century Chitra Kaladruma presents recipe for making red color paint from the resin of lac insects. Other colors for the historic frescoes found in India, such as those in the Ajanta Caves, were obtained from nature. They mention earthy and mineral (inorganic) colorants such as yellow and red ochre, orpigment, green celadonite and ultramarine blue (lapis lazuli). The use of organic colorants prepared per a recipe in these texts have been confirmed through residue analysis and modern chromatographic techniques.
THEORY
The Indian concepts of painting are described in a range of texts called the shilpa shastras. These typically begin by attributing this art to divine sources such as Vishvakarma and ancient rishis (sages) such as Narayana and Nagnajit, weaving some mythology, highlighting chitra as a means to express ideas and beauty along with other universal aspects, then proceed to discuss the theory and practice of painting, sketching and other related arts. Manuscripts of many these texts are found in India, while some are known to be lost but are found outside India such as in Tibet and Nepal. Among these are the Citrasutras in the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana manuscripts discovered in India, and the Citralaksana manuscript discovered in Tibet (lost in India). This theory include early Indian ideas on how to prepare a canvas or substrate, measurement, proportion, stance, color, shade, projection, the painting's interaction with light, the viewer, how to captivate the mind, and other ideas.
According to the historic Indian tradition, a successful and impactful painting and painter requires a knowledge of the subject – either mythology or real life, as well as a keen sense of observation and knowledge of nature, human behavior, dance, music, song and other arts. For example, section 3.2 of Visnudharmottara Purana discusses these requirements and the contextual knowledge needed in chitra and the artist who produces it. The Chitrasutras in the Vishnudharmottara Purana state that the sculpture and painting arts are related, with the phrase "as in Natya, so in Citra". This relationship links them in rasa (aesthetics) and as forms of expression.
THE PAINTING
A chitra is a form of expression and communication. According to Aparajitaprccha – a 12th-century text on arts and architecture, just like the water reflects the moon, a chitra reflects the world. It is a rupa (form) of how the painter sees or what the painter wants the viewer to observe or feel or experience.
A good painting is one that is alive, breathing, draws in and affects the viewer. It captivates the minds of viewers, despite their diversity. Installed in a sala (hall or room), it enlivens the space.
The ornaments of a painting are its lines, shading, decoration and colors, states the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana. It states that there are eight gunas (merits, features) of a chitra that the artist must focus on: posture; proportion; the use of the plumb line; charm; detail (how much and where); verisimilitude; kshaya (loss, foreshortening) and; vrddhi (gain). Among the dosas (demerits, faults) of a painting and related arts, states Chitrasutra, are lines that are weak or thick, absence of variety, errors in scale (oversized eyes, lips, cheeks), inconsistency across the canvas, deviations from the rules of proportion, improper posture or sentiment, and non-merging of colors.
LIMBS OF THE PAINTING
Two historical sets called "chitra anga", or "limbs of painting" are found in Indian texts. According to the Samarangana Sutradhara – an 11th-century Sanskrit text on Hindu architecture and arts, a painting has eight limbs:
Vartika – manufacture of brushes
Bhumibandhana – preparation of base, plaster, canvas
Rekhakarma – sketching
Varnakarma – coloring
Vartanakarma – shading
lekhakarana – outlining
Dvikakarma – second and final lining
Lepyakarma – final coating
According to Yashodhara's Jayamangala, a Sanskrit commentary on Kamasutra, there are sadanga (six limbs)[note 5] in the art of alekhyam and chitra (drawing and painting):
Rupa-bhedah, or form distinction; this requires a knowledge of characteristic marks, diversity, manifested forms that distinguish states of something in the same genus/class
Pramanani, or measure; requires knowledge of measurement and proportion rules (talamana)
Bhava yojanam, or emotion and its joining with other parts of the painting; requires understanding and representing the mood of the subject
Lavanya yojanam, or rasa, charm; requires understanding and representing the inner qualities of the subject
Sadrsyam, or resemblance; requires knowledge of visual correspondence across the canvas
Varnika-bhanga or color-pigment-analysis; requires knowledge how colors distribute on the canvas and how they visually impact the viewer.
These six limbs are arranged stylistically in two ways. First as a set of compound (Rupa-bhedah and Varnika-bhanda), a set of joining (middle two yojnam), and a set of single words (Pramanani and Sadrsyam). Second, states Victor Mair, the six limbs in this Hindu text are paired in a set of differentiation skills (first two), then a pair of aesthetic skills, and finally a pair of technical skills. These limbs parallel the 12th-century Six principles of Chinese painting of Xie He. {refn|group=note|The Hua Chi of Teng Ch'un, a 12th-century Chinese text, mentions the Buddhist temple of Nalanda with frescoes about the Buddha painted inside. It states that the Indian Buddhas look different from those painted by Chinese, as the Indian paintings have Buddha with larger eyes, their ears are curiously stretched and the Buddhas have their right shoulder bare. It then states that the artists first make a drawing of the picture, then paint a vermilion or gold colored base. It also mentions the use of ox-glue and a gum produced from peach trees and willow juice, with the artists preferring the latter. According to Coomaraswamy, the ox-glue in the Indian context mentioned in the Chinese text is probably the same as the recipe found in the Sanskrit text Silparatna, one where the base medium is produced from boiling buffalo skin in milk, followed by drying and blending process.
The six limbs in Jayamangala likely reflect the earliest and more established Hindu tradition for chitra. This is supported by the Chitrasutras found in the Vishnudharmottara Purana. They explicitly mention pramanani and lavanya as key elements of a painting, as well as discuss the other four of the six limbs in other sutras. The Chitrasutra chapters are likely from about the 4th or 5th-century. Numerous other Indian texts touch upon the elements or aspects of a chitra. For example, the Aparajitaprccha states that the essential elements of a painting are: citrabhumi (background), the rekha (lines, sketch), the varna (color), the vartana (shading), the bhusana (decoration) and the rasa (aesthetic experience).
THE PAINTER
The painter (chitrakara, rupakara) must master the fundamentals of measurement and proportions, state the historic chitra texts of India. According to these historic texts, the expert painter masters the skills in measurement, characteristics of subjects, attributes, form, relative proportion, ornament and beauty, states Isabella Nardi – a scholar known for her studies on chitra text and traditions of India. According to the Chitrasutras, a skilled painter needs practice, and is one who is able to paint neck, hands, feet, ears of living beings without ornamentation, as well as paint water waves, flames, smoke, and garments as they get affected by the speed of wind. He paints all types of scenes, ranging from dharma, artha and kama. A painter observes, then remembers, repeating this process till his memory has all the details he needs to paint, states Silparatna. According to Sivatattva Ratnakara, he is well versed in sketching, astute with measurements, skilled in outlining (hastalekha), competent with colors, and ready to diligently mix and combine colors to create his chitra. The painter is a creative person, with an inner sense of rasa (aesthetics).
THE VIEWER
The painter should consider the diversity of viewers, states the Indian tradition of chitra. The experts and critics with much experience with paintings study the lines, shading and aesthetics, the uninitiated visitors and children enjoy the vibrancy of colors, while women tend to be attracted to the ornamentation of form and the emotions. A successful painter tends to captivate a variety of minds. A painter should remember that the visual and aesthetic impact of a painting triggers different responses in different audiences.
The Silparatna – a Sanskrit text on the arts, states that the painting should reflect its intended place and purpose. A theme suitable for a palace or gateway is different from that in a temple or the walls of a home. Scenes of wars, misery, death and suffering are not suitable paintings within homes, but these can be important in a chitrasala (museum with paintings). Auspicious paintings with beautiful colors such as those that cheer and enliven a room are better for homes, states Silparatna.
PRACITICE
According to the art historian Percy Brown, the painting tradition in India is ancient and the persuasive evidence are the oldest known murals at the Jogimara caves. The mention of chitra and related terms in the pre-Buddhist Vedic era texts, the chitra tradition is much older. It is very likely, states Brown, the pre-Buddhist structures had paintings in them. However, the primary building material in ancient India was wood, the colors were organic materials and natural pigments, which when combined with the tropical weather in India would naturally cause the painting to fade, damage and degrade over the centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that sample paintings and historic evidence for chitra practice are unusual. The few notable surviving examples of chitra are found hidden in caves, where they would be naturally preserved a bit better, longer and would be somewhat protected from the destructive effects of wind, dust, water and biological processes.
Some notable, major surviving examples of historic paintings include:
Murals at Jogimara cave (eight panels of murals, with a Brahmi inscription, 2nd or 1st century BCE, Hindu), oldest known ceiling paintings in India in remote Ramgarh hills of northern Chhattisgarh, below on wall of this cave is a Brahmi inscription in Magadhi language about a girl named Devadasi and a boy named Devadina (either they were lovers and wrote a love-graffiti per one translation, or they were partners who together converted natural caves here into a theatre with painted walls per another translation)
Mural at Sitabhinji Group of Rock Shelters (c. 400 CE Ravanachhaya mural with an inscription, near a Shiva temple in remote Odisha, a non-religious painting), the oldest surviving example of a tempera painting in eastern states of India
Murals at Ajanta caves (Jataka tales, Buddhist), 5th-century CE, Maharashtra
Murals at Badami Cave Temples (Hindu), 6th-century CE, Karnataka (secular paintings along with one of the earliest known painting of a Hindu legend about Shiva and Parvati inside a Vaishnava cave)
Murals at Bagh caves (Hallisalasya dance, Buddhist or Hindu), Madhya Pradesh
Murals at Ellora caves (Flying vidyadharas, Jain), Maharashtra
Frescoes at Sittanavasal cave (Nature scenes likely representing places of Tirthankara sermons, Jain), Tamil Nadu
Frescoes at Thirunadhikkara cave temple (Flowers and a woman, likely a scene of puja offering to Ganesha, another of Vishnu, Hindu), Travancore region, Kerala-Tamil Nadu
Paintings at the Brihadisvara temple (Dancer, Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Manuscript paintings (numerous states such as Gujarat, Kashmir, Kerala, Odisha, Assam; also Nepal, Tibet; Buddhist, Jain, Hindu
Vijayanagara temples (Hindu), Karnataka
Chidambaram temple (Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Chitrachavadi (Hindu, a choultry–mandapa near Madurai with Ramayana frescoes)
Pahari paintings (Hindu), Himachal Pradesh and nearby regions
Rajput paintings (Hindu), Rajasthan
Deccan paintings (Hindu, Jain)
Kerala paintings (Hindu)
Telangana paintings (Hindu)
Mughal paintings (Indo-Islamic)
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Kalamkari (Hindu)
Pattas (Jain, Hindu)
WIKIPEDIA
A 3rd-Generation Gundam, Exia is designed to be a close quarters combat (CQC) type mobile suit (MS). The unit is the successor to GNY-001 Gundam Astraea and one of the predecessors to GN-0000 00 Gundam.
Much of Exia's design was heavily influenced from the Astraea. What this means is that even though Exia's weapons are specialized for CQC, its basic performance is still that of a general purpose mobile suit. This is mostly evident as Exia only Gundam out of the four main 3rd Generation units that retain a MS frame that has human-like range of motion. The lack of this range of motion on the other three units is not considered a weakness but rather because it was deemed unnecessary.
Gundams (and by extension other GNMS) benefit benefit from the weight reducing effects of GN Particles.In addition to reducing the overall weight of the MS, this effect can also be used for weight alteration of various body parts. One can this freely control the suit's inertia, influencing cornering ability when it is in the airborne. In space, this ability is transformed into Active Mass Balance Auto Control (AMBAC). As such, the legs do not really need to "walk" when moving.
As Exia was designed as a close quarters unit, there is need for its movements to be as human-like as possible. In order to achieve this, Exia was designed with joints that have the same range of motion as a human. To ensure that Exia's range of movement is not affected, its armor is seperated into much finer pieces than the other Gundams. This trait also means that portions of the internal structure is revealed during certain postures. Although this lowers Exia's overall defensive ability, its served Exia as it has the lowest "being hit" rate among the four main 3rd Generation Gundams.
Externally, the most eye catching feature of Exia is he numerous purple cables on its body; especially the cables that extends from the shoulders to the arms that are not present in the other Gundams. Named GN Power Lines, their main purpose is to transport large amounts of GN Particles to and from various parts of the body. As Exia frequently engages the enemy in close quarters, its higher amount of exposed cables allows it to have finer posture control than the other Gundams. Like its exposed joints, this design has optimizes mobility at the cost of defense and is considered a danger though it was later eliminated in the R2 variant as the GN Power Lines are now internalized within the armor.
Appearance wise, Gundams have heads that are human-like. In terms of use, the head of Gundams are said to be similar to a human brain as they both control the functions of the body. Exia's head design is kmodeled after the pilot helmet worn by earlier Gundam Meisters. This was done to cement the belief of the Meister being the Gundam. Third Generation Gundams like Exia also possess head antennas that control particle distribution, though most of the actual particle control responsibility is taken up by the antennas at the shoulders and neck. The head also has other head antennas that function as communication and sensor devices while at the same time also containing a blackbox device used for establishing a link with Veda.
Its GN Condensers also can show visually the amount of particles it holds as well as the particle compression rate it is currently using. This ability is also used for secret communication with friendly forces. The total energy output of Gundams like Exia is extremely powerful compared to other conventional suits of the time. Billy Katagiri estimated that Exia has approximately six times the output of the Flag based on the impact damage analyzed Graham Aker's suit after his first encounter with Exia.
When extreme firepower and defense is needed, Exia can receive combat support from GNR-001E GN Arms Type-E and the Assault Container. The GN Arms Type E itself is a customized transformable fighter, with mid-range beam weaponry and melee weapons themed after Exia's weapons silhouette. When greater power is needed, Exia and GN Arms can combine to become a mobile armor. Exia's GN Drive docks right into the MA to power the weapons platform. If a situation arises where greater speed is needed, Exia can be equipped with its own specialized armor, the Avalanche Pack, which would be later upgraded into the Avalanche ` Pack.
The Assault Container works on conjunction with the GN Arms and Exia as a miniature armed MS carrier. It was designed to dock both Exia and GN Arms for atmospheric entry and exit missions. It's heavily armored and has enough fire power to match an entire ESF battlefleet.
In addition, the Exia's extension cone chassis possess an ability that can temporarily increase the output of the equipped GN Drive and the ability of the suit temporarily in "burst"-like mode. However, this ability was rarely used as it is considered unstable however it was seen to be used in its upgraded form, the Exia Repair II. Exia's overall capabilities can be enhanced through the power of the Trans-Am System.
From Chopin's Quatre Mazurkas
B Flat Major, Op 17, No. 1
If you're familiar with this piece you'll notice I left out the little ornaments, because I found they were too much for me to dust off a past-learned piece tonight. I couldn't internalize the funky fingerings. Perhaps once I gain a confident command over the notes I'll investigate a more embellished performance and with a better dynamic range.
I have to say banging out the C dominant 7's in the middle section at top volume is always really enjoyable :) And, er, I hope my neighbors didn't disagree with that statement too much :p
On this hot summer day, I met four friendly, open and relaxed people. About the circumstances of this day I have already reported. A repetition, I would like to avoid at this point. Just have a look what I have already written to Jennifer and Matthias.
While I photographed Matthias, still reached us Melanie and her friend Daniel. (Melanie is Matthias sister.)
Curiously, Melanie and Daniel inquired what is happening here. I explained my project; Jennifer said to Melanie, you also have to take part and I had already won two more people who fill the project "The Human Family" with life. Both liked the idea of the project and also the photos that I had already made.
Now I asked Melanie to pose infront of my camera. As background functioned again the sandstone facade of city hall. Melanie made it really simple. She beamed when shooting with a looseness and fun, that it was a pleasure to take a portrait of Melanie. We tried different poses. There really are people who have a natural born smile, as my friend Jeff jeffcbowen remarked. This also applies to 100% to Melanie. Together we looked at the result on my camera screen. Never before I had seen so much enthusiasm in viewing of photos by the portrayed. This made me very very happy.
Then we did together a few photos of Melanie and Daniel, so that a they have a memory of our meeting. This as well was very funny and relaxed.
Afterwards we sat on the stairs at the Town Hall. So I could talk with Melanie and taking notes while taking.
Melanie is 29 years old, comes from Alsbach and works in Darmstadt. There Melanie is employed at a statutory health insurance. Melanie is interested in politics, but is not a member of any party.
The biggest challenge in life is for Melanie to accept herself. What was a big challenge in the past? Eight years ago, Melanie went to Malawi, a state in Southeastafrica, to visit her godchild.
Melanie was shocked of the funeral rites and under what conditions many children must live there (on the streets). When you have these experience at first hand, your own values will develop in a realistic direction.
Melanie was very impressed under what conditions, in comparison to our western standards of living, people live there. Although they do not have material riches, they are still happy. Luck has nothing to do with income, but with the attitude to life.
For Melanie, it is not important whether someone is attractive in the eyes of the people. It depends on the values that someone has internalized and lives. One of these values and for Melanie the highest good is charity /brotherly love, in German called “Nächstenliebe”.
Melanie would like to meet Jesus. Jesus wasthe personalized charity, without prejudice and honest to the people.
As a child, Melanie wanted to be an infant nurse. Unfortunately this has not been realized. But with the work at a health insurance Melanie cares somewhat about the health of people (young and old).
How would you describe yourself? “I am open, spontaneous, humorous and confident.” (Note from me: yes, Melanie has described herself very accurate).
Meanwhile a wedding group flowed out of the town hall. It was very busy and noisy. Therefore at this point, I had to stop our little talk. A lot of time had passed with interacting with three people; finally Jennifer, Melanie, Daniel and Matthias wanted to spend a relaxing evening at the River Main. So there was no time to take a single portrait of Daniel. What I regret so much.
Thank you Melanie for taking the time to meet and participate in this project: The Human Family. It was a stroke of luck to mee you on this hot summer evening. It was pure pleasure to take the pictures and be able to talk to you. Thanks for the positive response already this evening and later in your your e-mail. You might have again the opportunity to see again your godchild, who hopefully is well. In any case I wish you all the best for your future.
This is my 29th post to the group "The Human Family". Visit "The Human Family" here and have a look on the photos of the other photographers:
www.flickr.com/groups/thehumanfamily/
……………………………………..
