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In the year 1526 as Babur and his Mughal forces advanced towards Panipat, he received an embassy representing Rana Sanga of Mewar, the most powerful Hindu ruler in the region.[1] The Rajputs agreed to form an alliance with the Mughals against the Lodi dynasty and advance their forces towards Agra; in return Babur was to grant Kalpi, Dholpur and Biana to Rana Sanga.[1] After Babur and the Mughals defeated Ibrahim Lodi at the Battle of Panipat, he refused to hand over anything to the Rajputs.[1]
Angered by the first Mughal Emperor Babur's response, Rana Sanga allied himself with Raja Khanzada Hasan Khan of Mewat, a Muslim Yaduvanshi Rajput leader of the Muslims. Raja Khanzada Hasan Khan Mewati had been providing support and refuge to rebels such as Sikandar Lodi and particularly Mahmud Lodi.[1]
Silhadi, a Hindu, is noted to have come forward representing Rana Sanga in an effort to negotiate with the first Mughal Emperor Babur. Rana Sanga demanded that the lands around Agra be submitted to his authority and as the negotiations concluded, Babur had realized that the overconfident and numerically superior Rana Sanga would indeed attack. In March, 1527, the Hindus had gathered an army of around 80,000 men and began to mobilize against Babur.
This event instigated the gathering of the quarrelsome Mughals towards the command of Babur, but this time the Mughals sought no riches from their new enemies, they were now firm in their quest for revenge accompanied by a strong religious zeal. As Babur began to mobilize against the well prepared and heavily armed forces of Rana Sanga, approximately 20,000 Muslim Rajputs began a march towards Biana, under the command of Khanzada Hasan Khan Realizing his vast numerical weakness Babur withdrew most of his forces from Agra, he ordered his son Humayun to withdraw from his expedition at Jaunpur and start gathering Mughal forces.[1][1]
Babur realized that Khanzada Hasan Khan Mewati, the ruler of Mewat, a region lying south of Delhi, spread across south Haryana and northeast Rajasthan could be influenced to abandon his quest alongside Rana Sanga.[1] Although Khanzada Hasan Khan was a formidable rival, by reputation he was evidently respected among native Indian Muslims and therefore Babur made an attempt to appease the Muslim Rajput ruler by releasing Khanzada Naher Khan the son of khanzada Hasan Khan Mewati, who had been captured at the Battle of Panipat. Babur released Khanzada Naher Khan with the traditional Mughal Kaftan's of honor and with the finest Arabian horses in order to gain the good will of Raja Khanzada Hasan Khan Mewati and attempt to woo him away from Rana Sanga.[1]
Although khanzada Hasan Khan was pleased by the release of his son he however refused to abandon his state of warfare and hostilities against Babur, and saw the release of his son Khanzada Nahar Khan as an exposed weakness of the Mughals. Outraged by khanzada Hasan Khan's refusal to change his stance, in a politically motivated move Babur, declared him an apostate (although there is no evidence that Raja Khanzada Hasan Khan Mewati ever abandoned Islam). Despite his harsh declarations Babur however was even more concerned about advance of the sheer 100,000 mainly Hindu Rajputs, whom Babur had begun to commonly refer to as the "Infidels".[4]
Dedicated in 1940, the Lithuanian Room's decorations represent the community's love for their homeland and farming. The wallpaper is made of hand-spun linen in a geometric pattern called the "path of the birds". The wood blackboard frame, door and wall decorations were carved with motifs of greenery native to Lithuania.
The friezes near the ceiling were inscribed with names of famous and important Lithuanians. You may notice the black wood professor's chair at a corner of the room. This chair was made from precious bog oak, which is oak wood that had been submerged into bogs for years to obtain the dark hue. Wood submerged into bogs is not ready to be retrieved for use until several generations later.
The lead window frames were also hand-made to create the sunburst patterns, a reminder of the importance of nature's blessings in an agricultural society.
Near the window is a wood carving of a mother at a spinning wheel with her child. This is known as the School of Sorrows and is a traditional symbol of Lithuanian language and culture preservation during times of oppression. The story tells a mother teaching her child the Lithuanian language and history at home when the Russian invaders forbade that at school.
Finally, the back wall of the classroom is a fresco showing Two Kings who protect the most precious things: community, village life and land. Beyond the dark forest, the bright stars represent hope and light even in dark difficult times.
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The Nationality Rooms are located in the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning building. The rooms are gifts to the university from Pittsburgh's ethnic communities. Each room has been designed to represent the culture of the nation represented. The rooms function as university classrooms and are not open all the time for the public to explore particularly during school terms. Visitors are advised to contact the University for opening times and guided tours.
www.nationalityrooms.pitt.edu/
The very first Nationality Room opened in 1938, and new rooms are still being planned now. There are currently 30 Nationality Rooms at the Cathedral of Learning.
Forged in the secretive Viper Program, the Jaculus Advanced Strategic Space Superiority Starfighter represents a quantum leap in the naval technology of the Imperial Magikstrate. The fighter is lightning fast in both vacuum and atmosphere, its thrusters augmented by a pair of aether-void engines mounted in the wings. Armed with 4 interceptor cannons, a centrally mounted heavy Cuprite-12 Shattercannon, and versatile smart torpedoes, the Jaculus is a threat to both fighters and larger ships. The Jaculus has proven indispensible in the Konvergence Brikverse in both escort and independent roles, and has become the fighter of choice for a new generation of aces.
This fighter was started for NoVVember 2019 but I only recently finished it after a lot of good feedback from various builders. I thought the Vic Viper would be a great frame for the Imperial Magikstrate, a faction designed by Red Rover that blends high technology with magic light transparent blue crystals. The faction is gorgeous and pretty much anything you build in this aesthetic is fantastic. The name Jaculus was provided by Bookwyrm, referring to a winged serpent from Greek and Roman mythology that divebombed people from trees.
portfolio shoot with model Vera in Bohuslän, Sweden
Vera is represented by Avenuemodeller
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Kailasa Temple represents Siva's heaven on a Himalayan glacier, a place no mortal can reach.
Ellora (Marathi: वेरूळ Vērūḷa) is an archaeological site, 30 km (19 mi) from the city of Aurangabad in the Indian state of Maharashtra built by the Rashtrakuta dynasty (Kannada: ರಾಷ್ಟ್ರಕೂಟ). Well-known for its monumental caves, Ellora is a World Heritage Site. Ellora represents the epitome of Indian rock-cut architecture. The 34 "caves" – actually structures excavated out of the vertical face of the Charanandri hills. Buddhist, Hindu and Jain rock-cut temples and viharas and mathas were built between the 5th century and 10th century. The 12 Buddhist (caves 1–12), 17 Hindu (caves 13–29) and 5 Jain (caves 30–34) caves, built in proximity, demonstrate the religious harmony prevalent during this period of Indian history.