An diesem heißen Sommertag traf ich vier freundliche, offene und entspannte Menschen. Über die Umstände an diesem Tag habe ich bereits berichtet. Auf eine Wiederholung möchte ich an dieser Stelle verzichten. Schaut doch einfach nach was ich zu Jennifer und Matthias bereits geschrieben habe.
Während ich Matthias fotografierte, stoßen noch Melanie und ihr Freund Daniel dazu. Melanie ist Matthias Schwester. Neugierig erkundigten sich Melanie und Daniel was hier gerade passiert. Ich erklärte mein Projekt; Jennifer sagte, da müsst ihr auch mitmachen und schon hatte ich zwei weitere Menschen gewonnen, die das Projekt „The Human Family“ mit Leben füllen, da beide die Idee des Projektes und auch die Fotos, die ich schon gemacht hatte, interessant fanden.
Jetzt bat ich Melanie also vor meine Kamera. Als Hintergrund fungierte wieder die Sandsteinfassade des Rathauses. Melanie machte es mir wirklich einfach. Sie strahlte beim Fotografieren eine Lockerheit und Spaß aus, dass es eine Freude war Melanie zu portraitieren. Wir versuchten verschiedene Posen. Es gibt Menschen, die haben ein natürlich angeborenes Lächeln, wie mein Freund Jeff jeffcbowen einmal bemerkte. Dies trifft auch zu 100% auf Melanie zu. Gemeinsam schauten wir uns das Ergebnis auf meinem Display der Kamera an. Schon lange hatte ich nicht so viel Begeisterung bei der Ansicht der Fotos durch den Portraitierten erlebt. Das hat mich natürlich sehr sehr gefreut.
Dann machten wir noch ein paar Fotos von Melanie und Daniel zusammen, damit auch eine gemeinsame Erinnerung an unser Treffen bleibt. Auch das war sehr spaßig und entspannt.
Anschließend setzen wir uns auf die Treppe beim Rathaus. So konnte ich mit Melanie reden und mir gleichzeitig Notizen machen.
Melanie ist 29 Jahre alt, kommt aus Alsbach und arbeitet in Darmstadt. Dort ist Melanie bei einer Krankenkasse beschäftigt. Melanie ist politisch interessiert, ohne jedoch Mitglied einer Partei zu sein.
Die größte Herausforderung im Leben ist für Melanie, sich selbst anzunehmen. Was war eine große Herausforderung? Vor acht Jahren war Melanie in Malawi, ein Staat in Südostafrika um dort ihr Patenkind zu besuchen. Schockiert war Melanie über die Beerdigungsrituale und unter welchen Bedingungen viele Kinder dort (auf der Straße) leben müssen. Wenn man das hautnah erlebt, werden unsere Werte wieder zurecht gerückt.
Es hat Melanie sehr beeindruckt, unter welchen Bedingungen, im Vergleich zu unserem westlichen Lebensstandard die Menschen dort leben. Obwohl sie über keinen materiellen Reichtum verfügen, sind sie dennoch glücklich. Glück hat also nichts mit dem Einkommen zu tun, sondern mit der Einstellung zum Leben.
Für Melanie ist es nicht wichtig, ob jemand attraktiv in den Augen der Leute ist. Es kommt auf die Werte an, die jemand verinnerlicht hat und einhält. Einer dieser Werte und für Melanie das höchste Gut, ist die Nächstenliebe.
Melanie würde gerne einmal Jesus treffen. Jesus war die personifizierte Nächstenliebe, ohne Vorurteile und ehrlich zu den Menschen.
Als Kind wollte Melanie Säuglingskrankenschwester werden. Das hat sich leider nicht verwirklicht. Aber mit der Arbeit bei einer Krankenkasse trägt Melanie auch etwas zu der Gesundheit der Menschen (ob alt oder jung) bei.
Wie würdest du dich beschreiben? Ich bin offen, spontan, humorvoll und selbstbewusst. (Anmerkung von mir: ja, da hat sich Melanie sehr treffend eingeschätzt).
Inzwischen strömte eine Hochzeitsgruppe aus dem Rathaus. Wir saßen etwas im Weg und es wurde sehr unruhig. Daher musste ich an dieser Stelle das kleine Gespräch abbrechen. Auch war die Zeit schon sehr weit fortgeschritten, schließlich hatten sich ja Jennifer, Melanie, Daniel und Matthias hier verabredet, um einen entspannten Abend am Main zu verbringen. So blieb keine Zeit mehr, von Daniel ein Portrait zu machen. Was ich sehr bedauere.
Danke, dass Du bereit warst, mein Projekt zu unterstützen. Es war ein Glücksfall Euch an diesem heißen Sommerabend getroffen zu haben. Es war pure Freude, die Fotos machen zu dürfen und mit Euch reden zu können. Danke für die positive Resonanz schon an diesem Abend und Deine E-Mail. Vielleicht hast Du ja nochmal die Gelegenheit, Dein Patenkind wiederzusehen. Auf jeden Fall wünsche ich Dir für Deine Zukunft alles Gute.
Dies ist mein 29. Beitrag zu der Gruppe "The Human Family". Mehr Fotos von anderen Fotografen der Gruppe findest Du hier:
While sea turtles 🐢 are one of the most ancient creatures living around us, six of the seven species of sea turtles 🐢 are termed as threatened or endangered because of the devastating impact of human hunting, pollution, and climate change…
It is high time we internalize practices that diminish our contribution to climate change and give a fighting chance to our mother earth 🌎…
Don’t forget to share with your friends
f/10, 1/250 sec, ISO-100
#seaturtles #turtles #underwaterphotography #ocean
My gear
Sony A7III amzn.to/3oFS2iF
Sony 12-24mm F4 G amzn.to/3lobbUj
Sony FE 24 mm f/1.4 GM amzn.to/3DsHl7f
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from ift.tt/2kjK3Zb
Having grown up in Alabama, I understand that bigots will go to extraordinary lengths to justify their rage and their hate. When I have supported groups like Black Lives Matter, I have been accused of only having sex with black men. When I supported marriage equality, I was labeled a lesbian. So I guess that it makes sense that my support of rights for transgender/non-binary people means that, drumroll please, I am a man.
No, you didn’t read that wrong. In the middle of the night last night, a stranger accused me of having male privilege. I cackled as I read it. Who knew that I’m a dude?! I would have expected my parents or my gynecologists over the years to have told me if I was a dude. I’m especially disappointed that the gynecologist who performed the hysteroscopy/uterine biopsy and D&C didn’t say, “Uh. This procedure can’t be performed on you.”
My family and doctors didn’t call me a dude because…
I’m not one.
Whether you subscribe to trans-exclusionary feminism’s1 reductive view of gender as being based on body parts or the inclusive view I subscribe to that admits gender & sex are not one in the same, this conclusion that I have male privilege makes no sense. I don’t have the body parts of a dude. I don’t feel I am a dude. Therefore:
A dude I am not.
In case you can’t speak Yoda, let’s try the standard English:
I’m not a dude/man/guy/boy/male.
I doubt I can put it any more clearly than that, but I’m sure that that won’t satisfy some of these individuals.
Calling me a guy because I disagree with what you feel a woman should believe is as hysterical as it is sad. But it’s not the first time that a TERF has gone this route. I would bet that if any woman spends any length of time debating them or disagreeing with them that TERFs would start questioning their biological sex. Or if they don’t question the sex of the person, they start saying that she is somehow incapable of thinking for herself and that men must have brainwashed her. The internalized misogyny is strong with TERFs.
How are they “liberating” women2 by denigrating women that don’t agree with them and suggesting that they are somehow unable to use their cognitive processes to come to their own opinions? It’s almost like their own version of a savior complex. They feel the need to “rescue” the poor little women who disagree with them from making informed decisions about their own lives and making conclusions about the things that they believe based on their own experiences. That’s not liberation. That’s oppression.
You can’t replace one form of oppressive system with another.
That just doesn’t work.
Or, more correctly, it doesn’t actually liberate anyone.
Also, misrepresenting what people say so that you can perpetuate hatred and encourage a pile-on is not the action of those intent on liberating. The original angst fest by this “liberation” force began after I defended a male friend on Twitter after a female follower of mine said something about him being harmful because he uses the term TERF to describe people who are, well, TERFs. This was the tweet that was being responded to:
It’s becoming blatantly obvious where the adage “separate the artist from the art” came from, and we probably should stop using it.
— Soyter Krampus (@petercoffin) November 5, 2017
I cannot share the text of the tweet that I responded to as the user was reported3 to Twitter several tweets later for threatening to dox multiple individuals. But it is the threat to dox that alarmed me so much about this particular group of TERFs. I tried pointing out what was going on to Helen, which led to the response4 by Juniper that I have male privilege. Helen and other TERFs had insisted that their ilk couldn’t be behind the doxing threats or the ableism, racism, and other vitriol that I had seen while conversing with them. When Juniper came along, she decided that my outrage was due to my either having a penis or a feeling that I should have one. I’m really not sure how a person who has never been a man and who never wanted to be a man somehow has male privilege, so I asked.
I think one of the reasons is because you stated that you would fight to get a man who posts picture after picture of his come covered cock into safe spaces for women and girls because he says the magic words ‘I am a woman’.
— helen staniland (@helenstaniland) December 2, 2017
The tweets that Helen was referencing were from a different Twitter user who had offended her sensibilities by posting, on her own timeline, nude pictures and video. Helen encouraged a mob of individuals to report Meisha, even though Meisha’s posts do not violate the Twitter rules. She had already given me a hard time for pointing out to another individual that reporting Meisha would only lead to that person being punished by Twitter.
No. women don’t post pictures of their come covered flaccid cock. What mental gymnastics do you have to go through to tell yourself he’s a woman? Would you fight for him to be in spaces with women and girls?
— helen staniland (@helenstaniland) December 1, 2017
When Helen had discovered the tweet she dislikes so, she had made sure that all of her followers could join in on her hate. Anyone who didn’t had to be shamed. I just didn’t want to play that game with her, so she went full-on with the faux outrage against me and even challenged my gender and biological sex because I supported a person who she didn’t like & who she was simply using to gain prominence amongst her TERFy peers.5 I was familiar with her technique because of the past disagreements with her,6 so I told her to leave me alone. Repeatedly. She thought that that was an invitation to harass me.7
I haven’t heard from her in almost 24 hours, which should bring me some level of happiness and relief, right?
Her posse has continued in her stead. And they have encouraged some more bizarre conspiracy theories about my not ditching Meisha for the tweet they didn’t approve of. Or for ditching her for sending a tweet featuring a heart emoji to me.
@janersm thanks for the follow, and all of your support today!! It really means the world to me!! You’re a wonderful person!!
— Meisha Dixon (@Meisha_TS) December 1, 2017
You’re welcome. I’m sorry that those people were giving you such a hard time. You didn’t deserve any of their hate.
— Janet Morris (@janersm) December 1, 2017
Helen thought I was the one going down a rabbit hole8 here? Oh, that’s cute. My behavior is apparently an encouragement to cannibals. Not literal cannibals, the metaphorical type. She and her friends think that my being okay with a heart emoji from a transwoman means that I’m going to end up getting raped by frat boys and football stars.
Not only do I not think that Meisha is a man,9 I don’t think Meisha has any intention to rape me. Even if she was in the same town as me, I wouldn’t think that Meisha was going to rape me.
And I seriously do not think that receiving a tweet with 3 emojis is some kind of sign that I’m going to end up being raped by anyone. Are there rapists out there that have a signature of sending tweets with heart emojis to their future victims? I’m pretty sure there aren’t, but I haven’t seen a lot of Investigation Discovery lately, so I could be a bit behind on the MOs of recent or historical sexual predators.
I could be wrong.10
…
…
…
…
…
But I’m not.
I already knew I couldn’t take Witchy very seriously.
Back in November, when she and Lise were discussing my genitalia and gender identity, I made the “mistake” of disagreeing with her. That kept her up all night, which she then blamed on me and she told me that the only reason that I have been diagnosed with multiple illnesses is that I am a “snowflake” and I broke my issues down into an awful thing: symptoms. I thought that anyone who went to a doctor did that. I almost wondered if I was doing the whole getting-treated-for-being-sick thing wrong. After a while, I realized that she was just a very unusual person.
I have the disease with the lowest quality of life of any tested. I have terrible insomnia but if I don't get enough sleep EVERY day, I get an infection. Thanks for upsetting me&keeping me up, oh, Janet the Empath
— Witchy Womyn (@Harpbe_Nimble) November 9, 2017
BULLSHIT!! Every person I've ever met could be diagnosed with something!! Every person!! If you MAKE LAWS that violate my boundaries, DO NOT expect me to tiptoe around yours. You're not more important than me, or anyone else. t.co/HHD1E1S5Tb
— Witchy Womyn (@Harpbe_Nimble) November 9, 2017
Trans activists NEVER answer the simplest questions. They either disappear or they talk about feelings–but only their own&trans feelings matter–NOT the feelings of actually marginalized people. Fuck your feelings til you consider the rights of others. Welcome to adulting. t.co/8sTZD5u2yQ
— Witchy Womyn (@Harpbe_Nimble) November 9, 2017
Women&girls are screaming out "we are in danger" and the rest are dead already. You choose to plug your ears. I followed yrs ago bc I was looking for *actual* disabled ppl & I DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE 100% bad til now.
— Witchy Womyn (@Harpbe_Nimble) November 9, 2017
(Maybe Katy Perry and I should be friends, since I’m apparently the kind of person who would be a straight-up enemy.)1112
I would have all those too if I were tested & if I were raised to be into having diagnosis. I only mention the ONE which debilitates me. I don't break it down into SYMPTOMS & name them all like you snowflakes t.co/G2AXajpjKl
— Witchy Womyn (@Harpbe_Nimble) November 10, 2017
As for the other folks? Well, I hate to generalize anyone, but if they’re all feeding into this sort of hysterical thinking, then I’m not going to take any of them seriously. I know that there are dudes out there who rape women. I know there are ones who play the role of nice guy to lure them in, but I am not so afraid of reality that I make up narratives in my head that any person who has a penis or who had one is going to rape me or is going to take advantage of me. If I let myself live in that kind of state, I would never be able to deal with my life. Being cautious is one thing, but being so terrified that you can’t even handle an emoji is just beyond reason.
As a woman and as a human being,13 I know that there’s a possibility that I could be a victim of sexual violence, but I’m not going to suspect random members of a marginalized group of being the potential perpetrator. That is ridiculous and it is bigoted. It’s not just the belief of someone who is a “meanie”, it’s the belief of someone who is so filled with hate and intolerance that they choose to lash out and punish people who they don’t know for something they haven’t even done. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up in Alabama or because I’ve grown up with parents who have taught me right from wrong and to show love not hate to other people and other groups or because I’m not a shit-person. Who knows?! But I know that if not harboring this vitriol is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.14
P.S. I’m still a chick.
P.P.S. Debating someone’s genitalia, gender identity, or suggesting that they are living in the predatory fantasies of a hallucinogenic author for supporting the rights of transgender individuals is fucking wrong, assholes.15
TERFs ↩
TERFs don’t like the idea of feminism being about bringing about equality between men and women. It’s about liberating women. ↩
by me ↩
almost a month later ↩
Gross. ↩
It took days for us to eventually realize we would never agree and I thought that she would never contact me again, but she later went looking through the threads to find tweets she hadn’t responded to to harass me. ↩
Gross. ↩
I almost wish someone would explain to her how rife with sexual predation a Lewis Carroll/Alice in Wonderland reference is. ↩
No transwoman is a man. All transwomen are women. No transmen are women. All transmen are men. ↩
Take note: I almost never say that. ↩
I’m kidding. ↩
#swifty ↩
I’m assuming that the next claim this group might say is that I’m a robot. ↩
Rim-shot, please? ↩
If you didn’t realize it before now, you’re definitely deserving of the ‘asshole’ moniker. ↩
Related Posts:
A Dialogue With My 86-year-old Grandmother About LGBT Rights March 6, 2012
Male Entitlement as Motive May 24, 2014
Sexism Sucks March 19, 2014
That Awkward Moment When… November 14, 2012
The Other F Word July 3, 2014
America's Guilty Silence
By JAMES BROOKS
June 18, 2007
Crimes against humanity don't happen unless it is possible to commit them with impunity. Government corruption and gross imbalances of power will bring them closer to the edge of possibility. But the anticipation of impunity must be personal and social as well as legal and political. The perpetrators need to make sense of their crimes within a positive sense of themselves.
A shared sense of impunity that can pay for mass murder and torture chambers without self-reproach requires denial, distortion, and ignorance of swaths of reality. In totalitarian societies, the state handles these chores to try to keep the people unaware of its most criminal activities.
But in societies that enjoy relative freedom of the press, citizens encounter many unsavory facts that are impossible to deny directly. When "democracies" engage in war crimes, this knowledge pressures citizens to internalize a collective sense of impunity, which must be robust enough to neutralize incriminating truth as it appears.
Most informed US citizens are aware that their government runs a global network of secret detention centers where torture is routinely employed. They also know what this activity looks like, having seen photos of their troops' bestial behavior at Abu Ghraib. If they followed the story, they know that this behavior was also reported at several other prisons and detention centers in Iraq, under policy directives from the very top of the Pentagon.
They know about the human rights horrors of Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force base, that the CIA runs a global ring dedicated to kidnappings, "extraordinary rendition", and torture, that hundreds of our detainees have disappeared, and so on.
It is possible to know these things by reading big city newspapers. An objective observer could glean the general shape of these facts from network television news. The American public has been told. And the public has turned the page.
It's also a matter of record that our government has orchestrated an international economic blockade against the occupied Palestinian Authority, while Israel withholds the PA's tax revenues. After 15 months of this policy, an economy that aid experts had previously compared to sub-Saharan Africa has imploded. Social and civic services have ground to a virtual halt. (1) Diligent readers know that the Palestinians' already high rates of malnutrition and food insecurity are now at alarming levels. Doctors warn that skyrocketing numbers of Palestinian children are being crippled for life by chronic malnutrition. (2)
The predictable (and predicted) result of economic siege against an occupied people has been burgeoning chaos and civil strife, eroding what is left of the rule of law in the occupied territories. The informed American knows that this is happening because, in the fairest elections yet seen in the Middle East, the Palestinian people voted for the wrong party.
Yet even the best-informed Americans will be hard put to think of a similar instance in history. When have great powers conspired to destroy the government and economy of a destitute people already crumbling under another power's long colonial war?
To know about our government's global gulag and remain silent requires a reckoning with snatching people and repeatedly subjecting them to depraved acts of torture, knowing that those who do not die will suffer lifelong physical and psychological torment.
This reckoning appears to turn on variants of a calculation; that our collective security is worth more than the cost to a few tens of thousands of foreigners of questionable race and religion. This quantifies and prioritizes an otherwise difficult problem, allowing us to minimize the crimes by rounding our sums.
We don't notice that this pragmatic solution also fingers the people responsible for this inhumanity: us, the 'collective' whose security is so valuable that it's worth committing torture every day of the week to protect it.
To know about the economic siege against the occupied Palestinian territories and say nothing is to acquiesce in crippling collective punishment of millions of poor people, for the crime of holding a democratic election.
Unlike our straightforward torture-for-security deal in the global reign of terror against terror, our justifications for the Palestinian siege are bureaucratic and symbolic.
Hamas is on our "terror list" and therefore beyond the pale of humanity. Before we will end the blockade, Hamas must kiss the three poisoned rings of obeisance: recognize Israel's unique "right to exist" (as a "Jewish state" that refuses to recognize the rights of its current and former Arab residents), "renounce violence" (unlike Fatah, Israel, the US, etc.), and "accept past agreements" (the long sorry record of unreciprocated PLO concessions to Israel).
The public seems to accept this flimsy hypocrisy as reason enough to force Palestinian doctors to beg for syringes and bandages. (3) It goes down as easily as we close the cell door against the screams, to ease our pathetic fear of "terror".
Objectively, the American public is much more responsible for the crimes committed in its name than were the people of Germany for the horrors of the Third Reich. We have far more knowledge, and far greater freedom and opportunity to stop our government's criminal behavior.
But who is even asking the presidential candidates for their positions on torture and starving the Palestinians, or what they think of the respected study that found our war had killed as many as 665,000 Iraqis, as of almost two years ago?
Do we have any excuse for our abject failure to hold our leaders and ourselves responsible for our nation's most heinous crimes?
If we cannot bring ourselves to say, "guilty", then "innocent by reason of insanity" appears to be our only plausible defense before a future court of the world.
We will have to claim that our minds were not our own. The corporate media-government propaganda network had grown so ubiquitous that the people were essentially subjects in a mass brainwashing experiment. Unfortunately, the experiment was a success, so increasingly absurd versions of re-manufactured reality were implanted in the public mind.
At the time, some of us complained about cover-ups, lies, all the things we weren't being told by the media. But the public already knew too much, so our values had already been subverted to accommodate us to our national life of crime. In the reality we were fed, deceit could be virtuous, "terrorists" could destroy us, only leaders could understand the world, and in "extreme" cases the normal questions of morality did not apply. This is why we were silent while "our" government committed these terrible deeds.
The argument has some merit. The elites of this country invented modern propaganda almost a century ago. Today the immense power of corporate-political "opinion formation" in certain reaches the public mind is undeniable. We need to understand how much this system has undermined the public will and dehumanized our lives.
However, to the extent that we as individuals still possess free will and are responsible for our own values, we have no excuse for our mute acceptance of these and other national crimes against humanity. Don't we pay for them with our taxes, continue them with our votes, and support them with our silence?
The Conversion on the Way to Damascus
1600
Oil on canvas, 230 x 175 cm
Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
In 1600, soon after he had completed the first two canvases for the Contarelli Chapel, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint two pictures for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. The church has a special interest because of the works it contains by four of the finest artists ever to work in Rome: Raphael, Carracci, Caravaggio and Bernini. It is probable that by the time Caravaggio began to paint for one of its chapels, The Assumption by Annibale Carracci was in place above the altar. Caravaggio's depictions of key events in the lives of the founders of the Roman See have little in common with the brilliant colours and stylized attitudes of Annibale, and Caravaggio seems by far the more modern artist.
Of the two pictures in the chapel the more remarkable is the representation of the moment of St Paul's conversion. According to the Acts of the Apostles, on the way to Damascus Saul the Pharisee (soon to be Paul the Apostle) fell to the ground when he heard the voice of Christ saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' and temporarily lost his sight. It was reasonable to assume that Saul had fallen from a horse.
Caravaggio is close to the Bible. The horse is there and, to hold him, a groom, but the drama is internalized within the mind of Saul. He lies on the ground stunned, his eyes closed as if dazzled by the brightness of God's light that streams down the white part of the skewbald horse, but that the light is heavenly is clear only to the believer, for Saul has no halo. In the spirit of Luke, who was at the time considered the author of Acts, Caravaggio makes religious experience look natural.
Technically the picture has defects. The horse, based on D??rer, looks hemmed in, there is too much happening at the composition's base, too many feet cramped together, let alone Saul's splayed hands and discarded sword. Bellori's view that the scene is 'entirely without action' misses the point. Like a composer who values silence, Caravaggio respects stillness.
Both this and the following painting appear to be second versions, for Baglione states that Caravaggio first executed the two pictures 'in another manner, but as they did not please the patron, Cardinal Sannesio took them for himself'. Of these earlier versions, only The Conversion of St Paul survives.
--- Keywords: --------------
Author: CARAVAGGIO
Title: The Conversion on the Way to Damascus
Time-line: 1551-1600
School: Italian
Form: painting
Type: religious
There are times when I (wrongly) imagine myself as an isolated, lonely being. That my experiences are mine alone. That what happens to me is unique that only I understand. I internalize those things I go through, and lock away items, moments, thoughts, issues, feelings.
I place myself in an empty and lifeless field, a self-created exile because I wrongly think that I'm the only person to have ever felt this, or gone through that, or thought this.
But I'm never alone. I'm never in a place or feeling an emotion or having issues that someone else hasn't been through.
Fear keeps me isolated.
remixarmy.com/the-importance-of-visualization-to-achieve-...
Visualization And Imagery
The importance of visualization as part of your personal development plan cannot be overstated. Success begins within, and visualization is a great way to convince yourself you can achieve your dreams.
When you are trying to manifest your goals, you're essentially trying to change something about your current state of existence. And with any change, the mind resists as the ego perceives the unknown to be a threat.
Visualization and imagery exercises are excellent ways of managing resistance to change as they help push through this common barrier.
The Benefits Of Visualization
Visualization is a proven technique for achieving goals, whether your goal is spiritual enlightenment or winning a race. Even spiritual traditions such as Buddhism espouse the importance of visualization and sports psychologists swear by it.
In their book, Karate of Okinawa, Robert Scaglione and William Cummins give some compelling evidence of why visualization is considered one of the best self motivation tips. They cite a study by Russian researchers prior to the 1980 Olympic Games. Interested in understanding the power of the mind on performance, the researchers developed training schedules that involved different degrees of physical training and mental training. They found that the group which devoted the most time to mental training (and the least to physical training) performed the best.
When To Use Visualization
The importance of visualization is heightened when goals require long-term action. For example, if you have a lot of weight to lose, it's going to require a lot of time just following a seemingly mundane plan before you'll see results. When you consider that many people eat because they're bored, you can see why a mundane plan will be extra difficult for most.
The fact is; many goals take time to come to fruition. In his book, Harmonic Wealth, James Arthur Ray gives this example:
"Everything has a gestation period, a time period that must pass before things will come into form. If you plant a carrot seed, it takes about seven weeks for the sprout to make its above-dirt entrance. Bamboo, which can grow up to thirteen feet in as little as one week, takes up to seven years to break through the surface of the ground. But for seven long years it looks like absolutely nothing's happening."
Now, there's no question that human beings are more complex than bamboo! And we have a tendency to sabotage our own efforts. This is why it's best to incorporate visualization exercises into your daily personal development plan. You only need to spend a few minutes in the morning and just before going to sleep, picturing your success.
How To Visualize
When you practice visualization and imagery techniques as part of a personal development plan, you're living as if you've already achieved your goal, hence the saying "success begins within." In your mind, all you see is images of you at your goal weight. You see yourself in clothes you love, doing activities you've not enjoyed while being overweight, and most importantly, you see yourself getting plenty of attention from the opposite sex! These kinds of visualization motivate you to stick with your plan during the hard times.
Convinced Yet Of The Importance Of Visualization? Try These Exercises:
1. Internalization: see your goal in your mind's eye
2. Externalization: imagine the situation when you've attained your goal, this time with your eyes open
3. Forecasting: This requires expanding on externalization. Play out a whole scenario in your mind. See how people behave towards you. What else is happening?
4. Emotionalization: Focus on all of the positive emotions you will have when you achieve your goal
5. Verbalization: Picture your goals and the scenario you painted during your forecasting exercise. Say out loud what the scenario is that you see
Creative Visualization
Visualization is one of the most relied on self-motivation tips by Olympic trainers. And creative visualization is one specific style of visualization they often recommend. It requires imagining your desired goal by engaging all of your senses. For example, if you want to meet the partner of your dreams, develop a clear mental picture of what this person is like. What do they look like? Imagine the sound of their voice. What do they feel like? Can you see yourself holding his/her hand? What do they smell like?
To learn more about the importance of visualization, read Shakti Gawain's, Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life.
The Aghori (Sanskrit aghora)[2] are ascetic Shaiva sadhus. The Aghori are known to engage in post-mortem rituals. They often dwell in charnel grounds, have been witnessed smearing cremation ashes on their bodies, and have been known to use bones from human corpses for crafting kapalas (which Shiva and other Hindu deities are often iconically depicted holding or using) and jewelry. Because of their practices that are contradictory to orthodox Hinduism, they are generally opposed by other Hindus.[3][4]
Many Aghori gurus command great reverence from rural populations as they are supposed to possess healing powers gained through their intensely eremitic rites and practices of renunciation and tápasya. They are also known to meditate and perform worship in haunted houses.
Aghoris are devotees of Shiva manifested as Bhairava,[5] are monists who seek moksha from the cycle of reincarnation or saṃsāra. This freedom is a realization of the self's identity with the absolute. Because of this monistic doctrine, the Aghoris maintain that all opposites are ultimately illusory. The purpose of embracing pollution and degradation through various customs is the realization of non-duality (advaita) through transcending social taboos, attaining what is essentially an altered state of consciousness and perceiving the illusory nature of all conventional categories.
Aghoris are not to be confused with Shivnetras, who are also ardent devotees of Shiva but do not indulge in extreme, tamasic ritual practices. Although the Aghoris enjoy close ties with the Shivnetras, the two groups are quite distinct, Shivnetras engaging in sattvic worship.
Aghoris base their beliefs on two principles common to broader Shaiva beliefs: that Shiva is perfect (having omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence) and that Shiva is responsible for everything that occurs – all conditions, causes and effects. Consequently, everything that exists must be perfect and to deny the perfection of anything would be to deny the sacredness of all life in its full manifestation, as well as to deny the Supreme Being.
Aghoris believe that every person's soul is Shiva but is covered by aṣṭamahāpāśa "eight great nooses or bonds" - sensual pleasure, anger, greed, obsession, fear and hatred. The practices of the Aghoris are centered around the removal of these bonds. Sādhanā in cremation grounds destroys fear; sexual practices with certain riders and controls help release one from sexual desire; being naked destroys shame. On release from all the eight bonds the soul becomes sadāśiva and obtains moksha.[citation needed]
History[edit]
Aghori in Satopant.
An Aghori man in Badrinath smoking hashish or Cannabis from a chillum in 2011.
Although akin to the Kapalika ascetics of medieval Kashmir, as well as the Kalamukhas, with whom there may be a historical connection, the Aghoris trace their origin to Kina Ram, an ascetic who is said to have lived 150 years, dying during the second half of the 18th century.[6] Dattatreya the avadhuta, to whom has been attributed the esteemed nondual medieval song, the Avadhuta Gita, was a founding adi guru of the Aghor tradition according to Barrett (2008: p. 33):
Lord Dattatreya, an antinomian form of Shiva closely associated with the cremation ground, who appeared to Baba Keenaram atop Girnar Mountain in Gujarat. Considered to be the adi guru (ancient spiritual teacher) and founding deity of Aghor, Lord Dattatreya offered his own flesh to the young ascetic as prasād (a kind of blessing), conferring upon him the power of clairvoyance and establishing a guru-disciple relationship between them.[7]
Aghoris also hold sacred the Hindu deity Dattatreya as a predecessor to the Aghori Tantric tradition. Dattatreya was believed to be an incarnation of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva united in the same singular physical body. Dattatreya is revered in all schools of Tantra, which is the philosophy followed by the Aghora tradition, and he is often depicted in Hindu artwork and its holy scriptures of folk narratives, the Puranas, indulging in Aghori "left-hand" Tantric worship as his prime practice.
An aghori believes in getting into total darkness by all means, and then getting into light or self realizing. Though this is a different approach from other Hindu sects, they believe it to be effective. They are infamously known for their rituals that include such as shava samskara or shava sadhana (ritual worship incorporating the use of a corpse as the altar) to invoke the mother goddess in her form as Smashan Tara (Tara of the Cremation Grounds).
In Hindu iconography, Tara, like Kali, is one of the ten Mahavidyas (wisdom goddesses) and once invoked can bless the Aghori with supernatural powers. The most popular of the ten Mahavidyas who are worshiped by Aghoris are Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, and Bhairavi. The male Hindu deities primarily worshiped by Aghoris for supernatural powers are manifestations of Shiva, including Mahākāla, Bhairava, Virabhadra, Avadhuti, and others.
Barrett (2008: p. 161) discusses the "charnel ground sādhanā" of the Aghora in both its left and right-handed proclivities and identifies it as principally cutting through attachments and aversion and foregrounding primordiality; a view uncultured, undomesticated:
The gurus and disciples of Aghor believe their state to be primordial and universal. They believe that all human beings are natural-born Aghori. Hari Baba has said on several occasions that human babies of all societies are without discrimination, that they will play as much in their own filth as with the toys around them. Children become progressively discriminating as they grow older and learn the culturally specific attachments and aversions of their parents. Children become increasingly aware of their mortality as they bump their heads and fall to the ground. They come to fear their mortality and then palliate this fear by finding ways to deny it altogether.[8]
In this sense, the Aghora sādhanā is a process of unlearning deeply internalized cultural models. When this sādhanā takes the form of charnel ground sādhanā, the Aghori faces death as a very young child, simultaneously meditating on the totality of life at its two extremes. This ideal example serves as a prototype for other Aghor practices, both left and right, in ritual and in daily life."[9]
Adherents[edit]
Though Aghoris are prevalent in cremation grounds across India, Nepal, and even sparsely across cremation grounds in South East Asia, the secrecy of this religious sect leaves no desire for practitioners to aspire for social recognition and notoriety. [1]
Spiritual headquarters[edit]
Hinglaj Mata is the Kuladevata (patron goddess) of the Aghori. The main Aghori pilgrimage centre is Kina Ram's hermitage or ashram in Ravindrapuri, Varanasi.[10] The full name of this place is Baba Keenaram Sthal, Krim-Kund. Here, Kina Ram is buried in a tomb or samadhi which is a centre of pilgrimage for Aghoris and Aghori devotees. Present head (Abbot), since 1978, of Baba Keenaram Sthal is Baba Siddharth Gautam Ram.
According to Devotees, Baba Siddharth Gautam Ram is reincarnation of Baba Keenaram himself. Apart from this, any cremation ground would be a holy place for an Aghori ascetic. The cremation grounds near the yoni pithas, 51 holy centers for worship of the Hindu Mother Goddess scattered across South Asia and the Himalayan terrain, are key locations preferred for performing sadhana by the Aghoris. They are also known to meditate and perform sadhana in haunted houses.
Medicine[edit]
Aghori practise healing through purification as a pillar of their ritual. Their patients believe the Aghoris are able to transfer pollution and health to and from patients as a form of "transformative healing", due to the believed superior state of body and mind of the Aghori.[11][verification needed]
In popular culture[edit]
In the middle of a rich dinner conversation on the topic of saving the Earth from asteroid impacts.
The latest data show a 1/600 chance of a major impact on Feb 5, 2040 at 3pm by asteroid 2011 AG5.
And we have found only 10% of 100 megaton threats like AG5. For a sense of scale, a 100MT impact is about 10x larger than all wartime bomb bursts, conventional and nuclear, combined (equivalent to 100 million tons of TNT).
People generally have a difficult time internalizing the odds of "highly unlikely", but devastating events. The emotional fate of individuals fades to the muddle of statistics.
If you live in America, the chance that you will die on any given day in a car crash is the same chance that a 100MT asteroid will hit Earth on that day. We invest in seatbelts and airbags. But we invest nothing in asteroid deflection.
I had lunch with Astronaut Ed Lu today. He recently spoke with Sandia National Labs and asked: “What would you do if a 100MT bomb in your arsenal had a 1/600 chance of going off accidentally?” Not surprisingly, they said they would do everything conceivable to identify and neutralize that risk. They feel responsibility for that arsenal; it’s in their jurisdiction. “Nobody has jurisdiction to protect the Earth.”
Rusty Schweickart presented the risks to the UN Action Team on Near Earth Objects a couple week ago, and highlighted the need to address the trajectory prior to its pass through a gravitational keyhole in 2023.
Schweickart and Lu formed the B612 Foundation to detect and deflect these threats to humanity.
Schweickart summarized at dinner: “We live in a remarkable time in history. We can change the trajectory of the solar system, ever so slightly, and protect life on Earth.”
A documentary film, The Asteroid Effect is underway on this topic.
P.S. I also learned that during Apollo 9, they had the first test of the Lunar Module Descent Engine in space, and they thought it might be noisy. So they trained with hand signals just in case the noise in the LM cabin was too loud. When they hit the switch, there was total silence, and for a moment, they had to check the instruments to verify that it was operating properly (and it was).
Photo by Esther Dyson. On the left is Alex Hall, Director of the Google Lunar X Prize.
Which will come first? Green vs. Grey, as they say.
Thanks to Ariel Poler for hosting a SF Salon on the subject with Erik Torenberg of Village Global and Silicon Foundry.
I think we will build a superhuman AGI before we understand our own brain well enough to radically improve it or upload it to a silicon substrate. The complex creations of iterative algorithms (like evolution and deep learning) are inherently inscrutable. It is easier to push evolution forward than to reverse engineer the products of evolution.