Las tablas representan dos de los martirios aplicados al santo: el descuartizamiento de los miembros en el aspa de madera, y tormento de fuego sobre parrillas, tal y como fue martirizado San Lorenzo, otro diácono de la Tarraconense que la tradición sitúa nacido en Huesca. Probablemente las historias del martirio contadas de ambos se cruzaron en algún momento, y por eso la parrilla también aparece entre las diferentes torturas aplicadas a San Vicente en Valencia.
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Por la similitud de la obra con el estilo de Giotto, se ha llegado a la conclusión que el artista del retablo de san Vicente debía haberse formado en Italia, o que lo más probable es que fuera de origen italiano. Algunos estudiosos han identificado al maestro de Estopiñán con un pintor llamado Rómulo de Florencia que se encuentra documentado en Huesca, donde en el año 1367 recibe un encargo para la realización de un retablo por parte de los dominicos de esta ciudad.
El conjunto de tablas, pintadas al temple y doradas con pan de oro, forma un tríptico y procede de la población de Estopiñán del Castillo (provincia de Huesca).
La pieza narra la historia de san Vicente diácono y del obispo san Valero, de Zaragoza. Ambos fueron apresados en el año 303, castigados y conducidos a Valencia. Allí a Valero se le desterró y Vicente sufrió toda clase de martirios hasta su muerte.
San Vicente está representado, como imagen principal, ocupando la totalidad de la tabla central; las escenas de su martirio están narradas en las tablas laterales repartidas en seis registros cada una. Este personaje recibió una importante devoción en la Península Ibérica, principalmente por tierras aragonesas, de las que se piensa era originario (Huesca), y en la zona valenciana que también recorrió el santo.
El panel central representa la imagen majestuosa de san Vicente vestido con la dalmática de diácono con adornos grabados en oro igual que su nimbo. En sus manos sostiene los atributos de la palma del martirio y el libro del Evangelio. En la parte inferior aparecen en un tamaño diminuto los donantes, un caballero vestido con malla que sostiene su pavés y un fraile dominico, ambos se encuentran de rodillas y de perfil orando.
En los áticos del tríptico pueden verse, en la calle central, un Calvario con Cristo en la cruz acompañado de María y San Juan y en las tablas laterales un grupo de las Marías ante el sepulcro y el Noli me tangere o la aparición de Cristo resucitado a Magdalena.
St Albans Cathedral, also known as the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban, is a Church of England cathedral church within St Albans, England. At 84 metres (276 ft), its nave is the longest of any cathedral in England. With much of its present architecture dating from Norman times, it was formerly known as St Albans Abbey before it became a cathedral in 1877. It is the second longest cathedral in the United Kingdom (after Winchester). Local residents often call it "the abbey", although the present cathedral represents only the church of the old Benedictine abbey.
The abbey church, although legally a cathedral church, differs in certain particulars from most of the other cathedrals in England: it is also used as a parish church, of which the dean is rector. He has the same powers, responsibilities and duties as the rector of any other parish.
Alban was a pagan living in the Roman city of Verulamium, now Verulamium Park, in St Albans, in Hertfordshire, England, about 22 miles (35 km) north of London along Watling Street. Before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, local Christians were being persecuted by the Romans. Alban sheltered their priest, Saint Amphibalus, in his home and was converted to the Christian faith by him. When the soldiers came to Alban's house looking for the priest, Alban exchanged cloaks with the priest and let himself be arrested in his place. Alban was taken before the magistrate, where he avowed his new Christian faith and was condemned for it. He was beheaded, according to legend, on the spot where the cathedral named after him now stands. The site is on a steep hill and legend has it that his head rolled down the hill after being cut off and that a well sprang up at the point where it stopped.
A well certainly exists today and the road up to the cathedral is named Holywell Hill. However the current well structure is no older than the late 19th century and it is thought that the name of the street derives from the "Halywell" river and "Halywell Bridge", not from the well.
The date of Alban's execution is a matter of some debate and is generally given as "circa 250"—scholars generally suggest dates of 209, 254 or 304.
History of the abbey and cathedral
A memoria over the execution point and holding the remains of Alban existed at the site from the mid-4th century (possibly earlier); Bedementions a church and Gildas a shrine. Bishop Germanus of Auxerre visited in 429 and took a portion of the apparently still bloody earth away. The style of this structure is unknown; the 13th century chronicler Matthew Paris (see below) claimed that the Saxons destroyed the building in 586.
Saxon buildings
Offa II of Mercia, who ruled in the 8th century, is said to have founded the Benedictine abbey and monastery at St Albans. All later religious structures are dated from the foundation of Offa's abbey in 793. The abbey was built on Holmhurst Hill—now Holywell Hill—across the River Ver from the ruins of Verulamium. Again there is no information to the form of the first abbey. The abbey was probably sacked by the Danes around 890 and, despite Paris's claims, the office of abbot remained empty from around 920 until the 970s when the efforts of Dunstanreached the town.
There was an intention to rebuild the abbey in 1005 when Abbot Ealdred was licensed to remove building material from Verulamium. With the town resting on clay and chalk the only tough stone is flint. This was used with a lime mortar and then either plastered over or left bare. With the great quantities of brick, tile and other stone in Verulamium the Roman site became a prime source of building material for the abbeys, and other projects in the area, up to the 18th century. Sections demanding worked stone used Lincolnshire limestone (Barnack stone) from Verulamium, later worked stones include Totternhoe freestone from Bedfordshire, Purbeck marble, and different limestones (Ancaster, Chilmark, Clipsham, etc.).
Renewed Viking raids from 1016 stalled the Saxon efforts and very little from the Saxon abbey was incorporated in the later forms.
The nave. The north wall (left) features a mix of Norman arches dating back to 1077 and arches in the Early English style of 1200.
Norman abbey
Much of the current layout and proportions of the structure date from the first Norman abbot, Paul of Caen (1077–1093). The 14th abbot, he was appointed by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc.