We are in the middle of a sea change in how the vanguard of engineering will be done. Building complex systems that exceed human understanding is more like parenting than programming. The locus of learning shifts from end products to the process of their creation. An ever-growing percentage of software will be grown and an ever-growing percentage of compute will run on infrastructure that resembles the brain (massively parallel, fine grained architectures with in-memory compute and a growing focus on the memory and interconnect elements). This is the path to AGI, IMHO.
I’ve been working with a neural plasticity company for 14 years now (Posit Science). One of my concerns with uploading is the extreme plasticity of the sensory cortex and the recruitment of neighboring regions in the face of external changes (like phantom limb pain in amputees). Cut and paste of brain state to a foreign substrate may require a deep understanding of the analog domain, where structural topology and functional spike train variation is immense (there are over 300 types of neurons in neocortex that are structurally and electrically different. And each neuron has ~200 ion channels from a pool of 20-40 variations). Furthermore, our mostly 2D silicon substrates lack the interconnect density for a direct map of the synaptic fan-out of the brain. Without a deep understanding of what elements can be ignored or abstracted, a simulation of brain function explodes in combinatorial complexity.
Going back a decade, in talks about AI futures, I was fond of advising to “augment early and often.” I worry that people want to believe in extreme augmentation and uploading, not because it is likely, but because it offers a mental model for “humanity” maintaining the mantle of supremacy, perpetually perched at the pinnacle of evolution. The idea that evolution will eventually progress way beyond us is hard to internalize. We seek transcendence, as the antidote for obsolescence.
I’ll be brainstorming more about storming the brain this evening at a follow up salon.
My 2006 musings on these topics.
This scripture is one that everyone needs to memorize and really internalize. We must learn to take the Holy Spirit as our guide: lds-ponderize.blogspot.com/2018/05/doctrine-and-covenants...
#lds #Gospel #spiritualcrusade #quote #quotes #quoteoftheday #mormon #christian #christ #jesus #mormonquotes #becauseofhim #jesuschrist #faith #lastdays
Such Beauty calls forth a time of reflection (never mind that I lost my Fitbit) for internalizing the natural spirituality that embraces us and the thanksgiving that should proceed! My blessings far exceed the suffering of so many others. I say a silent prayer....
-rc
late roman architecture was so focused on interior space as to accept the mere resulting exterior shape as final. the classical heritage is completely internalized, leaving a shell of brick volumes mirroring the spaces inside.
this is often cited as a parallel to christian spirituality but the development away from the greek temple architecture-as-sculpture to an architecture of pure space had been underway for a long time. consider the massive maxentius/constantine basilica in the forum romanum next to the many marble temples.
san vitale 527-548 AD, architect unknown
more words, yada, yada, yada.
Read more about the project here:
tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html
The Doll Project is a series of conceptual digital photographs that uses fashion dolls to embody the negative messages the media gives to young girls. Though it would not be fair to blame it all on Barbie, there have been many instances in which she has come dangerously close. I chose to use Barbie dolls because they are miniature mannequins, emblems of the fashion world writ small, a representation of our culture's impossible standards of beauty scaled to one sixth actual size. The little pink scale and How To Lose Weight book are both real Barbie accessories from the 1960s. They are recurring motifs in the pictures in the series, symbolizing the ongoing dissatisfaction many girls and women feel about their weight and body image. The dolls' names, Ana and Mia, are taken from internet neologisms coined by anorexic and bulimic girls who have formed online communities with the unfortunate purpose of encouraging each other in their disordered eating. With each passing era, Ana and Mia are younger and younger, and the physical ideal to which they aspire becomes more unattainable. They internalize the unrealistic expectations of a society that digitally manipulates images of women in fashion and beauty advertisements and value their own bodies only as objects for others to look at and desire.
Read more about the project here:
tiffanygholar.blogspot.com/2008/08/doll-project.html
Purchase prints here:
Govert Flinck, Dutch
b. 1615 Cleve; d. 1660 Amsterdam
Flinck studied as a pupil in Rembrandt's studio and, according to one early biographer, had so internalized his teacher's method within a year that Flinck's paintings were sold as his master's own. However, by the time he made this work, he had distinguished himself by developing a much smoother manner of painting, one that would serve him well as a society portraitist.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York City
DSCF9977
Slug is a common name for an apparently shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word "slug" is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no shell, has a very reduced shell, or has only a small internal shell (this is in contrast to the common name snail, which applies to gastropods that have a coiled shell large enough that the animal can retract its soft parts fully into it).
Slugs exist on land and in the sea, and there is even one genus of freshwater slugs, Acochlidium. The unadorned word "slug" is however applied primarily to land slugs, whereas slugs from the sea or from fresh water are usually referred to as "sea slugs" or "freshwater slugs". Land gastropods with a shell that is not quite vestigial, but is too small to retract into (like many in the family Urocyclidae), are known as semislugs.
Various taxonomic families of slugs form part of several quite different evolutionary lineages, which also include snails. Thus, for example, the various families of land slugs are not closely related, despite a superficial similarity in the overall body form. The shell-less condition has arisen many times independently during the evolutionary past, and thus the category "slug" is emphatically a polyphyletic one.
Slugs, like all other gastropods, undergo torsion (a 180° twisting of the internal organs) during development. Internally, slug anatomy clearly shows the effects of this rotation—but externally, the bodies of land slugs appear more or less symmetrical, except for the positioning of the pneumostome, which is on one side of the animal, normally the right-hand side. The soft, slimy bodies of slugs are prone to desiccation, so land-living slugs are confined to moist environments and must retreat to damp hiding places when the weather is dry. The subsequent information in this article applies to land slugs.
Like other pulmonate land gastropods, the majority of land slugs have two pairs of 'feelers' or tentacles on their head. The upper pair is light sensing and has eyespots at the ends, while the lower pair provides the sense of smell. Both pairs are retractable, and can be regrown if lost.[citation needed]
On top of the slug, behind the head, is the saddle-shaped mantle, and under this are the genital opening and anus. On one side (almost always the right hand side) of the mantle is a respiratory opening, which is easy to see when open, but difficult to see when closed. This opening is known as the pneumostome. Within the tissue of the mantle in some species is a very small, rather flat shell, or in some other cases a collection of calcareous granules.[citation needed]
Like most gastropods, a slug moves by rhythmic waves of muscular contraction on the underside of its foot. It simultaneously secretes a layer of mucus that it travels on, which helps prevent damage to the foot tissues. Around the edge of the foot is the 'foot fringe' or 'skirt'.[citation needed]
Vestigial shell
Most slugs retain a remnant of their shell, which is usually internalized. This organ generally serves as storage for calcium salts, often in conjunction with the digestive glands. An internal shell is present in the Limacidae and Parmacellidae. Adult Philomycidae, Onchidiidae and Veronicellidae lack shells.
More Info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug
Photo showing close up of the Pneumostome which was open
ROMA ARCHEOLOGICA & RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA 2020. «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. The NYT (18 Aug. 2020) & Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (13 Apr. 2020). S.v., "Raffaello architetto", in: The NYT (06 March 2020); Università di Padova (20/07/2020); Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020); Jhon Correa / Facebook (1 July 2020) & Prof. Cammy Brothers (2001). wp.me/pbMWvy-uQ
1). ROME - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. Scuderie del Quirinale (5 March - June 2020).
A monographic exhibition with over two hundred masterpieces among paintings, drawings and comparative works, dedicated to Raffaello on the 500th anniversary of his death, which took place in Rome on April 6, 1520 at the age of just 37 years old.
The exhibition, which finds inspiration particularly in the Raffaello's fundamental Roman period which consecrated him as an artist of incomparable and legendary greatness, tells his whole complex and articulated creative path with richness of detail through a vast corpus of works, for the first time exposed all together.
Many institutions involved have contributed to enrich the exhibition with masterpieces from their collections: among these, in Italy, the National Galleries of Ancient Art, the National Art Gallery of Bologna, the Museum and the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Brescia Museums Foundation, and abroad, in addition to the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, the National Gallery of London, the Prado Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum, the Royal Collection, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille.
Fonte / source:
--- Scuderie del Quirinale (5 March - June 2020).
www.scuderiequirinale.it/mostra/copia-di-raffaello
2.1). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483», in: Intervento delle Scuderie del Quirinale per la maratona del MiBACT "Italia chiamò" / Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (Mar 13, 2020).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8l6q9ywLxY&t=112s
2.2). ROME - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. / English / Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (Apr. 13, 2020). www.youtube.com/watch?v=s58gYvvNrKQ&t=61s
3). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. Scuderie del Quirinale (05/03 - 02/06/2020).
Il 6 aprile 1520 muore a Roma, a trentasette anni, Raffaello Sanzio, il più grande pittore del Rinascimento. La città sembra fermarsi nella commozione e nel rimpianto, mentre la notizia della scomparsa si diffonde con incredibile rapidità in tutte le corti europee. S’interrompeva non solo un percorso artistico senza precedenti, ma anche l’ambizioso progetto di ricostruzione grafica della Roma antica, commissionato dal pontefice, che avrebbe riscattato dopo secoli di oblio e rovina la grandezza e la nobiltà della capitale dei Cesari, affermando inoltre una nuova idea di tutela. Sepolto secondo le sue ultime volontà nel Pantheon, simbolo della continuità fra diverse tradizioni di culto, forse l’esempio più emblematico dell’architettura classica, Raffaello diviene immediatamente oggetto di un processo di divinizzazione, mai veramente interrotto, che ci consegna oggi la perfezione e l’armonia della sua arte.
A distanza di cinquecento anni, questa mostra racconta la sua storia e insieme quella di tutta la cultura figurativa occidentale che l’ha considerato un modello imprescindibile. La mostra, articolata secondo un’idea originale, propone un percorso che ripercorre a ritroso l’avventura creativa di Raffaello, da Roma a Firenze, da Firenze all’Umbria, fino alla nativa Urbino. Un incalzante flash-back che consente di ripensare il percorso biografico partendo dalla sua massima espansione creativa negli anni di Leone X. Risalendo il corso della vita di Raffaello di capolavoro in capolavoro, il visitatore potrà rintracciare in filigrana la prefigurazione di quel linguaggio classico che solo a Roma, assimilata nel profondo la lezione dell’antico, si sviluppò con una pienezza che non ha precedenti nella storia dell’arte. Grazie ad un numero eccezionale di capolavori provenienti dalle maggiori raccolte italiane ed europee, la mostra organizzata dalle Scuderie del Quirinale insieme con le Gallerie degli Uffizi, costituisce un’occasione ineguagliabile per osservare da vicino le invenzioni dell’Urbinate. Il suo breve, luminoso percorso ha cambiato per sempre la storia delle arti e del gusto: Raffaello rivive nelle sale dell’esposizione che lo celebra come genio universale.
Fonte / source:
--- Scuderie del Quirinale (05/03 - 02/06/2020).
www.scuderiequirinale.it/mostra/raffaello-000
3). ROME «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. The NYT (18 Aug. 2020).
ROME - In the Virtual (and Actual) Footsteps of Raphael - In Italy and beyond, the plan was to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance artist’s death with great fanfare. Then came the pandemic, and the virtual world stepped in. The NYT (18 Aug. 2020).
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Also see:
--- ROME - Rome Celebrates the Short, but Beautiful, Life of Raphael - Amid new coronavirus restrictions on museums in Italy, a blockbuster show traces the artistʼs life from finish to start. The NYT (06 March 2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/raphael-rome-coronavirus....
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This was supposed to be the year of Raphael. Five hundred years after his death at 37, the Renaissance master was due to receive the exalted rollout reserved for artistic superstars: blockbuster museum shows in Rome and London; conferences and lectures at universities and cultural centers around the world; flag-waving and wreath-laying in his Italian hometown, Urbino. There was even the tang of controversy when the advisory committee of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery resigned en masse to protest the inclusion of a precious papal portrait in the big exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale. Then the coronavirus hit and Raphael’s annus mirabilis turned into the world’s annus horribilis.
When news of the handsome young artist’s death broke in Rome on April 6, 1520, Pope Leo X wept and church bells tolled all over the city.
Half a millennium later, Rome was in lockdown along with the rest of Italy as deaths from the virus spiraled. The Scuderie show, a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of more than 200 works (120 by Raphael) from all over the world, was forced to shut its doors after just three days, despite having presold a record 70,000 tickets. Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon was supposed to be adorned with a red rose every day of 2020 to commemorate his death — but the ancient temple was also shuttered because of the virus. Lectures and conferences were canceled, postponed or moved online.
Poor Raphael. Last year, the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death came off without a hitch. Raphael’s devotees hoped that this
year’s celebrations would restore the artist’s luster, which has dimmed over the past centuries. When the world fell ill this past winter,
Raphael was one of the casualties. But all is not lost. The Scuderie show reopened on June 2 and will remain up until the end of August. The Scuderie’s president, Mario de Simoni, had expected as many as 500,000 people to see the show pre-virus, but now says the number probably won’t exceed 160,000. For those unable to attend in person, the Scuderie has released an English-language version of its excellent video, recapping the highlights of the exhibition, room by room. You’ll want to hit the pause button in Room 2 to admire two masterpieces on loan from the Louvre: a selfportrait with a friend and the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, one of the glories of Renaissance portraiture. The close-ups of his paintings of women in Room 6 testify to the artist’s passionate appreciation of feminine beauty. Other Scuderie videos (in Italian) delve into particular aspects of his genius — for instance, the jewelry worn by his female subjects, or the literary world he moved in.
Tour guides such as Clam Tours and Joy of Rome now offer virtual journeys in which small groups can zoom around Italy in the footsteps of the artist. On Sept. 13, for example, you can join the Renaissance specialist Antonio Forcellino and other Italian art experts on Clam Tour’s virtual exploration of Raphael’s incomparable frescoes of the four sibyls at Rome’s Santa Maria della Pace church ($25). Check out Joy of Rome’s free two-minute video about Raphael’s frescoes at the Villa Farnesina to see if you’d like to sign up for a two-and-a-half hour virtual tour (prices on request).
Even on a laptop screen, Raphael’s ever-evolving craftsmanship and quicksilver brilliance are apparent. “The year of Raphael has not
been ruined, but simply modified,” said Marzia Faietti, a curator of the Scuderie show. “Since many conferences and lectures have been
put off until next year, in a sense there will be two years of Raphael.”
For Italians, a silver lining of the pandemic has been the opportunity to relish their cultural treasures without the tourist hordes. “I cried,”
said Francesca Pagliaro, founder of the Joy of Rome tour company, of the experience of standing alone in the Vatican’s recently reopened
Sala di Costantino — one of four rooms in the museum frescoed by Raphael and his students, and which you can view here. “It’s the first
time in five years that I’ve seen the Stanze without scaffolding — and I had it to myself,” Ms. Pagliaro said. “It was magical.” Americans, barred from European travel for the foreseeable future, will have to make do with all this virtual magic. Not ideal — but Raphael’s magic is powerful, subtle and enduring enough to withstand the challenge.
The spirit of Urbino
I can attest to this because back in November 2019, I had the opportunity to follow in Raphael’s actual, not virtual, footsteps in Italy. I stood
shivering in the room where he was born in Urbino in 1483. I knelt at the austere tomb in a niche inside the Pantheon where he was
interred 37 years later. I feasted my eyes not only on paintings and frescoes, but on the humble church and glorious Roman chapel that
attest to his emerging genius for architecture. My pilgrimage would be impossible today — but thanks to the wonders of the internet and
the resourcefulness of Italy’s leading cultural institutions, I can remotely retrace my steps, refresh my memories and relive the
revelations.
The first revelation came, aptly, in Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale, the magnificent Renaissance palace constructed in the late 15th century by the
humanist and warlord Federico da Montefeltro that now houses the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. Judge the magnificence for yourself
by clicking through Google Images’ impressive photo archive. Another click puts you face to face with the museum’s sole work by Raphael
— the haunting portrait known as “La Muta” (“The Mute Woman”). As in so many of his portraits, Raphael posed this stern beauty against a solid dark background, eschewing any visual cues that would evoke a sense of place.
How, I wondered, did Urbino influence the art of its most famous son?
I posed this question to Peter Aufreiter, then director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, when I sat down with him in his office in the
Palazzo Ducale. Mr. Aufreiter’s response was to click on an image of Raphael’s 1507 portrait of Federico’s son, Duke Guidobaldo da
Montefeltro (now in the Uffizi), and then summon me to the window. “Look at the hillside across the valley and that house at the base of
the hill — it’s the same background Raphael put in his painting of Guidobaldo.” You can see exactly what Mr. Aufreiter meant by using the
magnify feature on this online image. Urbino’s steep green landscape, limpid light and crystalline architecture — you can also get a good sense of it here — imprinted themselves on the artist’s young mind and surface repeatedly in his work.
Even though Raphael spent most of his career in Florence and Rome, Mr. Aufreiter insists that Urbino, whose cityscape has changed little
since the Renaissance, is where you can feel his spirit most intensely.
The spirit is palpable in the artisans’ quarter surrounding the house where Raphael was born, the son of the local court painter Giovanni
Santi. Near the summit of the ski-slope-pitched Via Raffaello, just a stone’s throw from the rather pompous bronze monument of the artist
erected in 1897, the Casa Natale di Raffaello has been preserved as a museum. There’s a rather rudimentary virtual tour on its website, but
you’ll get a better feel for the interior and exterior spaces in this YouTube video. In these bare simple rooms and the deep brick courtyard
they enclose, little imagination is required to dial the scene back to Raphael’s apprenticeship in the last years of the 15th century. Giovanni
Santi’s bottega (workshop) occupied the ground floor, and the future master grew up amid the bustle of painters grinding pigments,
dabbing madonnas and trading in art supplies.
Father and son conducted a more exalted commerce at Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale. Fabricated of brick, stone and flawless geometry, this
palace was one of the glories of the Italian Renaissance — not only for its divine architecture, but for the refined elegance of the nobles
who gathered here. This video captures some facets of the palace’s perfection — the way its silhouette pierces the profile of surrounding
hills, the ideal proportions of its noble courtyard, the interplay of volume and decoration in its interior.
Baldassare Castiglione set his 1528 masterpiece, “The Book of the Courtier,” in this storied palace — and it was here that the young
Raphael polished his manners, sharpened his wit, cultivated invaluable connections and acquired a lifelong passion for classical antiquity.