Building work started in the year of Abbot Paul's arrival. The design and construction was overseen by the Norman Robert the Mason. The plan has very limited Anglo-Saxon elements and is clearly influenced by the French work at Cluny, Bernay, and Caen and shares a similar floor plan to Saint-Étienne and Lanfranc's Canterbury—although the poorer quality building material was a new challenge for Robert and he clearly borrowed some Roman techniques, learned while gathering material in Verulamium. To take maximum use of the hilltop the abbey was oriented to the south-east. The cruciform abbey was the largest built in England at that time, it had a chancel of four bays, a transept containing seven apses, and a nave of ten bays—fifteen bays long overall. Robert gave particular attention to solid foundations, running a continuous wall of layered bricks, flints and mortar below and pushing the foundations down to twelve feet to hit bedrock. Below the crossing tower special large stones were used.
The tower was a particular triumph—it is the only 11th century great crossing tower still standing in England. Robert began with special thick supporting walls and four massive brick piers. The four-level tower tapers at each stage with clasping buttresses on the three lower levels and circular buttresses on the fourth stage. The entire structure masses 5,000 tons and is 144 feet high. The tower was probably topped with a Norman pyramidal roof; the current roof is flat. The original ringing chamber had five bells—two paid for by the Abbot, two by a wealthy townsman, and one donated by the rector of Hoddesdon. None of these bells has survived.
There was a widespread belief that the abbey had two additional, smaller towers at the west end. No remains have been found.
The monastic abbey was completed in 1089 but not consecrated until Holy Innocents' Day, 1115, (28 Dec) by the Archbishop of Rouen. King Henry I attended as did many bishops and nobles.
A nunnery (Sopwell Priory) was founded nearby in 1140.
Internally the abbey was bare of sculpture, almost stark. The plaster walls were coloured and patterned in parts, with extensive tapestries adding colour. Sculptural decoration was added, mainly ornaments, as it became more fashionable in the 12th century—especially after the Gothic style arrived in England around 1170.
In the current structure the original Norman arches survive principally under the central tower and on the north side of the nave. The arches in the rest of the building are Gothic, following medieval rebuilding and extensions, and Victorian era restoration.
The abbey was extended in the 1190s by Abbot John de Cella (also known as John of Wallingford) (1195–1214); as the number of monks grew from fifty to over a hundred, the abbey was extended westwards with three bays added to the nave. The severe Norman west front was also rebuilt by Hugh de Goldclif—although how is uncertain, it was very costly but its 'rapid' weathering and later alterations have erased all but fragments. A more prominent shrine and altar to Saint Amphibalus were also added. The work was very slow under de Cella and was not completed until the time of Abbot William de Trumpington (1214–35). The low Norman tower roof was demolished and a new, much higher, broached spire was raised, sheathed in lead.
The St Albans Psalter (ca. 1130–45) is the best known of a number of important Romanesque illuminated manuscripts produced in the Abbey scriptorium. Later, Matthew Paris, a monk at St Albans from 1217 until his death in 1259, was important both as a chronicler and an artist. Eighteen of his manuscripts survive and are a rich source of contemporary information for historians.
Nicholas Breakspear was born near St Albans and applied to be admitted to the abbey as a novice, but he was turned down. He eventually managed to be accepted into an abbey in France. In 1154 he was elected Pope Adrian IV, the only English Pope there has ever been. The head of the abbey was confirmed as the premier abbot in England also in 1154.
13th to 15th centuries
An earthquake shook the abbey in 1250 and damaged the eastern end of the church. In 1257 the dangerously cracked sections were knocked down—three apses and two bays. The thick Presbytery wall supporting the tower was left. The rebuilding and updating was completed during the rule of Abbot Roger de Norton (1263–90).
On 10 October 1323 two piers on the south side of the nave collapsed dragging down much of the roof and wrecking five bays. Mason Henry Wy undertook the rebuilding, matching the Early English style of the rest of the bays but adding distinctly 14th century detailing and ornaments. The shrine to St Amphibalus had also been damaged and was remade.
Abbey Gateway, now part of St. Albans School.
Richard of Wallingford, abbot from 1297 to 1336 and a mathematician and astronomer, designed a celebrated clock, which was completed by William of Walsham after his death, but apparently destroyed during the reformation.
A new gateway, now called the Abbey Gateway, was built to the abbey grounds in 1365, which was the only part of the monastery buildings (besides the church) to survive the dissolution, later being used as a prison and now part of St Albans School. The other monastic buildings were located to the south of the gateway and church.
In the 15th century a large west window of nine main lights and a deep traced head was commissioned by John of Wheathampstead. The spire was reduced to a 'Hertfordshire spike', the roof pitch greatly reduced and battlements liberally added. Further new windows, at £50 each, were put in the transept by Abbot Wallingford (also known as William of Wallingford), who also had a new high altar screen made.
Dissolution and after
After the death of Abbot Ramryge in 1521 the abbey fell into debt and slow decay under three weak abbots. At the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries and its surrender on 5 December 1539 the income was £2,100 annually. The abbot and remaining forty monks were pensioned off and then the buildings were looted. All gold, silver and gilt objects were carted away with all other valuables; stonework was broken and defaced and graves opened to burn the contents.
The abbey became part of the diocese of Lincoln in 1542 and was moved to the diocese of London in 1550. The buildings suffered—neglect, second-rate repairs, even active damage. Richard Lee purchased all the buildings, except the church and chapel and some other Crown premises, in 1550. Lee then began the systematic demolition for building material to improve Lee Hall at Sopwell. In 1551, with the stone removed, Lee returned the land to the abbot. The area was named Abbey Ruins for the next 200 years or so.
In 1553 the Lady chapel became a school, the Great Gatehouse a town jail, some other buildings passed to the Crown, and the Abbey Church was sold to the town for £400 in 1553 by King Edward VI to be the church of the parish.
The cost of upkeep fell upon the town, although in 1596 and at irregular intervals later the Archdeacon was allowed to collect money for repairs by Brief in the diocese. After James I visited in 1612 he authorised another Brief, which collected around £2,000—most of which went on roof repairs. The English Civil War slashed the monies spent on repairs, while the abbey was used to hold prisoners of war and suffered from their vandalism, as well as that of their guards. Most of the metal objects that had survived the Dissolution were also removed and other ornamental parts were damaged in Puritan sternness. Another round of fund-raising in 1681–84 was again spent on the roof, repairing the Presbytery vault. A royal grant from William and Mary in 1689 went on general maintenance, 'repairs' to conceal some of the unfashionable Gothic features, and on new internal fittings. There was a second royal grant from William in 1698.
By the end of the 17th century the dilapidation was sufficient for a number of writers to comment upon it.
In 1703, from 26 November to 1 December, the Great Storm raged across southern England; the abbey lost the south transept window which was replaced in wood at a cost of £40. The window was clear glass with five lights and three transoms in an early Gothic Revival style by John Hawgood. Other windows, although not damaged in the storm, were a constant drain on the abbey budget in the 18th century.
A brief in 1723–24, seeking £5,775, notes a great crack in the south wall, that the north wall was eighteen inches from vertical, and that the roof timbers were decayed to the point of danger. The money raised was spent on the nave roof over ten bays.
Another brief was not issued until 1764. Again the roof was rotting, as was the south transept window, walls were cracked or shattered in part and the south wall had subsided and now leant outwards. Despite a target of £2,500 a mere £600 was raised.
In the 1770s the abbey came close to demolition; the expense of repairs meant a scheme to destroy the abbey and erect a smaller church almost succeeded.
A storm in 1797 caused some subsidence, cracking open graves, scattering pavement tiles, flooding the church interior and leaving a few more arches off-vertical.
19th century
The Wallingford Screen of c. 1480—the statues are Victorian replacements (1884–89) of the originals, destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when the screen itself was also damaged. Statues of St Alban and St Amphibalus stand on either side of the altar.
This century was marked with a number of repair schemes. The abbey received some money from the 1818 "Million Act", and in 1820 £450 was raised to buy an organ—a second-hand example made in 1670.
The major efforts to revive the abbey church came under four men—L. N. Cottingham, Rector H. J. B. Nicholson, and, especially, George Gilbert Scott and Edmund Beckett, first Baron Grimthorpe.
In February 1832 a portion of the clerestory wall fell through the roof of the south aisle, leaving a hole almost thirty feet long. With the need for serious repair work evident the architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham was called in to survey the building. His Survey was presented in 1832 and was worrying reading: everywhere mortar was in a wretched condition and wooden beams were rotting and twisting. Cottingham recommended new beams throughout the roof and a new steeper pitch, removal of the spire and new timbers in the tower, new paving, ironwork to hold the west transept wall up, a new stone south transept window, new buttresses, a new drainage system for the roof, new ironwork on almost all the windows, and on and on. He estimated a cost of £14,000. A public subscription of £4,000 was raised, of which £1,700 vanished in expenses. With the limited funds the clerestory wall was rebuilt, the nave roof re-leaded, the tower spike removed, some forty blocked windows reopened and glazed, and the south window remade in stone.
Henry Nicholson, rector from 1835 to 1866, was also active in repairing the abbey church—as far as he could, and in uncovering lost or neglected Gothic features.
In 1856 repair efforts began again; £4,000 was raised and slow moves started to gain the abbey the status of cathedral. George Gilbert Scottwas appointed the project architect and oversaw a number of works from 1860 until his death in 1878.
Scott began by having the medieval floor restored, necessitating the removal of tons of earth, and fixing the north aisle roof. From 1872–77 the restored floors were re-tiled in matching stone and copies of old tile designs. A further 2,000 tons of earth were shifted in 1863 during work on the foundation and a new drainage system. In 1870 the tower piers were found to be badly weakened with many cracks and cavities. Huge timbers were inserted and the arches filled with brick as an emergency measure. Repair work took until May 1871 and cost over £2,000. The south wall of the nave was now far from straight; Scott reinforced the north wall and put in scaffolding to take the weight of the roof off the wall, then had it jacked straight in under three hours. The wall was then buttressed with five huge new masses and set right. Scott was lauded as "saviour of the Abbey." From 1870–75 around £20,000 was spent on the abbey.
In 1845 St Albans was transferred from the Diocese of Lincoln to the Diocese of Rochester. Then, in 1875, the Bishopric of St Albans Act was passed and on 30 April 1877 the See of St Albans was created, which comprises about 300 churches in the counties of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. The then Bishop of Rochester, the Right Revd Dr Thomas Legh Claughton, elected to take the northern division of his old diocese and on 12 June 1877 was enthroned first Bishop of St Albans, a position he held until 1890. He is buried in the churchyard on the north side of the nave.
George Gilbert Scott was working on the nave roof, vaulting and west bay when he died on 27 March 1878. His plans were partially completed by his son, John Oldrid Scott, but the remaining work fell into the hands of Lord Grimthorpe, whose efforts have attracted much controversy—Nikolaus Pevsner calling him a "pompous, righteous bully." However, he donated much of the immense sum of £130,000 the work cost.
Whereas Scott's work had clearly been in sympathy with the existing building, Grimthorpe's plans reflected the Victorian ideal. Indeed, he spent considerable time dismissing and criticising the work of Scott and the efforts of his son.
Grimthorpe first reinstated the original pitch of the roof, although the battlements added for the lower roof were retained. Completed in 1879, the roof was leaded, following on Scott's desires.
1805 engraving of the west front of the abbey showing the lost Wheathampstead window.
His second major project was the most controversial. The west front, with the great Wheathampstead window, was cracked and leaning, and Grimthorpe, never more than an amateur architect, designed the new front himself—attacked as dense, misproportioned and unsympathetic: "His impoverishment as a designer ... [is] evident"; "this man, so practical and ingenious, was utterly devoid of taste ... his great qualities were marred by arrogance ... and a lack of historic sense". Counter proposals were deliberately substituted by Grimthorpe for poorly drawn versions and Grimthorpe's design was accepted?. During building it was considerably reworked in order to fit the actual frontage and is not improved by the poor quality sculpture. Work began in 1880 and was completed in April 1883, having cost £20,000.
The Lady Chapel at the east end of the cathedral.
Grimthorpe was noted for his aversion to the Perpendicular—to the extent that he would have sections he disliked demolished as "too rotten" rather than remade. In his reconstruction, especially of windows, he commonly mixed architectural styles carelessly (see the south aisle, the south choir screen and vaulting). He spent £50,000 remaking the nave. Elsewhere he completely rebuilt the south wall cloisters, with new heavy buttresses, and removed the arcading of the east cloisters during rebuilding the south transept walls. In the south transept he completely remade the south face, completed in 1885, including the huge lancet window group—his proudest achievement—and the flanking turrets; a weighty new tiled roof was also made. In the north transept Grimthorpe had the Perpendicular window demolished and his design inserted—a rose window of circles, cusped circles and lozenges arrayed in five rings around the central light, sixty-four lights in total, each circle with a different glazing pattern.