Raised at court, Raphael was pursued by the powerful (Popes Julius II and Leo X), esteemed by the brilliant (Castiglione and the Urbinoborn
architect Donato Bramante were close friends) and adored by the beautiful. “Raphael was a very amorous person,” wrote Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer. It was Vasari who originated the claim that Raphael died after an overindulgence in sex with his Roman mistress, Margherita Luti. Whatever really killed him on April 6, 1520, Raphael accomplished much and rose high in his brief life — but he never ceased to be “il maestro Urbinate,” the master from Urbino.
A couch-surfing brush-for-hire.
Orphaned when his father died in 1494 (his mother had died three years earlier), Raphael spent his teenage years as an apprentice before
undertaking commissions in Umbria and Tuscany. It’s likely that he was in Florence by 1504 — not as a permanent resident but rather a
couch-surfing brush-for-hire.
Though Raphael’s footsteps in Florence are faint, there is no question that he encountered the works of both Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo here — including, very likely, the Mona Lisa, which you can view here, and the marble statue of David, which you can see
and read about on the Accademia’s detailed website. Critics and connoisseurs have been measuring this Renaissance trio against each other for 500 years now. Florence’s Uffizi Gallery is the ideal place to revisit this rivalry, both in person and virtually. After a recent renovation, paintings by the big three have been put on display in two beautifully lit adjoining rooms, and you can find them on the Uffizi website.
To my eyes, neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo ever matched the sheer painterly virtuosity of the fringed white collar that Raphael stitched around the neck of the cloth merchant Agnolo Doni, or the faint dent he incised between the young businessman’s anxious brows (use the magnify function to zoom in on this image). Agnolo’s 15-year-old bride, Maddalena Strozzi, hangs beside him, posed like the Mona Lisa with bejeweled hands clasped on her lap, but clad in a kaleidoscope of watered red silk, embroidered blue damask and shimmering gauze. Across the Arno are the glories of the Pitti Palace’s Galleria Palatina — the largest collection of Raphael’s works outside the Vatican. Unlike the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace retains the ambience and layout of an aristocratic residence: Paintings are stacked three deep in gilded high-ceilinged chambers; works are arranged idiosyncratically rather than chronologically; and the lighting can be maddeningly inadequate. Luckily for remote visitors, the lighting is much better on the palace’s website, as well as in the Italian and Spanish language videos about the museum’s treasures, posted here.
To the Eternal City
Raphael was summoned to Rome in 1508 by Pope Julius II, and he remained there until his death in 1520. Those 12 final years in the
Eternal City marked the apogee of his career. Painter, architect, entrepreneur, archaeologist, pioneer printmaker, Raphael became the
prototype of the artist as celebrity — the Andy Warhol of the Renaissance.
In pre-pandemic Rome, visitors had to endure the lines and tour groups that plagued the Vatican Museums in order to spend a few crowded moments with one of Raphael’s supreme accomplishments: the four papal chambers, known as the Stanze di Raffaello, that the artist and his workshop frescoed between 1508 and 1520. These days, in-person visitors to the reopened Vatican Museums enjoy the Stanze along with the nearby Sistine Chapel in ideal conditions. But remote visits can also be rewarding, thanks to the beautifully produced videos and virtual tours now available on the Vatican’s website. With the click of a mouse, you can hop back and forth between the virtual Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Raphael Stanze and decide for yourself which is the greater masterpiece.
“Everything he had in art, he had from me,” the curmudgeonly Michelangelo once grumbled of his younger rival. When you view their
roughly contemporaneous fresco cycles one after the other (or side by side on your computer), it’s clear that Raphael did much more than
borrow. “The School of Athens,” the most celebrated work in the Stanze, has the propulsive tension of a film paused at its climactic scene.
Cast members — a mix of classical philosophers and Renaissance savants — converse, argue, scribble, read and declaim on a sprawling,
but unified, “set” framed by classical architecture. By contrast, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, for all its bravura, reads like a series of
static cels.
After the Vatican’s Raphael Stanze, a logical next stop, whether actually or virtually, is the Villa Farnesina, with its two beguiling frescoed
loggias — “The Triumph of Galatea” in one of the loggias and “Cupid and Psyche” in the other. Despite the name, this riverside Trastevere landmark is neither a villa nor originally a Farnese property, but rather a suburban pleasure pavilion that Agostino Chigi built for himself in the early 16th century. Chigi brought in the finest artists of the day to fresco the loggias; the result is a delightful crazy quilt of mythological scenes and astrological symbols. Raphael’s “Galatea,” with her wind-whipped tresses, elegantly torqued bare torso and dolphin-powered, scallop-shell raft, has become an icon of High Renaissance grace and wit, and you can see it and other highlights in the villa’s video archive. Even if you don’t speak Italian, the short films are worth delving into for the imagery alone.
From painting to architecture
In the last phase of his career, Raphael increasingly turned from painting to architecture. Sadly, his major architectural achievements — the grand unfinished Villa Madama perched on a wooded hill two miles north of the Vatican, and the classically inspired Raphael loggias inside the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace — were inaccessible to the public even before the pandemic, and remain so. To get a sense of Raphael’s architectural genius, make (or click) your way to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in the piazza of the same name at the northwest edge of the historic center. Like so many transplants, Raphael fell under the spell of the Eternal City’s classical substructure: Rome itself, its layers, its ruins and relics, its ceaseless commerce with the past, became a source of inspiration. The chapel he designed for Chigi inside the Popolo church evinces just how deeply and fruitfully Raphael internalized this inspiration. At first glance, it’s just another church chapel — tight, high, adorned with art and inlaid with precious stone. But on this site you can glimpse the almost miraculous geometry of this space — the interplay of disc and dome, the rhythm set up between the vertical pleats of the Corinthian pilasters and the elongated triangles of the twin red marble pyramids that mark the Chigis' graves. Fittingly, the artist who devoted the final years of his career to measuring, cataloging, preserving and mapping Roman antiquities, was laid to rest in the greatest classical structure to survive the ages: the Pantheon. If a trip to the physical Pantheon is not in the cards, you can drop in with Tom Hanks as your guide in this clip from the film “Angels and Demons.” As for his tomb — an easy-to-miss niche with a statue of the Virgin, modest and vague, presiding over the glassed-in coffin — you can view it here.
Marzia Faietti, curator of Rome’s Scuderie show, has been struck by how the virus has enhanced Raphael’s reputation and heightened
awareness of the twin beauties of his art and character. “Young people in particular have reacted with an outpouring of enthusiasm and
benevolence which I really didn’t expect,” she said. “The pandemic has brought suffering to so many, but the year of Raphael will be
remembered more vividly, not despite the virus, but because of it.”
Fonte / source:
--- The NYT (18 Aug. 2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/travel/in-the-virtual-and-actu...
Foto / fonte / source:
--- ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483», et al., Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (05/03 - 02/06/2020) (08/2020).
www.youtube.com/user/ScuderieQuirinale/videos
4.). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483»., in: "Raffaello architetto e la Lettera a Papa Leone X." Università di Padova (20/07/2020).
Artista dal talento straordinario, affermato, corteggiato, desiderato. Questo, ma non solo questo, fu Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520): l'esperienza come architetto, lo studio e l'impegno per la tutela degli edifici antichi di Roma sono di importanza centrale nel suo percorso, a partire dalla realizzazione di opere come la Cappella Chigi e Villa Madama, fino alla stesura, insieme a Baldassarre Castiglione, della Lettera a Papa Leone X. La grande mostra Raffaello 1520-1483, allestita alle Scuderie del Quirinale di Roma, prorogata fino al 30 agosto, dedica ampio spazio alla sua appassionata attività nel campo dell'architettura.
"Sin dai primi anni di formazione, l'interesse di Raffaello per l'architettura, in particolare per quella del mondo antico, è fortemente presente - racconta il professor Zaggia al Bo Live - Fino a sfociare in un'opera fondamentale come Lo sposalizio della vergine, in cui compare un tempio a pianta centrale sullo sfondo che interpreta in modo molto chiaro le sperimentazioni del suo tempo in ambito architettonico. A questa sperimentazione dell'architettura sul piano della rappresentazione, segue poi, con il trasferimento di Raffaello a Roma tra il 1508 e il 1509 e l'incontro con Bramante, un interesse concreto rivolto alla costruzione e alla progettazione vera e propria. Da questo punto di vista, il rapporto che si instaura tra Raffaello e Bramante per lo studio dell'architettura antica, conservata all'interno della città, diventa fondamentale punto di partenza per un approfondimento che aprirà strade nuove all'architettura successiva. Con la morte di figure di riferimento, come Bramante appunto, Raffaello diventa la personalità più importante che opera nel campo dell'architettura all'interno dei grandi cantieri pontifici. Si apre così una stagione breve in cui le opere realizzate da Raffaello saranno numerose e importanti: alcune realmente costruite, altre solo progettate".
In questo contesto si inserisce la Lettera a Papa Leone X, scritta nel 1519 da Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione, il raffinato autore del Cortegiano (ai due, uniti da amicizia e stima reciproca, è dedicata una mostra al Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, dal titolo Baldassarre Castiglione e Raffaello.Volti e momenti della civiltà di corte), sul tema della tutela e dello studio degli edifici antichi. La premessa al documento è rintracciabile nei fatti avvenuti qualche anno prima: nell'estate del 1515, infatti, Leone X nomina Raffaello præfectus marmorum et lapidum omnium (dal 1514 l'Urbinate già dirigeva la fabbrica di San Pietro). La lettera dedicatoria, la cui prima edizione venne inserita all'interno delle opere di Baldassare Castiglione pubblicate a Padova nel 1733, si apre così: "Sono molti, padre santissimo, i quali misurando col loro piccolo giudizio le cose grandissime che delli romani circa l’arme, e della città di Roma circa al mirabile artificio, ai ricchi ornamenti e alla grandezza degli edifici si scrivono, quelle più presto stimano favolose che vere. Ma altrimenti a me suole avvenire; perché considerando dalle ruine, che ancor si veggono di Roma, la divinità di quegli animi antichi, non istimo fuor di ragione il credere che molte cose a noi paiono impossibili, che ad essi erano facilissime".
Nella prima parte Raffaello esalta la grandezza del passato, dichiara le proprie competenze in ambito architettonico e invita il pontefice a intervenire per garantire la tutela dei monumenti antichi, da salvare dal degrado. Nella seconda invece si concentra su questione più tecniche, introducendo anche la descrizione di uno strumento per la misurazione degli edifici antichi di sua invenzione: "Farassi adunque un instromento tondo e piano, come un astrolabio, il diametro del quale sarà due palmi o più o meno, come piace a chi vuole adoperarlo, e la circonferenza di questo istromento si partirà in otto parti giusti, e a ciascuna di quelle parti si porrà il nome d’uno degli otto venti, dividendola in trentadue altre parti picciole, che si chiameranno gradi [...] Con questo adunque misureremo ogni sorte di edificio, di che forma sia, o tondo o quadro o con istrani angoli e svoglimenti quanto dir si possa".
"L'importanza della lettera risiede nei principi enunciati all'inizio del testo, in cui Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione sostengono la necessità e l'urgenza di tutelare i monumenti antichi, per trasmetterle alle generazioni future - conclude Zaggia -. Non a caso la lettera, pubblicata alla fine del Settecento, una volta riconosciuto l'autore in Raffaello, diventa il punto di partenza per la legislazione adottata successivamente dagli Stati europei per la protezione del patrimonio artistico e culturale. Erede ultimo di questa tradizione è l'articolo 9 della nostra Costituzione".
Fonte/ source:
--- Università di Padova (20/07/2020).
ilbolive.unipd.it/it/news/raffaello-architetto-lettera-pa...
4.1). ROMA / Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020): «Raffaello 1520-1483»., "Raffaello architetto e la Lettera a Papa Leone X." S.v., Lettera a papa Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione; in: Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020).
Nella galleria fotografica potrete scorrere la lettera di Raffaello e Baladassare Castiglione a papa Leone X. Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione, Lettera a papa Leone X, s.d. [1519]. Manoscritto cartaceo costituito da 6 carte di formato 220 x 290 mm circa, ripiegate a formare fascicoletto non rilegato di 24 facciate, di cui 21 scritte, 3 bianche. ASMn, Archivio Castiglioni (acquisto 2016), busta 2, n. 12.
Fonte / source:
--- Lettera a papa Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione, in: Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020).
www.archiviodistatomantova.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/...
4.2). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. Scuderie del Quirinale (05/03 - 02/06/2020), in: Jhon Correa / Facebook (1 July 2020). www.facebook.com/jhon.correa.7549
4.3). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Lettera a papa Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione. S.v.,
Prof. Cammy Brothers, “Architecture, History, Archaeology: Drawing Ancient Rome in the Letter to Leo X & in Sixteenth-Century Practice,” in Coming About…A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew. Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums (2001): 135–40 [in PDF].
Fonte / source:
--- Prof. Cammy Brothers / academia.edu. (2020).
ROMA ARCHEOLOGICA & RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA 2020. «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. The NYT (18 Aug. 2020) & Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (13 Apr. 2020). S.v., "Raffaello architetto", in: The NYT (06 March 2020); Università di Padova (20/07/2020); Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020); Jhon Correa / Facebook (1 July 2020) & Prof. Cammy Brothers (2001). wp.me/pbMWvy-uQ
1). ROME - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. Scuderie del Quirinale (5 March - June 2020).
A monographic exhibition with over two hundred masterpieces among paintings, drawings and comparative works, dedicated to Raffaello on the 500th anniversary of his death, which took place in Rome on April 6, 1520 at the age of just 37 years old.
The exhibition, which finds inspiration particularly in the Raffaello's fundamental Roman period which consecrated him as an artist of incomparable and legendary greatness, tells his whole complex and articulated creative path with richness of detail through a vast corpus of works, for the first time exposed all together.
Many institutions involved have contributed to enrich the exhibition with masterpieces from their collections: among these, in Italy, the National Galleries of Ancient Art, the National Art Gallery of Bologna, the Museum and the Real Bosco di Capodimonte, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Brescia Museums Foundation, and abroad, in addition to the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, the National Gallery of London, the Prado Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum, the Royal Collection, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille.
Fonte / source:
--- Scuderie del Quirinale (5 March - June 2020).
www.scuderiequirinale.it/mostra/copia-di-raffaello
2.1). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483», in: Intervento delle Scuderie del Quirinale per la maratona del MiBACT "Italia chiamò" / Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (Mar 13, 2020).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8l6q9ywLxY&t=112s
2.2). ROME - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. / English / Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (Apr. 13, 2020). www.youtube.com/watch?v=s58gYvvNrKQ&t=61s
3). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. Scuderie del Quirinale (05/03 - 02/06/2020).
Il 6 aprile 1520 muore a Roma, a trentasette anni, Raffaello Sanzio, il più grande pittore del Rinascimento. La città sembra fermarsi nella commozione e nel rimpianto, mentre la notizia della scomparsa si diffonde con incredibile rapidità in tutte le corti europee. S’interrompeva non solo un percorso artistico senza precedenti, ma anche l’ambizioso progetto di ricostruzione grafica della Roma antica, commissionato dal pontefice, che avrebbe riscattato dopo secoli di oblio e rovina la grandezza e la nobiltà della capitale dei Cesari, affermando inoltre una nuova idea di tutela. Sepolto secondo le sue ultime volontà nel Pantheon, simbolo della continuità fra diverse tradizioni di culto, forse l’esempio più emblematico dell’architettura classica, Raffaello diviene immediatamente oggetto di un processo di divinizzazione, mai veramente interrotto, che ci consegna oggi la perfezione e l’armonia della sua arte.
A distanza di cinquecento anni, questa mostra racconta la sua storia e insieme quella di tutta la cultura figurativa occidentale che l’ha considerato un modello imprescindibile. La mostra, articolata secondo un’idea originale, propone un percorso che ripercorre a ritroso l’avventura creativa di Raffaello, da Roma a Firenze, da Firenze all’Umbria, fino alla nativa Urbino. Un incalzante flash-back che consente di ripensare il percorso biografico partendo dalla sua massima espansione creativa negli anni di Leone X. Risalendo il corso della vita di Raffaello di capolavoro in capolavoro, il visitatore potrà rintracciare in filigrana la prefigurazione di quel linguaggio classico che solo a Roma, assimilata nel profondo la lezione dell’antico, si sviluppò con una pienezza che non ha precedenti nella storia dell’arte. Grazie ad un numero eccezionale di capolavori provenienti dalle maggiori raccolte italiane ed europee, la mostra organizzata dalle Scuderie del Quirinale insieme con le Gallerie degli Uffizi, costituisce un’occasione ineguagliabile per osservare da vicino le invenzioni dell’Urbinate. Il suo breve, luminoso percorso ha cambiato per sempre la storia delle arti e del gusto: Raffaello rivive nelle sale dell’esposizione che lo celebra come genio universale.
Fonte / source:
--- Scuderie del Quirinale (05/03 - 02/06/2020).
www.scuderiequirinale.it/mostra/raffaello-000
3). ROME «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. The NYT (18 Aug. 2020).
ROME - In the Virtual (and Actual) Footsteps of Raphael - In Italy and beyond, the plan was to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance artist’s death with great fanfare. Then came the pandemic, and the virtual world stepped in. The NYT (18 Aug. 2020).
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Also see:
--- ROME - Rome Celebrates the Short, but Beautiful, Life of Raphael - Amid new coronavirus restrictions on museums in Italy, a blockbuster show traces the artistʼs life from finish to start. The NYT (06 March 2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/raphael-rome-coronavirus....
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This was supposed to be the year of Raphael. Five hundred years after his death at 37, the Renaissance master was due to receive the exalted rollout reserved for artistic superstars: blockbuster museum shows in Rome and London; conferences and lectures at universities and cultural centers around the world; flag-waving and wreath-laying in his Italian hometown, Urbino. There was even the tang of controversy when the advisory committee of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery resigned en masse to protest the inclusion of a precious papal portrait in the big exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale. Then the coronavirus hit and Raphael’s annus mirabilis turned into the world’s annus horribilis.
When news of the handsome young artist’s death broke in Rome on April 6, 1520, Pope Leo X wept and church bells tolled all over the city.