Grimthorpe continued through the Presbytery in his own style, adapting the antechapel for Consistory Courts, and into the Lady Chapel. After a pointed lawsuit with Henry Hucks Gibbs, first Baron Aldenham over who should direct the restoration, Grimthorpe had the vault remade and reproportioned in stone, made the floor in black and white marble (1893), and had new Victorian arcading and sculpture put below the canopy work. Externally the buttresses were expanded to support the new roof, and the walls were refaced.
As early as 1897, Grimthorpe was having to return to previously renovated sections to make repairs. His use of over-strong cement led to cracking, while his fondness for ironwork in windows led to corrosion and damage to the surrounding stone.
Grimthorpe died in 1905 and was interred in the churchyard. He left a bequest for continuing work on the buildings.
During this century the name St Albans Abbey was given to one of the town's railway stations.
20th century
John Oldrid Scott (died 1913) (George Gilbert Scott's son), despite frequent clashes with Grimthorpe, had continued working within the cathedral. Scott was a steadfast supporter of the Gothic revival and designed the tomb of the first bishop; he had a new bishop's throne built (1903), together with commemorative stalls for Bishop Festing and two Archdeacons, and new choir stalls. He also repositioned and rebuilt the organ (1907). Further work was interrupted by the war.
A number of memorials to the war were added to the cathedral, notably the painting The Passing of Eleanor by Frank Salisbury (stolen 1973) and the reglazing of the main west window, dedicated in 1925.
Following the Enabling Act of 1919 control of the buildings passed to a Parochial Church Council (replaced by the Cathedral Council in 1968), who appointed the woodwork specialist John Rogers as Architect and Surveyor of the Fabric. He uncovered extensive death watch beetledamage in the presbytery vault and oversaw the repair (1930–31). He had four tons of rubbish removed from the crossing tower and the main timbers reinforced (1931–32), and invested in the extensive use of insecticide throughout the wood structures. In 1934, the eight bells were overhauled and four new bells added to be used in the celebration of George V's jubilee.
Cecil Brown was architect and surveyor from 1939 to 1962. At first he merely oversaw the lowering of the bells for the war and established a fire watch, with the pump in the slype. After the war, in the 1950s, the organ was removed, rebuilt and reinstalled and new pews added. His major work was on the crossing tower. Grimthorpe's cement was found to be damaging the Roman bricks: every brick in the tower was replaced as needed and reset in proper mortar by one man, Walter Barrett. The tower ceiling was renovated as were the nave murals. Brown established the Muniments Room to gather and hold all the church documents.
In 1972, to encourage a closer link between celebrant and congregation, the massive nine-ton pulpit along with the choir stalls and permanent pews was dismantled and removed. The altar space was enlarged and improved. New 'lighter' wood (limed oak) choir stalls were put in, and chairs replaced the pews. A new wooden pulpit was acquired from a Norfolk church and installed in 1974. External floodlighting was added in 1975.
A major survey in 1974 revealed new leaks, decay and other deterioration, and a ten-year restoration plan was agreed. Again the roofing required much work. The nave and clerestory roofs were repaired in four stages with new leading. The nave project was completed in 1984 at a total cost of £1.75 million. The clerestory windows were repaired with the corroded iron replaced with delta bronze and other Grimthorpe work on the clerestory was replaced. Seventy-two new heads for the corbel table were made. Grimthorpe's west front was cracking, again due to the use originally of too strong a mortar, and was repaired.
A new visitors' centre was proposed in 1970. Planning permission was sought in 1973; there was a public inquiry and approval was granted in 1977. Constructed to the south side of the cathedral close to the site of the original chapter house of the abbey, the new 'Chapter House' cost around £1 million and was officially opened on 8 June 1982 by Queen Elizabeth. The main building material was 500,000 replica Roman bricks.
Other late 20th-century works include the restoration of Alban's shrine, with a new embroidered canopy, and the stained glass designed by Alan Younger for Grimthorpe's north transept rose window, unveiled in 1989 by Diana, Princess of Wales.
Modern times
The Bishop is the Right Reverend Alan Smith, installed in September 2009. The Venerable Jonathan Smith is Archdeacon of St Albans, installed in October 2008. On 2 July 2004, the Very Reverend Canon Dr Jeffrey John became the ninth Dean of the Cathedral.
Robert Runcie, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was bishop of St Albans from 1970 to 1980 and returned to live in the city after his retirement; he is commemorated by a gargoyle on the Cathedral as well as being buried in the graveyard. Colin Slee, former Dean of Southwark Cathedral, was sub-dean at St Albans under Runcie and then Dean, Peter Moore. The bishop's house is in Abbey Mill Lane, St Albans, as is the house of the Bishop of Hertford. The Reverend Canon Eric James, Chaplain Extraordinary to HM the Queen, was Canon at St Albans for many years.
West window by Hugh Easton 1955, representing Christ in Glory seated upon the globe and surrounded by significant figures from ecclesiastical history. Perhap's Easton's finest work, the overall effect is very much a mid 20th century version of a Last Judgement, which aptly is reflected by the recently uncovered medieval interpretation of the subject in the mural painted at the opposite end of the nave.
Holy Trinity would have been the star attraction in any other town or city, it is a majestic cruciform 15th century Perpendicular church with a tapering central tower and spire, the second of Coventry's famous 'Three Spires'. However it has always been overshadowed by larger neighbours, having been encircled by no less than three separate cathedrals through it's history, a unique distinction! Holy Trinity was founded by the monks of the adjoining priory to act as a parish church for it's lay tenants, thus it is ironic that it has long outlived the parent building.
The earliest part is the north porch, which dates from the 13th century, but the majority of the building dates from a more ambitious phase in 15th century Perpendicular style. The 15th century rebuilding has given us the present cruciform arrangement with small transepts and extra chapels on the north side giving an overall roughly rectangular footprint. These chapels were some of many in the church that served the city's separate guilds in medieval times.
The church has gone through much restoration, most notably the rebuilding of it's spire after it was blown down in a storm in 1665. The east end of the chancel was extended in 1786 (in sympathetic style) and much of the exterior was refaced in the early 19th century in then fashionable Bath stone (which clashes with the original red sandstone).
The church luckily escaped major damage during the Coventry Blitz in 1940, largely thanks to the vigilance of Canon Clitheroe and his team of firewatchers who spent a perilous night on the roof tackling incendaries. The main loss was the Victorian stained glass in the east and west windows, which were replaced with much more fetching glass in the postwar restoration.