Half a millennium later, Rome was in lockdown along with the rest of Italy as deaths from the virus spiraled. The Scuderie show, a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of more than 200 works (120 by Raphael) from all over the world, was forced to shut its doors after just three days, despite having presold a record 70,000 tickets. Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon was supposed to be adorned with a red rose every day of 2020 to commemorate his death — but the ancient temple was also shuttered because of the virus. Lectures and conferences were canceled, postponed or moved online.
Poor Raphael. Last year, the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death came off without a hitch. Raphael’s devotees hoped that this
year’s celebrations would restore the artist’s luster, which has dimmed over the past centuries. When the world fell ill this past winter,
Raphael was one of the casualties. But all is not lost. The Scuderie show reopened on June 2 and will remain up until the end of August. The Scuderie’s president, Mario de Simoni, had expected as many as 500,000 people to see the show pre-virus, but now says the number probably won’t exceed 160,000. For those unable to attend in person, the Scuderie has released an English-language version of its excellent video, recapping the highlights of the exhibition, room by room. You’ll want to hit the pause button in Room 2 to admire two masterpieces on loan from the Louvre: a selfportrait with a friend and the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, one of the glories of Renaissance portraiture. The close-ups of his paintings of women in Room 6 testify to the artist’s passionate appreciation of feminine beauty. Other Scuderie videos (in Italian) delve into particular aspects of his genius — for instance, the jewelry worn by his female subjects, or the literary world he moved in.
Tour guides such as Clam Tours and Joy of Rome now offer virtual journeys in which small groups can zoom around Italy in the footsteps of the artist. On Sept. 13, for example, you can join the Renaissance specialist Antonio Forcellino and other Italian art experts on Clam Tour’s virtual exploration of Raphael’s incomparable frescoes of the four sibyls at Rome’s Santa Maria della Pace church ($25). Check out Joy of Rome’s free two-minute video about Raphael’s frescoes at the Villa Farnesina to see if you’d like to sign up for a two-and-a-half hour virtual tour (prices on request).
Even on a laptop screen, Raphael’s ever-evolving craftsmanship and quicksilver brilliance are apparent. “The year of Raphael has not
been ruined, but simply modified,” said Marzia Faietti, a curator of the Scuderie show. “Since many conferences and lectures have been
put off until next year, in a sense there will be two years of Raphael.”
For Italians, a silver lining of the pandemic has been the opportunity to relish their cultural treasures without the tourist hordes. “I cried,”
said Francesca Pagliaro, founder of the Joy of Rome tour company, of the experience of standing alone in the Vatican’s recently reopened
Sala di Costantino — one of four rooms in the museum frescoed by Raphael and his students, and which you can view here. “It’s the first
time in five years that I’ve seen the Stanze without scaffolding — and I had it to myself,” Ms. Pagliaro said. “It was magical.” Americans, barred from European travel for the foreseeable future, will have to make do with all this virtual magic. Not ideal — but Raphael’s magic is powerful, subtle and enduring enough to withstand the challenge.
The spirit of Urbino
I can attest to this because back in November 2019, I had the opportunity to follow in Raphael’s actual, not virtual, footsteps in Italy. I stood
shivering in the room where he was born in Urbino in 1483. I knelt at the austere tomb in a niche inside the Pantheon where he was
interred 37 years later. I feasted my eyes not only on paintings and frescoes, but on the humble church and glorious Roman chapel that
attest to his emerging genius for architecture. My pilgrimage would be impossible today — but thanks to the wonders of the internet and
the resourcefulness of Italy’s leading cultural institutions, I can remotely retrace my steps, refresh my memories and relive the
revelations.
The first revelation came, aptly, in Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale, the magnificent Renaissance palace constructed in the late 15th century by the
humanist and warlord Federico da Montefeltro that now houses the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. Judge the magnificence for yourself
by clicking through Google Images’ impressive photo archive. Another click puts you face to face with the museum’s sole work by Raphael
— the haunting portrait known as “La Muta” (“The Mute Woman”). As in so many of his portraits, Raphael posed this stern beauty against a solid dark background, eschewing any visual cues that would evoke a sense of place.
How, I wondered, did Urbino influence the art of its most famous son?
I posed this question to Peter Aufreiter, then director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, when I sat down with him in his office in the
Palazzo Ducale. Mr. Aufreiter’s response was to click on an image of Raphael’s 1507 portrait of Federico’s son, Duke Guidobaldo da
Montefeltro (now in the Uffizi), and then summon me to the window. “Look at the hillside across the valley and that house at the base of
the hill — it’s the same background Raphael put in his painting of Guidobaldo.” You can see exactly what Mr. Aufreiter meant by using the
magnify feature on this online image. Urbino’s steep green landscape, limpid light and crystalline architecture — you can also get a good sense of it here — imprinted themselves on the artist’s young mind and surface repeatedly in his work.
Even though Raphael spent most of his career in Florence and Rome, Mr. Aufreiter insists that Urbino, whose cityscape has changed little
since the Renaissance, is where you can feel his spirit most intensely.
The spirit is palpable in the artisans’ quarter surrounding the house where Raphael was born, the son of the local court painter Giovanni
Santi. Near the summit of the ski-slope-pitched Via Raffaello, just a stone’s throw from the rather pompous bronze monument of the artist
erected in 1897, the Casa Natale di Raffaello has been preserved as a museum. There’s a rather rudimentary virtual tour on its website, but
you’ll get a better feel for the interior and exterior spaces in this YouTube video. In these bare simple rooms and the deep brick courtyard
they enclose, little imagination is required to dial the scene back to Raphael’s apprenticeship in the last years of the 15th century. Giovanni
Santi’s bottega (workshop) occupied the ground floor, and the future master grew up amid the bustle of painters grinding pigments,
dabbing madonnas and trading in art supplies.
Father and son conducted a more exalted commerce at Urbino’s Palazzo Ducale. Fabricated of brick, stone and flawless geometry, this
palace was one of the glories of the Italian Renaissance — not only for its divine architecture, but for the refined elegance of the nobles
who gathered here. This video captures some facets of the palace’s perfection — the way its silhouette pierces the profile of surrounding
hills, the ideal proportions of its noble courtyard, the interplay of volume and decoration in its interior.
Baldassare Castiglione set his 1528 masterpiece, “The Book of the Courtier,” in this storied palace — and it was here that the young
Raphael polished his manners, sharpened his wit, cultivated invaluable connections and acquired a lifelong passion for classical antiquity.
Raised at court, Raphael was pursued by the powerful (Popes Julius II and Leo X), esteemed by the brilliant (Castiglione and the Urbinoborn
architect Donato Bramante were close friends) and adored by the beautiful. “Raphael was a very amorous person,” wrote Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer. It was Vasari who originated the claim that Raphael died after an overindulgence in sex with his Roman mistress, Margherita Luti. Whatever really killed him on April 6, 1520, Raphael accomplished much and rose high in his brief life — but he never ceased to be “il maestro Urbinate,” the master from Urbino.
A couch-surfing brush-for-hire.
Orphaned when his father died in 1494 (his mother had died three years earlier), Raphael spent his teenage years as an apprentice before
undertaking commissions in Umbria and Tuscany. It’s likely that he was in Florence by 1504 — not as a permanent resident but rather a
couch-surfing brush-for-hire.
Though Raphael’s footsteps in Florence are faint, there is no question that he encountered the works of both Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo here — including, very likely, the Mona Lisa, which you can view here, and the marble statue of David, which you can see
and read about on the Accademia’s detailed website. Critics and connoisseurs have been measuring this Renaissance trio against each other for 500 years now. Florence’s Uffizi Gallery is the ideal place to revisit this rivalry, both in person and virtually. After a recent renovation, paintings by the big three have been put on display in two beautifully lit adjoining rooms, and you can find them on the Uffizi website.
To my eyes, neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo ever matched the sheer painterly virtuosity of the fringed white collar that Raphael stitched around the neck of the cloth merchant Agnolo Doni, or the faint dent he incised between the young businessman’s anxious brows (use the magnify function to zoom in on this image). Agnolo’s 15-year-old bride, Maddalena Strozzi, hangs beside him, posed like the Mona Lisa with bejeweled hands clasped on her lap, but clad in a kaleidoscope of watered red silk, embroidered blue damask and shimmering gauze. Across the Arno are the glories of the Pitti Palace’s Galleria Palatina — the largest collection of Raphael’s works outside the Vatican. Unlike the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace retains the ambience and layout of an aristocratic residence: Paintings are stacked three deep in gilded high-ceilinged chambers; works are arranged idiosyncratically rather than chronologically; and the lighting can be maddeningly inadequate. Luckily for remote visitors, the lighting is much better on the palace’s website, as well as in the Italian and Spanish language videos about the museum’s treasures, posted here.
To the Eternal City
Raphael was summoned to Rome in 1508 by Pope Julius II, and he remained there until his death in 1520. Those 12 final years in the
Eternal City marked the apogee of his career. Painter, architect, entrepreneur, archaeologist, pioneer printmaker, Raphael became the
prototype of the artist as celebrity — the Andy Warhol of the Renaissance.
In pre-pandemic Rome, visitors had to endure the lines and tour groups that plagued the Vatican Museums in order to spend a few crowded moments with one of Raphael’s supreme accomplishments: the four papal chambers, known as the Stanze di Raffaello, that the artist and his workshop frescoed between 1508 and 1520. These days, in-person visitors to the reopened Vatican Museums enjoy the Stanze along with the nearby Sistine Chapel in ideal conditions. But remote visits can also be rewarding, thanks to the beautifully produced videos and virtual tours now available on the Vatican’s website. With the click of a mouse, you can hop back and forth between the virtual Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Raphael Stanze and decide for yourself which is the greater masterpiece.
“Everything he had in art, he had from me,” the curmudgeonly Michelangelo once grumbled of his younger rival. When you view their
roughly contemporaneous fresco cycles one after the other (or side by side on your computer), it’s clear that Raphael did much more than
borrow. “The School of Athens,” the most celebrated work in the Stanze, has the propulsive tension of a film paused at its climactic scene.
Cast members — a mix of classical philosophers and Renaissance savants — converse, argue, scribble, read and declaim on a sprawling,
but unified, “set” framed by classical architecture. By contrast, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, for all its bravura, reads like a series of
static cels.
After the Vatican’s Raphael Stanze, a logical next stop, whether actually or virtually, is the Villa Farnesina, with its two beguiling frescoed
loggias — “The Triumph of Galatea” in one of the loggias and “Cupid and Psyche” in the other. Despite the name, this riverside Trastevere landmark is neither a villa nor originally a Farnese property, but rather a suburban pleasure pavilion that Agostino Chigi built for himself in the early 16th century. Chigi brought in the finest artists of the day to fresco the loggias; the result is a delightful crazy quilt of mythological scenes and astrological symbols. Raphael’s “Galatea,” with her wind-whipped tresses, elegantly torqued bare torso and dolphin-powered, scallop-shell raft, has become an icon of High Renaissance grace and wit, and you can see it and other highlights in the villa’s video archive. Even if you don’t speak Italian, the short films are worth delving into for the imagery alone.
From painting to architecture
In the last phase of his career, Raphael increasingly turned from painting to architecture. Sadly, his major architectural achievements — the grand unfinished Villa Madama perched on a wooded hill two miles north of the Vatican, and the classically inspired Raphael loggias inside the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace — were inaccessible to the public even before the pandemic, and remain so. To get a sense of Raphael’s architectural genius, make (or click) your way to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in the piazza of the same name at the northwest edge of the historic center. Like so many transplants, Raphael fell under the spell of the Eternal City’s classical substructure: Rome itself, its layers, its ruins and relics, its ceaseless commerce with the past, became a source of inspiration. The chapel he designed for Chigi inside the Popolo church evinces just how deeply and fruitfully Raphael internalized this inspiration. At first glance, it’s just another church chapel — tight, high, adorned with art and inlaid with precious stone. But on this site you can glimpse the almost miraculous geometry of this space — the interplay of disc and dome, the rhythm set up between the vertical pleats of the Corinthian pilasters and the elongated triangles of the twin red marble pyramids that mark the Chigis' graves. Fittingly, the artist who devoted the final years of his career to measuring, cataloging, preserving and mapping Roman antiquities, was laid to rest in the greatest classical structure to survive the ages: the Pantheon. If a trip to the physical Pantheon is not in the cards, you can drop in with Tom Hanks as your guide in this clip from the film “Angels and Demons.” As for his tomb — an easy-to-miss niche with a statue of the Virgin, modest and vague, presiding over the glassed-in coffin — you can view it here.
Marzia Faietti, curator of Rome’s Scuderie show, has been struck by how the virus has enhanced Raphael’s reputation and heightened
awareness of the twin beauties of his art and character. “Young people in particular have reacted with an outpouring of enthusiasm and
benevolence which I really didn’t expect,” she said. “The pandemic has brought suffering to so many, but the year of Raphael will be
remembered more vividly, not despite the virus, but because of it.”
Fonte / source:
--- The NYT (18 Aug. 2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/travel/in-the-virtual-and-actu...
Foto / fonte / source:
--- ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483», et al., Scuderie del Quirinale / You-Tube (05/03 - 02/06/2020) (08/2020).
www.youtube.com/user/ScuderieQuirinale/videos
4.). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483»., in: "Raffaello architetto e la Lettera a Papa Leone X." Università di Padova (20/07/2020).
Artista dal talento straordinario, affermato, corteggiato, desiderato. Questo, ma non solo questo, fu Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520): l'esperienza come architetto, lo studio e l'impegno per la tutela degli edifici antichi di Roma sono di importanza centrale nel suo percorso, a partire dalla realizzazione di opere come la Cappella Chigi e Villa Madama, fino alla stesura, insieme a Baldassarre Castiglione, della Lettera a Papa Leone X. La grande mostra Raffaello 1520-1483, allestita alle Scuderie del Quirinale di Roma, prorogata fino al 30 agosto, dedica ampio spazio alla sua appassionata attività nel campo dell'architettura.
"Sin dai primi anni di formazione, l'interesse di Raffaello per l'architettura, in particolare per quella del mondo antico, è fortemente presente - racconta il professor Zaggia al Bo Live - Fino a sfociare in un'opera fondamentale come Lo sposalizio della vergine, in cui compare un tempio a pianta centrale sullo sfondo che interpreta in modo molto chiaro le sperimentazioni del suo tempo in ambito architettonico. A questa sperimentazione dell'architettura sul piano della rappresentazione, segue poi, con il trasferimento di Raffaello a Roma tra il 1508 e il 1509 e l'incontro con Bramante, un interesse concreto rivolto alla costruzione e alla progettazione vera e propria. Da questo punto di vista, il rapporto che si instaura tra Raffaello e Bramante per lo studio dell'architettura antica, conservata all'interno della città, diventa fondamentale punto di partenza per un approfondimento che aprirà strade nuove all'architettura successiva. Con la morte di figure di riferimento, come Bramante appunto, Raffaello diventa la personalità più importante che opera nel campo dell'architettura all'interno dei grandi cantieri pontifici. Si apre così una stagione breve in cui le opere realizzate da Raffaello saranno numerose e importanti: alcune realmente costruite, altre solo progettate".
In questo contesto si inserisce la Lettera a Papa Leone X, scritta nel 1519 da Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione, il raffinato autore del Cortegiano (ai due, uniti da amicizia e stima reciproca, è dedicata una mostra al Palazzo Ducale di Urbino, dal titolo Baldassarre Castiglione e Raffaello.Volti e momenti della civiltà di corte), sul tema della tutela e dello studio degli edifici antichi. La premessa al documento è rintracciabile nei fatti avvenuti qualche anno prima: nell'estate del 1515, infatti, Leone X nomina Raffaello præfectus marmorum et lapidum omnium (dal 1514 l'Urbinate già dirigeva la fabbrica di San Pietro). La lettera dedicatoria, la cui prima edizione venne inserita all'interno delle opere di Baldassare Castiglione pubblicate a Padova nel 1733, si apre così: "Sono molti, padre santissimo, i quali misurando col loro piccolo giudizio le cose grandissime che delli romani circa l’arme, e della città di Roma circa al mirabile artificio, ai ricchi ornamenti e alla grandezza degli edifici si scrivono, quelle più presto stimano favolose che vere. Ma altrimenti a me suole avvenire; perché considerando dalle ruine, che ancor si veggono di Roma, la divinità di quegli animi antichi, non istimo fuor di ragione il credere che molte cose a noi paiono impossibili, che ad essi erano facilissime".
Nella prima parte Raffaello esalta la grandezza del passato, dichiara le proprie competenze in ambito architettonico e invita il pontefice a intervenire per garantire la tutela dei monumenti antichi, da salvare dal degrado. Nella seconda invece si concentra su questione più tecniche, introducendo anche la descrizione di uno strumento per la misurazione degli edifici antichi di sua invenzione: "Farassi adunque un instromento tondo e piano, come un astrolabio, il diametro del quale sarà due palmi o più o meno, come piace a chi vuole adoperarlo, e la circonferenza di questo istromento si partirà in otto parti giusti, e a ciascuna di quelle parti si porrà il nome d’uno degli otto venti, dividendola in trentadue altre parti picciole, che si chiameranno gradi [...] Con questo adunque misureremo ogni sorte di edificio, di che forma sia, o tondo o quadro o con istrani angoli e svoglimenti quanto dir si possa".
"L'importanza della lettera risiede nei principi enunciati all'inizio del testo, in cui Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione sostengono la necessità e l'urgenza di tutelare i monumenti antichi, per trasmetterle alle generazioni future - conclude Zaggia -. Non a caso la lettera, pubblicata alla fine del Settecento, una volta riconosciuto l'autore in Raffaello, diventa il punto di partenza per la legislazione adottata successivamente dagli Stati europei per la protezione del patrimonio artistico e culturale. Erede ultimo di questa tradizione è l'articolo 9 della nostra Costituzione".
Fonte/ source:
--- Università di Padova (20/07/2020).
ilbolive.unipd.it/it/news/raffaello-architetto-lettera-pa...
4.1). ROMA / Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020): «Raffaello 1520-1483»., "Raffaello architetto e la Lettera a Papa Leone X." S.v., Lettera a papa Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione; in: Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020).
Nella galleria fotografica potrete scorrere la lettera di Raffaello e Baladassare Castiglione a papa Leone X. Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione, Lettera a papa Leone X, s.d. [1519]. Manoscritto cartaceo costituito da 6 carte di formato 220 x 290 mm circa, ripiegate a formare fascicoletto non rilegato di 24 facciate, di cui 21 scritte, 3 bianche. ASMn, Archivio Castiglioni (acquisto 2016), busta 2, n. 12.
Fonte / source:
--- Lettera a papa Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione, in: Archivio di Stato di Mantova (2020).
www.archiviodistatomantova.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/...
4.2). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Raffaello a Roma è un percorso a ritroso dal 1520 al 1483. Scuderie del Quirinale (05/03 - 02/06/2020), in: Jhon Correa / Facebook (1 July 2020). www.facebook.com/jhon.correa.7549
4.3). ROMA - «Raffaello 1520-1483». Lettera a papa Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione. S.v.,
Prof. Cammy Brothers, “Architecture, History, Archaeology: Drawing Ancient Rome in the Letter to Leo X & in Sixteenth-Century Practice,” in Coming About…A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew. Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums (2001): 135–40 [in PDF].
Fonte / source:
--- Prof. Cammy Brothers / academia.edu. (2020).
Slug, or land slug, is a common name for any apparently shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word slug is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no shell, a very reduced shell, or only a small internal shell, particularly sea slugs and semi-slugs (this is in contrast to the common name snail, which applies to gastropods that have a coiled shell large enough that they can fully retract their soft parts into it).
Various taxonomic families of land slugs form part of several quite different evolutionary lineages, which also include snails. Thus, the various families of slugs are not closely related, despite a superficial similarity in the overall body form. The shell-less condition has arisen many times independently as an example of convergent evolution, and thus the category "slug" is polyphyletic.
Taxonomy
Of the six orders of Pulmonata, two – the Onchidiacea and Soleolifera – solely comprise slugs. A third group, the Sigmurethra, contains various clades of snails, semi-slugs (i.e. snails whose shells are too small for them to retract fully into), and slugs.[1] The taxonomy of this group is in the process of being revised in light of DNA sequencing. It appears that pulmonates are paraphyletic and basal to the opisthobranchs, which are a terminal branch of the tree. The family Ellobiidae are also polyphyletic.
Subinfraorder Orthurethra
Superfamily Achatinelloidea Gulick, 1873
Superfamily Cochlicopoidea Pilsbry, 1900
Superfamily Partuloidea Pilsbry, 1900
Superfamily Pupilloidea Turton, 1831
Subinfraorder Sigmurethra
Superfamily Acavoidea Pilsbry, 1895
Superfamily Achatinoidea Swainson, 1840
Superfamily Aillyoidea Baker, 1960
Superfamily Arionoidea J.E. Gray in Turnton, 1840
Superfamily Athoracophoroidea
Family Athoracophoridae
Superfamily Orthalicoidea
Subfamily Bulimulinae
Superfamily Camaenoidea Pilsbry, 1895
Superfamily Clausilioidea Mörch, 1864
Superfamily Dyakioidea Gude & Woodward, 1921
Superfamily Gastrodontoidea Tryon, 1866
Superfamily Helicoidea Rafinesque, 1815
Superfamily Helixarionoidea Bourguignat, 1877
Superfamily Limacoidea Rafinesque, 1815
Superfamily Oleacinoidea H. & A. Adams, 1855
Superfamily Orthalicoidea Albers-Martens, 1860
Superfamily Plectopylidoidea Moellendorf, 1900
Superfamily Polygyroidea Pilsbry, 1894
Superfamily Punctoidea Morse, 1864
Superfamily Rhytidoidea Pilsbry, 1893
Family Rhytididae
Superfamily Sagdidoidera Pilsbry, 1895
Superfamily Staffordioidea Thiele, 1931
Superfamily Streptaxoidea J.E. Gray, 1806
Superfamily Strophocheiloidea Thiele, 1926
Superfamily Parmacelloidea
Superfamily Zonitoidea Mörch, 1864
Superfamily Quijotoidea Jesús Ortea and Juan José Bacallado, 2016
Family Quijotidae
Description
Tentacles: Like other pulmonate land gastropods, the majority of land slugs have two pairs of 'feelers' or tentacles on their head. The upper pair is light-sensing and has eyespots at the ends, while the lower pair provides the sense of smell. Both pairs are retractable in stylommatophoran slugs, but contractile in veronicellid slugs.
Mantle: On top of the slug, behind the head, is the saddle-shaped mantle. In stylommatophoran slugs, on the right-hand side of the mantle is a respiratory opening, the pneumostome, which is easier to see when open; also on the right side at the front are the genital opening and anus. Veronicellid slugs have a mantle covering the whole dorsal part of the body, they have no respiratory opening, and the anus opens posteriorly.
Tail: The part of a slug behind the mantle is called the 'tail'.
Keel: Some species of slugs, for example Tandonia budapestensis, have a prominent ridge running over their back along the middle of the tail (sometimes along the whole tail, sometimes only the posterior part).
Foot: The bottom side of a slug, which is flat, is called the 'foot'. Like almost all gastropods, a slug moves by rhythmic waves of muscular contraction on the underside of its foot. It simultaneously secretes a layer of mucus that it travels on, which helps prevent damage to the foot tissues. Around the edge of the foot in some slugs is a structure called the 'foot fringe'.
Vestigial shell: Most slugs retain a remnant of their shell, which is usually internalized. This organ generally serves as storage for calcium salts, often in conjunction with the digestive glands. An internal shell is present in the Limacidae and Parmacellidae. Adult Philomycidae, Onchidiidae and Veronicellidae lack shells.
Physiology
An active Ambigolimax slug in Fremont, California
Slugs' bodies are made up mostly of water and, without a full-sized shell, their soft tissues are prone to desiccation. They must generate protective mucus to survive. Many species are most active just after a rain because of the moist ground or during nighttime. In drier conditions, they hide in damp places such as under tree bark, fallen logs, rocks and manmade structures, such as planters, to help retain body moisture.[3] Like all other gastropods, they undergo torsion (a 180° twisting of the internal organs) during development. Internally, slug anatomy clearly shows the effects of this rotation—but externally, the bodies of slugs appear more or less symmetrical, except the pneumostome, which is on one side of the animal, normally the right-hand side.
Slugs produce two types of mucus: one is thin and watery, and the other thick and sticky. Both kinds are hygroscopic. The thin mucus spreads from the foot's centre to its edges, whereas the thick mucus spreads from front to back. Slugs also produce thick mucus that coats the whole body of the animal. The mucus secreted by the foot contains fibres that help prevent the slug from slipping down vertical surfaces.
The "slime trail" a slug leaves behind has some secondary effects: other slugs coming across a slime trail can recognise the slime trail as produced by one of the same species, which is useful in finding a mate. Following a slime trail is also part of the hunting behaviour of some carnivorous slugs. Body mucus provides some protection against predators, as it can make the slug hard to pick up and hold by a bird's beak, for example, or the mucus itself can be distasteful. Some slugs can also produce very sticky mucus which can incapacitate predators and can trap them within the secretion. Some species of slug, such as Limax maximus, secrete slime cords to suspend a pair during copulation.
Reproduction
Slugs are hermaphrodites, having both female and male reproductive organs. Once a slug has located a mate, they encircle each other and sperm is exchanged through their protruded genitalia. A few days later, the slugs lay approximately thirty eggs in a hole in the ground, or beneath the cover of an object such as a fallen log.
Apophallation has been reported only in some species of banana slug (Ariolimax) and one species of Deroceras. In the banana slugs, the penis sometimes becomes trapped inside the body of the partner. Apophallation allows the slugs to separate themselves by one or both of the slugs chewing off the other's or its own penis. Once the penis has been discarded, banana slugs are still able to mate using only the female parts of the reproductive system.
In a temperate climate, slugs usually live one year outdoors. In greenhouses, many adult slugs may live for more than one year.
Ecology
Slugs play an important role in the ecosystem by eating decaying plant material and fungi. Most carnivorous slugs on occasion also eat dead specimens of their own kind.
Feeding habits
Most species of slugs are generalists, feeding on a broad spectrum of organic materials, including leaves from living plants, lichens, mushrooms, and even carrion. Some slugs are predators and eat other slugs and snails, or earthworms.
Lehmannia feeding on a small fruit in Mexico City
Slugs can feed on a wide variety of vegetables and herbs, including flowers such as petunias, chrysanthemums, daisies, lobelia, lilies, dahlias, narcissus, gentians, primroses, tuberous begonias, hollyhocks, marigolds, and fruits such as strawberries. They also feed on carrots, peas, apples, and cabbage that are offered as a sole food source.
Slugs from different families are fungivores. It is the case in the Philomycidae (e. g. Philomycus carolinianus and Phylomicus flexuolaris) and Ariolimacidae (Ariolimax californianus), which respectively feed on slime molds (myxomycetes) and mushrooms (basidiomycetes).[16] Species of mushroom producing fungi used as food source by slugs include milk-caps, Lactarius spp., the oyster mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus and the penny bun, Boletus edulis. Other species pertaining to different genera, such as Agaricus, Pleurocybella and Russula, are also eaten by slugs. Slime molds used as food source by slugs include Stemonitis axifera and Symphytocarpus flaccidus. Some slugs are selective towards certain parts or developmental stages of the fungi they eat, though this is very variable. Depending on the species and other factors, slugs eat only fungi at specific stages of development. Moreover, in other cases, whole mushrooms can be eaten, without any selection or bias towards ontogenetic stages.
Predators
Slugs are preyed upon by various vertebrates and invertebrates. The predation of slugs has been the subject of studies for at least a century. Because some species of slugs are considered agricultural pests, research investments have been made to discover and investigate potential predators in order to establish biological control strategies.
Vertebrates
Slugs are preyed upon by virtually every major vertebrate group. With many examples among reptiles, birds, mammals, amphibians and fish, vertebrates can occasionally feed on, or be specialised predators of, slugs. Fish that feed on slugs include the brown trout (Salmo trutta), which occasionally feeds on Arion circumscriptus, an arionid slug. Similarly, the shortjaw kokopu (Galaxias postvectis) includes slugs in its diet. Amphibians such as frogs and toads have long been regarded as important predators of slugs. Among them are species in the genus Bufo, Rhinella and Ceratophrys.
Reptiles that feed on slugs include mainly snakes and lizards. Some colubrid snakes are known predators of slugs. Coastal populations of the garter snake, Thamnophis elegans, have a specialised diet consisting of slugs, such as Ariolimax, while inland populations have a generalized diet. One of its congeners, the Northwestern garter snake (Thamnophis ordinoides), is not a specialized predator of slugs but occasionally feeds on them. The redbelly snake (Storeria occipitomaculata) and the brown snake (Storeria dekayi) feed mainly but not solely on slugs, while some species in the genus Dipsas (e.g. Dipsas neuwiedi) and the common slug eater snake (Duberria lutrix), are exclusively slug eaters. Several lizards include slugs in their diet. This is the case in the slowworm (Anguis fragilis), the bobtail lizard (Tiliqua rugosa), the she-oak skink (Cyclodomorphus casuarinae) and the common lizard (Zootoca vivipara).
Birds that prey upon slugs include common blackbirds (Turdus merula), starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), rooks (Corvus frugilegus), jackdaws (Corvus monedula), owls, vultures and ducks. Studies on slug predation also cite fieldfares (feeding on Deroceras reticulatum), redwings (feeding on Limax and Arion), thrushes (on Limax and Arion ater), red grouse (on Deroceras and Arion hortensis), game birds, wrynecks (on Limax flavus), rock doves and charadriiform birds as slug predators.
Mammals that eat slugs include foxes, badgers and hedgehogs.
Invertebrates
Beetles in the family Carabidae, such as Carabus violaceus and Pterostichus melanarius, are known to feed on slugs.Ants are a common predator of slugs; some ant species are deterred by the slug's mucus coating, while others such as driver ants will roll the slug in dirt to absorb its mucus.
Parasites and parasitoids
Slugs are parasitised by several organisms, including acari and a wide variety of nematodes. The slug mite, Riccardoella limacum, is known to parasitise several dozen species of molluscs, including many slugs, such as Deroceras reticulatum, Arianta arbustorum, Arion ater, Arion hortensis, Limax maximus, Tandonia budapestensis, Milax gagates, and Tandonia sowerbyi. R. limacum can often be seen swarming about their host's body, and live in its respiratory cavity.
Several species of nematodes are known to parasitise slugs. The nematode worms Agfa flexilis and Angiostoma limacis respectively live in the salivary glands and rectum of Limax maximus. Species of widely known medical importance pertaining to the genus Angiostrongylus are also parasites of slugs. Both Angiostrongylus costaricensis and Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a meningitis-causing nematode, have larval stages that can only live in molluscs, including slugs, such as Limax maximus.
Insects such as dipterans are known parasitoids of molluscs. To complete their development, many dipterans use slugs as hosts during their ontogeny. Some species of blow-flies (Calliphoridae) in the genus Melinda are known parasitoids of Arionidae, Limacidae and Philomycidae. Flies in the family Phoridae, specially those in the genus Megaselia, are parasitoids of Agriolimacidae, including many species of Deroceras. House flies in the family Muscidae, mainly those in the genus Sarcophaga, are facultative parasitoids of Arionidae.
Behavior
Slug contracts itself and retracts its tentacles when attacked
A brown and yellow spotted slug curled up into a tight ball so that its head is withdrawn completely, its mantle edge and tail are nearly touching, and none of its foot surface is exposed
The alarm response posture of the Kerry slug, which is found only in this species
When attacked, slugs can contract their body, making themselves harder and more compact and more still and round. By doing this, they become firmly attached to the substrate. This, combined with the slippery mucus they produce, makes slugs more difficult for predators to grasp. The unpleasant taste of the mucus is also a deterrent. Slugs can also incapacitate predators through the production of a highly sticky and elastic mucus which can trap predators in the secretion.
Some species present different response behaviors when attacked, such as the Kerry slug. In contrast to the general behavioral pattern, the Kerry slug retracts its head, lets go of the substrate, rolls up completely, and stays contracted in a ball-like shape. This is a unique feature among all the Arionidae, and among most other slugs. Some slugs can self-amputate (autotomy) a portion of their tail to help the slug escape from a predator. Some slug species hibernate underground during the winter in temperate climates, but in other species, the adults die in the autumn.
Intra- and inter-specific agonistic behavior is documented, but varies greatly among slug species. Slugs often resort to aggression, attacking both conspecifics and individuals from other species when competing for resources. This aggressiveness is also influenced by seasonality, because the availability of resources such as shelter and food may be compromised due to climatic conditions. Slugs are prone to attack during the summer, when the availability of resources is reduced. During winter, the aggressive responses are substituted by a gregarious behavior.
Human relevance
The great majority of slug species are harmless to humans and to their interests, but a small number of species are serious pests of agriculture and horticulture. They can destroy foliage faster than plants can grow, thus killing even fairly large plants. They also feed on fruits and vegetables prior to harvest, making holes in the crop, which can make individual items unsuitable to sell for aesthetic reasons, and can make the crop more vulnerable to rot and disease. Excessive buildup of slugs within some wastewater treatment plants with inadequate screening have been found to cause process issues resulting in increased energy and chemical use.
In a few rare cases, humans have developed Angiostrongylus cantonensis-induced meningitis from eating raw slugs. Live slugs that are accidentally eaten with improperly cleaned vegetables (such as lettuce), or improperly cooked slugs (for use in recipes requiring larger slugs such as banana slugs), can act as a vector for a parasitic infection in humans.
Prevention
As control measures, baits are commonly used in both agriculture and the garden. In recent years, iron phosphate baits have emerged and are preferred over the more toxic metaldehyde, especially because domestic or wild animals may be exposed to the bait. The environmentally safer iron phosphate has been shown to be at least as effective as baits. Methiocarb baits are no longer widely used. Parasitic nematodes (Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita) are a commercially available biological control method that are effective against a wide range of common slug species. The nematodes are applied in water and actively seek out slugs in the soil and infect them, leading to the death of the slug. This control method is suitable for use in organic growing systems.
Other slug control methods are generally ineffective on a large scale, but can be somewhat useful in small gardens. These include beer traps [de], diatomaceous earth, crushed eggshells, coffee grounds, and copper. Salt kills slugs by causing water to leave the body owing to osmosis but this is not used for agricultural control as soil salinity is detrimental to crops. Conservation tillage worsens slug infestations. Hammond et al. 1999 find maize/corn and soybean in the US to be more severely affected under low till because this increases organic matter, thus providing food and shelter.
Note: this photo was published in an Apr 3, 2011 in a blog titled "Friends in Law."
Moving into 2012, the photo was published in a Feb 29, 2012 blog titled "Should Fighting Couples Stay Together or Call it Quits?"
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I have no idea if these women are MIT students, or visitors, or just random tourists. But I'd like to think that the woman on the left is a professor, and that the woman on the right is a student, who just needs someone to listen to her and pay attention to her for a few minutes...
If so, then the place has changed for the better. When I was there, everyone was so intensely focused on their studies that they rarely paid any attention to one another at all. People were not hostile or unfriendly; they were just tuned out.
In my case, for example, I counted my course-credits at the end of the first semester of my senior year, and discovered that I had finished all my requirements, and had enough credits to graduate (mostly because I had advance-placed out of freshman math and chemistry). So I simply didn't show up for the second semester -- didn't register, and didn't bother telling anyone. (I got a computer programming job at DEC, but that's another story.)
The amazing this is that nobody noticed, until two weeks before graduation -- at which point my so-called "faculty advisory" went ballistic, tracked me down, and asked what on earth I thought I was doing. After a little yelling and shouting, he too confirmed that I had enough credits to graduate -- at which point he completely lost interest in me.
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It was a lifetime ago that I stumbled off a Greyhound bus in downtown Boston, a clueless 17 year old kid with two suitcases that held all my worldly possessions. I dragged them out to the street (no roll-aboard suitcases in those ancient times), and asked a taxi driver to take me to an address in Cambridge that I had scribbled on a scrap of paper: 77 Massachusetts Ave.
"Aye," the driver muttered, in a dialect that never did become familiar during the next several years. "SebendySebenMassAve."
When he dropped me off, I noticed two things. First, enormous stone steps leading up to the entrance to an imposing granite building. And second, a long line of scraggly, sloppily-dressed young men stretching from the building's entrance down toward the street where the taxi had dropped me. Aha, I thought: I'm not the only one who forgot to fill out the official form requesting a dorm room.