The most recent restoration involved the uncovering of the 15th century Doom painting over the chancel arch in 2004. Hidden under blackened varnish since it's rediscovery in the early Victorian period, it has now been revealed to be one of the most complete and important medieval Last Judgement murals in the country. There is further painting contemporary with this on the exquisite nave ceiling, painted a beautiful dusty blue with large kneeling angels flanking passion shields on every rafter.
There are only a handful of monuments and most of the furnishings date from G.G.Scott's 1850s restoration (as does the magnificent vaulted ceiling high above the crossing) but there are some notable medieval survivals in the rare stone pulpit and the brass eagle lectern, both 15th century, along with a fine set of misericords originating from the former Whitefriars monastery church. Just a few fragments of medieval glass survive in the north west chapel.
The church is happily normally open and welcoming to visitors every day.
For more detail on this church see it's entry on the Warwickshire Churches website below:-
warwickshirechurches.weebly.com/coventry---holy-trinity.html
This little video represents success at a project that I have tried to make several times over many years with no joy until recently.
A cloud chamber is a device that allows you to see the paths of otherwise invisible radioactivity. A particle (in this case alpha) shoots through the air creating a lot of ionized atoms. If the conditions are right , with supersaturated alcohol vapor. The alcohol condenses on the ions creating a cloud.
I've tried building a chamber with dry ice several times with no results. A few years back I built a chamber using peltier elements. It got plenty cold but I never saw a single track.
A few days ago I grabbed the peltier system for another try but one of the leads on the unit had fallen off (cheap components) and since I had thermal epoxied everything together that was that.
I was actually kind of mad at the whole thing at this point but decided to try a simple liquid nitrogen chamber that I had tried a few years ago (and failed). For some stupid reason it worked perfectly. Loads of tracks.
So today I spent some time trying to get a good video. To do that I cut a hole in the side of the plastic chamber and covered it with a good glass window. Keeping things reasonably clean if hard, it reminded me of schlieren photography. Every dust particle shows up like a little searchlight.
The video shows the run from start to end. The chamber cools down fairly quickly because of the liquid nitrogen, but I still speeded up parts of the video to keep it short. I wanted to show how adding a clearing voltage to the chamber can really add to the number of tracks that you can see.
The chamber is really a wonder to see in person. the tracks look like fairy tale effects, ghostly and real at the same time.
Cheers.
☠ ☠
-->> Representing another interesting turning point in the 2003 series as the actually, somewhat short-lived, "futuristic" and lighter TMNT: FAST FORWARD line marked the start of a shift in the Toys and animated worlds of the Turtles. All of this was both praised and shunned by many fans of the show. Cut off by the TMNT 2007 film toy line, a whole wave of unreleased characters and fun Turtle variants never made it past TOY FAIR.
Another "alright" reproduction - this one was kind of hard to remove from the base. But it may have just been mine. Small paint apps are missing such as below the knee. Leo's futuristic katanas were partly made of a translucent blue plastic with a painted metallic handle ( representing the lazer-like, lightsabre-ish weapons of the show ). Here they are cast in solid silver. The scabbard on his back is completely blue, the original's scabbard is silver-metallic. While it may just be MY particular figure, it does appear that the head on my repro FF Leo is just a tad off-mold. ~ t
The SGM-6 represents the state of the art in Hadratian tactical air defense. The SGM-6 uses a continuous wave missile engagement radar to guide its SARH missiles to their targets. Utilizing the chassis from AMT-15 Vikros, the SGM-6 has impressive mobility when compared to contemporary systems but suffers a complex radar that requires extended periods to configure before it can be used.
The A(T)-75 is a radar guided 75mm autocannon designed to provide high value assets with point defense against enemy air attack, The cannon is fed by twin revolving magazines.
Both the SGM-6 and A(T)-75 can both be tied into the large MR-18 mobile search radar for early warning of incoming targets.
Representing the two main generic Platinum liveries, 6827 and 6891 contrast at Frankley Holly Hill terminus, working 63 Bristol Road Services into Birmingham. Although not an official Platinum route, it sees frequent use of them, with numerous spares available due to Birmingham Centrals extra 6 recently received (6945-50)
Nos encontramos ante una pintura de caballete de formato rectangular que muestra a varias figuras de cuerpo entero representadas al aire libre, en concreto en un bosque o huerto de árboles frutales, en concreto naranjos. Parece que se trata de una alegoría protagonizada por personajes mitológicos.
De izquierda a derecha se distinguen:
- Un joven vestido con una túnica roja que parece remover unas nubes con un bastón. Aparece calzado, en concreto con una especie de borceguíes.
- Tres doncellas descalzas y ataviadas con ropajes transparentes en actitud de baile.
- Otra mujer que lleva sandalias y que va vestida con túnica y manto rojo con forro azul. Esta figura parece presidir la escena.
- Un niño alado con los ojos cubiertos por una venda y que dispara una flecha en dirección a las doncellas. El pintor lo ubicó por encima de la mujer que se acaba de describir.
- Otra dama que avanza hacia el espectador y que destaca por su sonrisa, por su corona de flores y por su vestido estampado con motivos vegetales. Atrae nuestra atención por que es la única figura que mira hacia el espectador. Pisa el prado con sus pies desnudos.
- Por último un grupo que rompe la quietud de la escena. Está formado por otra joven descalza y vestida con túnica transparente que sufre el asalto de un personaje singular: un joven pintado enteramente de azul y que parece flotar o volar. Entre el ramaje de los árboles apenas se distinguen sus alas con alguna dificultad.
Pasando a la organización de la escena, el pintor integra la mayor parte de las figuras en un esquema triangular que tiene un vértice en el amorcillo, otro en las doncellas que bailan y el tercero en la figura acosada. Los dos varones quedan a un lado y a otro de este esquema, equilibrando la composición
En cuanto a la organización del espacio, todas las figuras se hallan en un mismo plano, menos la mujer que preside la escena, que se halla en un segundo plano, más retirada. Lógicamente, el niño alado se sitúa en otro nivel completamente distinto. De hecho se halla sobrevolando la escena.
La línea del horizonte, que apenas si se distingue, se halla algo más elevada de lo normal, en concreto al nivel de la cintura de los personajes situados en primer plano. La perspectiva que emplea el artista resulta puramente intuitiva: los personajes parecen flotar sobre un prado que a lo que más se parece es a un tapiz y el bosque del fondo se dispone como un telón. Esta relativa torpeza se revela muy útil para datar la obra, pues resulta habitual encontrar en los pintores del siglo XV, esta construcción del espacio realizada de forma más o menos espontánea y, sobre todo, la elección de ese punto de vista algo elevado, que permite representar el suelo con más altura de la conveniente, recurso que recuerda a la perspectiva caballera. Estos rasgos se encuentran tanto en los pintores renacentistas, como en los seguidores del gótico flamenco.