Welcome to MIT.
I waited in line for two hours before being assigned temporarily, with two other equally absent-minded, newly-arrived MIT students, to sleep on mattresses in an East Campus dorm room that had initially been assigned as a "single" room to an understandably annoyed fellow from Cincinnati. One of the other temporary misfits, whom we immediately nicknamed "Filthy Pierre," had just arrived from Paris with nothing but one large, heavy duffel bag that he dragged into the room. Its contents consisted of miscellaneous telephone parts, which he dumped on the floor and kicked under the bed before wandering out of the room to explore Boston. (He had not showered in weeks, and he was eventually expelled for burning a cross on MIT's Great Lawn on Easter morning. But that's another story.)
Thus began my four-year experience at what many still consider America's premiere scientific/engineering university. That I survived and graduated is a minor miracle; and while I'll hint at the adventures along the way, in this Flickr set, you'll have to look elsewhere for the details...
I continued to live in Cambridge for a couple of years after I graduated; took a couple of graduate courses in AI and computer science, taught a couple summer MIT classes to innocent high school students (one of whom challenged me to write the value of pi on the blackboard, to 100 places, from memory - which I did), took full advantage of MIT's athletic facilities, and 25-cent Saturday-nite movies at Kresge auditorium, which always featured the enormously popular RoadRunner cartoons, and occasionally walked through the same halls and pathways that I had first explored as an overwhelmed undergraduate student. But then I got a new job, moved to New York City, got married, settled down, and began raising family. After that, I typically travelled to Boston two or three times a year on business trips, but never seemed to have time to come back to MIT for a casual visit.
But one of the advantages of a near-fanatical devotion to the hobby of photography is that you begin to appreciate that all of the experiences you internalized and took for granted need to be photographed -- for posterity, if nothing else. Some of my most vivid memories of MIT, which we took for granted - like the huge,red, neon, flashing/pulsating "Heinz 57" sign out on the northern edge of the (Briggs) athletic fields -- are gone. Some of the legendary professors and deans have died and commemorative plaques have been erected in their honor. And there's a whole lot of new stuff - mostly new buildings and laboratories, whose specific purpose is a mystery to me - that I just have to shrug and accept.
But the basic campus is still there. And the memories are just as vivid as they were, so many years ago. I can't say that I captured them all in this Flickr set; the photos were taken at sunset one evening, and dawn the following morning. But they'll give you an idea of what it was like, a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ... and what it's still like today.
Chitra, also spelled as Citra, is an Indian genre of art that includes painting, sketch and any art form of delineation. The earliest mention of the term Chitra in the context of painting or picture is found in some of the ancient Sanskrit texts of Hinduism and Pali texts of Buddhism
NOMENCLATURE
Chitra (IAST: Citra, चित्र) is a Sanskrit word that appears in the Vedic texts such as hymns 1.71.1 and 6.65.2 of the Rigveda. There, and other texts such as Vajasaneyi Samhita, Taittiriya Samhita, Satapatha Brahmana and Tandya Brahmana, Chitra means "excellent, clear, bright, colored, anything brightly colored that strikes the eye, brilliantly ornamented, extraordinary that evokes wonder". In the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, it means "picture, sktech, dilineation", and is presented as a genre of kala (arts). Many texts generally dated to the post-4th-century BCE period, use the term Chitra in the sense of painting, and Chitrakara as a painter. For example, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini in verse 3.2.21 of his Astadhyayi highlights the word chitrakara in this sense. Halls and public spaces to display paintings are called chitrasalas, and the earliest known mention of these are found in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
A few Indian regional texts such as Kasyapa silpa refer to painting by others words. For example, abhasa – which literally means "semblance, shining forth", is used in Kasyapa-shilpa to mean as a broader category of painting, of which chitra is one of three types. The verses in section 4.4 of the Kasyapa-silpa state that there are three types of images – those which are immovable (walls, floor, terracota, stucco), movable, and those which are both movable-immovable (stone, wood, gems).[5] In each of these three, states Kasyapa-shipa, are three classes of expression – ardhacitra, citra, and citra-abhasa. Ardhacitra is an art form where a high relief is combined with painting and parts of the body is not seen (it appears to be emerging out of the canvas). The Citra is the form of picture artwork where the whole is represented with or without integrating a relief. Citrabhasha is the form where an image is represented on a canvas or wall with colors (painting). However, states Commaraswamy, the word Abhasa has other meanings depending on the context. For example, in Hindu texts on philosophy, it implies the "field of objective experience" in the sense of the intellectual image internalized by a person during a reading of a subject (such as an epic, tale or fiction), or one during a meditative spiritual experience.
In some Buddhist and Hindu texts on methods to prepare a manuscript (palm leaf) or a composition on a cloth, the terms lekhya and alekhya are also used in the context of a chitra. More specifically, alekhya is the space left while writing a manuscript leaf or cloth, where the artist aims to add a picture or painting to illustrate the text.
HISTORY
The earliest explicit reference to painting in an Indian text is found in verse 4.2 of the Maitri Upanishad where it uses the phrase citrabhittir or "like a painted wall". The Indian art of painting is also mention in a number of Buddhist Pali suttas, but with the modified spelling of Citta. This term is found in the context of either a painting, or painter, or painted-hall (citta-gara) in Majjhima Nikaya 1.127, Samyutta Nikaya 2.101 and 3.152, Vinaya 4.289 and others. Among the Jain texts, it is mentioned in Book 2 of the Acaranga Sutra as it explains that Jaina monk should not indulge in the pleasures of watching a painting.
The Kamasutra, broadly accepted to have been complete by about the 4th-century CE, recommends that the young man should surprise the girl he courts with gifts of color boxes and painted scrolls. The Viddhasalabhanjika – another Hindu kama- and kavya–text uses chitra-simile in verse 1.16, as "pictures painted by the god of love, with the brush of the mind and the canvas of the heart".
The nature of a chitra (painting), how the viewer's mind projects a two dimensional artwork into a three dimensional representation, is used by Asanga in Mahayana Sutralamkara – a 3rd to 5th-century Sanskrit text of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, to explain "non-existent imagination" as follows:
Just as in a picture painted according to rules, there are neither projections nor depressions and yet we see it in three dimensions, so in the non-existent imagination there is no phenomenal differentiation, and yet we behold it.
— Mahayana Sutralamkara 13.7, Translated in French by Sylvain Levi
According to Yoko Taniguchi and Michiyo Mori, the art of painting the caves at the c. 6th-century Buddhas of Bamiyan site in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban Muslims in the late 1990s, were likely introduced to this region from India along with the literature on early Buddhism.
TEXTS
There are many important dedicated Indian treatises on chitra. Some of these are chapters within a larger encyclopedia-like text. These include:
Chitrasutras, chapters 35–43 within the Hindu text Vishnudharmottara Purana (the standard, and oft referred to text in the Indian tradition)
Chitralaksana of Nagnajit (a classic on classical painting, 5th-century CE or earlier making it the oldest known text on Indian painting; but the Sanskrit version has been lost, only version available is in Tibet and it states that it is a translation of a Sanskrit text)
Samarangana Sutradhara (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Aparajitaprccha (mostly architecture treatise, contains a large section on paintings)
Manasollasa (an encyclopedia, contains chapters on paintings)
Abhilashitartha chinatamani
Sivatatva ratnakara
Chitra Kaladruma
Silpa ratna
Narada silpa
Sarasvati silpa
Prajapati silpa
Kasyapa silpa
These and other texts on chitra not only discuss the theory and practice of painting, some of them include discussions on how to become a painter, the diversity and the impact of a chitra on viewers, of aesthetics, how the art of painting relates to other arts (kala), methods of preparing the canvas or wall, methods and recipes to make color pigments. For example, the 10th-century Chitra Kaladruma presents recipe for making red color paint from the resin of lac insects. Other colors for the historic frescoes found in India, such as those in the Ajanta Caves, were obtained from nature. They mention earthy and mineral (inorganic) colorants such as yellow and red ochre, orpigment, green celadonite and ultramarine blue (lapis lazuli). The use of organic colorants prepared per a recipe in these texts have been confirmed through residue analysis and modern chromatographic techniques.
THEORY
The Indian concepts of painting are described in a range of texts called the shilpa shastras. These typically begin by attributing this art to divine sources such as Vishvakarma and ancient rishis (sages) such as Narayana and Nagnajit, weaving some mythology, highlighting chitra as a means to express ideas and beauty along with other universal aspects, then proceed to discuss the theory and practice of painting, sketching and other related arts. Manuscripts of many these texts are found in India, while some are known to be lost but are found outside India such as in Tibet and Nepal. Among these are the Citrasutras in the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana manuscripts discovered in India, and the Citralaksana manuscript discovered in Tibet (lost in India). This theory include early Indian ideas on how to prepare a canvas or substrate, measurement, proportion, stance, color, shade, projection, the painting's interaction with light, the viewer, how to captivate the mind, and other ideas.
According to the historic Indian tradition, a successful and impactful painting and painter requires a knowledge of the subject – either mythology or real life, as well as a keen sense of observation and knowledge of nature, human behavior, dance, music, song and other arts. For example, section 3.2 of Visnudharmottara Purana discusses these requirements and the contextual knowledge needed in chitra and the artist who produces it. The Chitrasutras in the Vishnudharmottara Purana state that the sculpture and painting arts are related, with the phrase "as in Natya, so in Citra". This relationship links them in rasa (aesthetics) and as forms of expression.
THE PAINTING
A chitra is a form of expression and communication. According to Aparajitaprccha – a 12th-century text on arts and architecture, just like the water reflects the moon, a chitra reflects the world. It is a rupa (form) of how the painter sees or what the painter wants the viewer to observe or feel or experience.
A good painting is one that is alive, breathing, draws in and affects the viewer. It captivates the minds of viewers, despite their diversity. Installed in a sala (hall or room), it enlivens the space.
The ornaments of a painting are its lines, shading, decoration and colors, states the 6th-century Visnudharmottara Purana. It states that there are eight gunas (merits, features) of a chitra that the artist must focus on: posture; proportion; the use of the plumb line; charm; detail (how much and where); verisimilitude; kshaya (loss, foreshortening) and; vrddhi (gain). Among the dosas (demerits, faults) of a painting and related arts, states Chitrasutra, are lines that are weak or thick, absence of variety, errors in scale (oversized eyes, lips, cheeks), inconsistency across the canvas, deviations from the rules of proportion, improper posture or sentiment, and non-merging of colors.
LIMBS OF THE PAINTING
Two historical sets called "chitra anga", or "limbs of painting" are found in Indian texts. According to the Samarangana Sutradhara – an 11th-century Sanskrit text on Hindu architecture and arts, a painting has eight limbs:
Vartika – manufacture of brushes
Bhumibandhana – preparation of base, plaster, canvas
Rekhakarma – sketching
Varnakarma – coloring
Vartanakarma – shading
lekhakarana – outlining
Dvikakarma – second and final lining
Lepyakarma – final coating
According to Yashodhara's Jayamangala, a Sanskrit commentary on Kamasutra, there are sadanga (six limbs)[note 5] in the art of alekhyam and chitra (drawing and painting):
Rupa-bhedah, or form distinction; this requires a knowledge of characteristic marks, diversity, manifested forms that distinguish states of something in the same genus/class
Pramanani, or measure; requires knowledge of measurement and proportion rules (talamana)
Bhava yojanam, or emotion and its joining with other parts of the painting; requires understanding and representing the mood of the subject
Lavanya yojanam, or rasa, charm; requires understanding and representing the inner qualities of the subject
Sadrsyam, or resemblance; requires knowledge of visual correspondence across the canvas
Varnika-bhanga or color-pigment-analysis; requires knowledge how colors distribute on the canvas and how they visually impact the viewer.
These six limbs are arranged stylistically in two ways. First as a set of compound (Rupa-bhedah and Varnika-bhanda), a set of joining (middle two yojnam), and a set of single words (Pramanani and Sadrsyam). Second, states Victor Mair, the six limbs in this Hindu text are paired in a set of differentiation skills (first two), then a pair of aesthetic skills, and finally a pair of technical skills. These limbs parallel the 12th-century Six principles of Chinese painting of Xie He. {refn|group=note|The Hua Chi of Teng Ch'un, a 12th-century Chinese text, mentions the Buddhist temple of Nalanda with frescoes about the Buddha painted inside. It states that the Indian Buddhas look different from those painted by Chinese, as the Indian paintings have Buddha with larger eyes, their ears are curiously stretched and the Buddhas have their right shoulder bare. It then states that the artists first make a drawing of the picture, then paint a vermilion or gold colored base. It also mentions the use of ox-glue and a gum produced from peach trees and willow juice, with the artists preferring the latter. According to Coomaraswamy, the ox-glue in the Indian context mentioned in the Chinese text is probably the same as the recipe found in the Sanskrit text Silparatna, one where the base medium is produced from boiling buffalo skin in milk, followed by drying and blending process.
The six limbs in Jayamangala likely reflect the earliest and more established Hindu tradition for chitra. This is supported by the Chitrasutras found in the Vishnudharmottara Purana. They explicitly mention pramanani and lavanya as key elements of a painting, as well as discuss the other four of the six limbs in other sutras. The Chitrasutra chapters are likely from about the 4th or 5th-century. Numerous other Indian texts touch upon the elements or aspects of a chitra. For example, the Aparajitaprccha states that the essential elements of a painting are: citrabhumi (background), the rekha (lines, sketch), the varna (color), the vartana (shading), the bhusana (decoration) and the rasa (aesthetic experience).
THE PAINTER
The painter (chitrakara, rupakara) must master the fundamentals of measurement and proportions, state the historic chitra texts of India. According to these historic texts, the expert painter masters the skills in measurement, characteristics of subjects, attributes, form, relative proportion, ornament and beauty, states Isabella Nardi – a scholar known for her studies on chitra text and traditions of India. According to the Chitrasutras, a skilled painter needs practice, and is one who is able to paint neck, hands, feet, ears of living beings without ornamentation, as well as paint water waves, flames, smoke, and garments as they get affected by the speed of wind. He paints all types of scenes, ranging from dharma, artha and kama. A painter observes, then remembers, repeating this process till his memory has all the details he needs to paint, states Silparatna. According to Sivatattva Ratnakara, he is well versed in sketching, astute with measurements, skilled in outlining (hastalekha), competent with colors, and ready to diligently mix and combine colors to create his chitra. The painter is a creative person, with an inner sense of rasa (aesthetics).
THE VIEWER
The painter should consider the diversity of viewers, states the Indian tradition of chitra. The experts and critics with much experience with paintings study the lines, shading and aesthetics, the uninitiated visitors and children enjoy the vibrancy of colors, while women tend to be attracted to the ornamentation of form and the emotions. A successful painter tends to captivate a variety of minds. A painter should remember that the visual and aesthetic impact of a painting triggers different responses in different audiences.
The Silparatna – a Sanskrit text on the arts, states that the painting should reflect its intended place and purpose. A theme suitable for a palace or gateway is different from that in a temple or the walls of a home. Scenes of wars, misery, death and suffering are not suitable paintings within homes, but these can be important in a chitrasala (museum with paintings). Auspicious paintings with beautiful colors such as those that cheer and enliven a room are better for homes, states Silparatna.
PRACITICE
According to the art historian Percy Brown, the painting tradition in India is ancient and the persuasive evidence are the oldest known murals at the Jogimara caves. The mention of chitra and related terms in the pre-Buddhist Vedic era texts, the chitra tradition is much older. It is very likely, states Brown, the pre-Buddhist structures had paintings in them. However, the primary building material in ancient India was wood, the colors were organic materials and natural pigments, which when combined with the tropical weather in India would naturally cause the painting to fade, damage and degrade over the centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that sample paintings and historic evidence for chitra practice are unusual. The few notable surviving examples of chitra are found hidden in caves, where they would be naturally preserved a bit better, longer and would be somewhat protected from the destructive effects of wind, dust, water and biological processes.
Some notable, major surviving examples of historic paintings include:
Murals at Jogimara cave (eight panels of murals, with a Brahmi inscription, 2nd or 1st century BCE, Hindu), oldest known ceiling paintings in India in remote Ramgarh hills of northern Chhattisgarh, below on wall of this cave is a Brahmi inscription in Magadhi language about a girl named Devadasi and a boy named Devadina (either they were lovers and wrote a love-graffiti per one translation, or they were partners who together converted natural caves here into a theatre with painted walls per another translation)
Mural at Sitabhinji Group of Rock Shelters (c. 400 CE Ravanachhaya mural with an inscription, near a Shiva temple in remote Odisha, a non-religious painting), the oldest surviving example of a tempera painting in eastern states of India
Murals at Ajanta caves (Jataka tales, Buddhist), 5th-century CE, Maharashtra
Murals at Badami Cave Temples (Hindu), 6th-century CE, Karnataka (secular paintings along with one of the earliest known painting of a Hindu legend about Shiva and Parvati inside a Vaishnava cave)
Murals at Bagh caves (Hallisalasya dance, Buddhist or Hindu), Madhya Pradesh
Murals at Ellora caves (Flying vidyadharas, Jain), Maharashtra
Frescoes at Sittanavasal cave (Nature scenes likely representing places of Tirthankara sermons, Jain), Tamil Nadu
Frescoes at Thirunadhikkara cave temple (Flowers and a woman, likely a scene of puja offering to Ganesha, another of Vishnu, Hindu), Travancore region, Kerala-Tamil Nadu
Paintings at the Brihadisvara temple (Dancer, Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Manuscript paintings (numerous states such as Gujarat, Kashmir, Kerala, Odisha, Assam; also Nepal, Tibet; Buddhist, Jain, Hindu
Vijayanagara temples (Hindu), Karnataka
Chidambaram temple (Hindu), Tamil Nadu
Chitrachavadi (Hindu, a choultry–mandapa near Madurai with Ramayana frescoes)
Pahari paintings (Hindu), Himachal Pradesh and nearby regions
Rajput paintings (Hindu), Rajasthan
Deccan paintings (Hindu, Jain)
Kerala paintings (Hindu)
Telangana paintings (Hindu)
Mughal paintings (Indo-Islamic)
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Kalamkari (Hindu)
Pattas (Jain, Hindu)
WIKIPEDIA