Las figuras y la vegetación se encuentran perfectamente delimitadas con un trazo fino, de tal forma que la línea predomina sobre la policromía. Los colores son nítidos, existiendo un claro contraste entre el de los personajes, más vivos y los de la vegetación, más apagados. Existe un cuidado equilibrio entre los tonos cálidos y los fríos. Parece que el artista pintó la escena con minuciosidad, usando una pincelada muy fina. Es de destacar lo bien conseguidas que están las veladuras en las vestiduras transparentes.
El uso de veladuras es típico de la pintura al óleo, pero este cuadro debe tratarse más bien de una pintura al temple, porque los colores parecen planos y relativamente apagados, predominando ese acabado de brillo mate típico de esta técnica.
El temple o témpera es un tipo de pintura de origen muy antiguo que emplea como disolvente el agua y como aglutinante una emulsión de yema de huevo, cola u otras materias orgánicas. Con frecuencia, la aplicación de esta técnica se combina con fondos de oro, en el que el metal era dispuesto en láminas extremadamente finas. En el caso de una pintura de caballete, como la que nos ocupa, el soporte habitual del temple es la tabla.
Volviendo al análisis del cuadro, señalemos que la luz está aplicada de forma uniforme, como conviene a una escena desarrollada al aire libre.
El volumen de las figuras se expresa mediante el plegado de los ropajes y la gradación tonal, esto es indicando la musculatura y las distintas texturas con ligeras variaciones de color, reflejando con un ligero claroscuro la musculatura o el plegado de las vestiduras. Estos recursos no se emplean en el prado y los árboles que, como queda dicho, parecen planos como si se tratase de un decorado.
Respecto a la plasmación de la figura humana, el artista representa a los personajes con corrección anatómica, bien que buscando la armonía y la idealización. El canon empleado alarga a los protagonistas de la escena haciéndoles parecer altos y esbeltos.
Menos la dama que centra la composición, todas las figuras se hallan en movimiento, bien que con actitudes reposadas y lánguidas. Un dinamismo particular expresan las tres doncellas y la dama de las flores, personajes que parecen encontrarse en la ejecución de los pasos de una danza. Hay que señalar que estas actitudes calmosas no se pueden aplicar al grupo de la izquierda que sorprende por lo brusco de las actitudes y la violencia que respira esta especie de asalto o rapto.
Parecido contraste se observa en los gestos: serenos y ensimismados en las figuras de la izquierda y del centro, y muy expresivos los de la derecha: la dama de las flores sonríe abiertamente, la doncella del vestido transparente mira con sorpresa y temor, mientras que su agresor la contempla con furia.
Respecto a las facciones, algunos autores han supuesto que en el cuadro figuran retratos de algunas personalidades, e incluso se han avanzado las identificaciones. Con todo, parecen rostros impersonales, dotados de una belleza ideal en consonancia con la armónica perfección de los cuerpos y la refinada elegancia de sus vestiduras.
Armonía, belleza ideal, reposo y una atmósfera de refinamiento son los valores que parece transmitir esta obra. Debe añadirse la erudición y la estimación por la cultura clásica, pues la imagen, aunque muy hermosa, permanece indescifrable para los ojos del espectador poco avezado.
Respecto a la clasificación de esta obra, el empleo de una perspectiva intuitiva y el uso del temple nos sitúan en el siglo XV, en el tránsito entre la Edad Media y el Renacimiento. Por otra parte el tema mitológico o alegórico y la atmósfera de lujo y elegancia aconsejan emplazar esta obra en el Quattrocento, la primera fase del arte renacentista.
Dentro de los artistas de este período la obra debe adscribirse a Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi) por esas figuras elegantes y cargadas de distinción, por esa ambiente de belleza ideal que presenta cierta melancolía y, también, por el pobre conocimiento de la perspectiva.
Este pintor vivió en Florencia en la segunda mitad del siglo XV y el primer decenio del siglo XVI. Se formó en el taller de Fra Filippo Lippi, en Prato, y en su obra, desarrollada casi por entero en Florencia, se distingue un largo período de plenitud con figuras elegantes, vaporosas y monumentales y un último período de gran intensidad religiosa con obras de ejecución nerviosa y composición excéntrica y descuidada.
Botticelli destacó como pintor de temática religiosa (tanto pinturas monumentales al fresco como pequeños cuadros de devoción), como retratista y, especialmente, como autor de temas profanos de contenido alegóricos y mitológicos, como «La calumnia de Apeles», «El Nacimiento de Venus» y la obra que nos ocupa que es «La Alegoría de la Primavera», conservada en la Galería Uffizi de Florencia.
Se trata de un cuadro monumental (Mide 203 cm de alto por 314 cm de ancho) y la técnica empleada es, como queda dicho el temple. El soporte empleado es la tabla. Se fecha por 1477 o 1476
El primer poseedor de la obra fue Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, conocido como «Il Popolano» («El Populista»), fue miembro de la familia Médici, primo de Lorenzo el Magnífico. Dado que este personaje tenía 15 años cuando la obra se pintó, y para entonces se había quedado huérfano, se especula con que fue encargada por sus tutores, como estímulo para su formación en la filosofía neoplatónica o exhortación moral según los principios de esta doctrina. Tal vez fuera un regalo de su primo Lorenzo «el Magnífico», bajo cuya tutela se encontraba.
Posteriormente pasó a la colección de la rama principal de los Médici, que fueron primeros duques de Florencia y posteriormente grandes duques de Toscana). Vasari la contempló y la admiró en 1550, cuando pertenecía al duque Cosme I.
La interpretación de esta pintura requiere un amplio conocimiento de la mitología clásica, bien que algunas figuras como Cupido o las Tres Gracias se identifican con facilidad. De izquierda a derecha se reconoce a:
- El dios Mercurio (con un sombrero o casco denominado petaso y con la vara llamada caduceo). Con este objeto parece jugar con unas nubecillas, escena enigmática que sólo se comprende por un pasaje de la Eneida en el que describe al veloz mensajero de los dioses, dominando las nubes y los vientos con sólo alzar el mágico caduceo. Con todo, algunos especialistas creen que realmente representa al dios Marte.
- Las tres Gracias, divinidades menores que presiden el encanto, la belleza y la fertilidad.
- La diosa Venus, seguramente en su advocación de Venus Genetrix, esto es como madre, lo que explicaría que se hubieran destacado sus pechos y el que vientre aparezca abultado. Por detrás de esta figura el pintor dispuso un arbusto que se ha identificado como el mirto (o arrayán), planta consagrada a esta deidad, al igual que los naranjos.
- Cupido, hijo de Venus, otra divinidad menor considerado dios del amor.
- Flora, divinidad secundaria del panteón latino encargada de las flores y los jardines. Ese patronazgo explica su corona de flores y su vestido ornamentado con plantas y ramos. Su representación derramando flores se encuentra ya en las pinturas de Pompeya.
- Cloris, ninfa que en la mitología griega desempeña el mismo papel que Flora en el panteón latino, de ahí que a veces se consideren que son el mismo personaje. Su vínculo con la vegetación queda resaltado por las flores que salen de su boca.
- Céfiro o bien Bóreas, personificaciones del viento del oeste y del norte, respectivamente. Ambas deidades raptaron a Cloris, de ahí que su identificación permanezca dudosa. Aunque tradicionalmente se ha visto en él a Céfiro, la brusquedad con la que aparece y su color azul oscuro, propio de las tormentas, parece convenir mejor al tempestuoso Bóreas que al tranquilo y fecundante viento del oeste.
Si en la identificación existe cierto consenso, la crítica no se ha puesto de acuerdo sobre su verdadero significado y ninguna de las interpretaciones ha conseguido imponerse, bien que suele vincularse a la filosofía neoplatónica.
Una explicación bastante verosímil (y alternativa) es la que considera la obra una alegoría de los tres meses de la primavera: A la derecha marzo, mes caracterizado por los repentinos y negativos efectos del viento y del frío sobre la primera floración; en el centro abril mes consagrado a Venus; y a la izquierda mayo, mes vinculado a Mercurio, pues se creía que estaba dedicado a la madre del dios, la pléyade Maya.
La obra estaría inspirada en los tapices flamencos dedicados a las estaciones y meses del año, lo que explicaría la deficiente construcción del espacio y ese prado poblado por diminutas flores y plantas, muy similar a los fondos de tapiz de estilo «mille fleur» confeccionado en aquella época en Francia y en Flandes
Para situar el monumento en su contexto histórico, social, político y cultural señalemos que el arte renacentista surge en Italia en el siglo XV, difundiéndose por el resto de Europa en el siglo siguiente. La expansión colonial de españoles y portugueses extenderán este estilo por Iberoamérica y otros territorios que estas potencias incorporan a sus imperios.
La cronología de este estilo abarca, pues, desde el siglo XV hasta inicios del siglo XVII. Se distinguen varias fases: Quattrocento (siglo XV), Cinquecento (primer cuarto del siglo XVI) y Manierismo (resto del siglo XVI). Existe una suave etapa de transición hacia el Barroco conocida como protobarroco o arte tridentino (por hallarse marcado por la influencia del Concilio de Trento).
El mundo del Quattrocento se caracteriza en lo político por el predominio del sistema de la ciudad-estado en Italia. Se trata de una forma de gobierno oligárquica, pues unas pocas familias controlaban el poder de estas urbes. Estos linajes solían pertenecer a una burguesía mercantil que desarrolla un capitalismo inicial, basado en el comercio de tejidos y en las operaciones bancarias. Esta centuria se caracteriza por un período de expansión económica, caracterizada por el incremento de la circulación monetaria.
Respecto a la cultura, la Iglesia sigue desempeñando un papel preponderante, bien que se asiste a una recuperación de la herencia clásica, desarrollándose la filosofía neoplatónica, que fomenta el antropocentrismo y la estima por los números, la proporción y la armonía.
Socialmente, la valoración de los artistas comenzará a ser tenida en cuenta, y como se observa en esta obra, arquitectos, escultores y pintores colaboraran en el retorno de la Antigüedad clásica bien estudiando los restos arqueológicos, leyendo y comentando a los autores de la literatura grecorromana o frecuentando las academias filosóficas. Con todo, la producción artística siguió siendo considerada como un mero trabajo mecánico y manual, en el que sólo importaba la destreza, a diferencia de las artes liberales (la Gramática, la Retórica, la Dialéctica, la Aritmética, la Geometría, la Música y la Astronomía) en las que se hacía precisa la aplicación del intelecto.
El mecenazgo cobrará un gran impulso en este período como forma de distinción y prestigio. A los promotores de obras tradicionales en la Italia del momento (el Papado, las órdenes religiosas mendicantes y las corporaciones cívicas), se unirán la burguesía mercantil y los condottieros o capitanes de las tropas mercenarias.
Para terminar, señalemos que «la Primavera» y otras obras alegóricas y/o mitológicas de Botticelli han sido consideradas un retorno del arte profano, olvidado en la Edad Media o reducido en este período a la mínima expresión ante la preponderancia del arte sacro. Lo cierto es que aunque no puedan competir con el arte religioso, los temas y la decoración seculares tuvieron un amplio desarrollo en la Europa medieval cristiana, bien que los testimonios conservados son muy escasos. Destacaron los tapices (cuya pervivencia resulta muy difícil) o bien mosaicos, vidrieras, pinturas murales y otros ornamentos cuya suerte va ligada a los palacios para los que se realizaron.
Dado que estas construcciones sufrieron continuas renovaciones, o al contrario fueron abandonados o pasaron por los rigores de la guerra, los testimonios que nos han llegado de arte profano se han preservado en algunos casos por pasar a las colecciones de iglesias o monasterios, como el tapiz de Bayeux. Algunos otros, como las pinturas de las techumbres de la catedral de Teruel, albergan un contenido profano pese a que se realizaron para un templo.
Por tanto hay que recurrir muchas veces a las crónicas o a las representaciones contenidas en los libros miniados para reconstruir el esplendor decorativo de las residencias medievales y de algunos edificios como juzgados o casas consistoriales.
El repertorio era amplísimo: escenas de batallas más o menos históricas, o bien basadas en ciclos de romances y leyendas; series de personajes de la Antigüedad, en especial Alejandro Magno; complicadas alegorías mitológicas inspiradas en la obra de Marciano Capela y en Ovidio (bien que se trata del Ovidio «moralizado»); alegorías sobre el gobierno de la ciudad; fábulas protagonizadas por animales; episodios cinegéticos, bailes y otros esparcimientos de los nobles, entre ellos las escenas de baños, llamada de «estufa» (termas); representaciones cartográficas y de las constelaciones celestes, cargadas de los simbolismos propios de la época… En cambio el retrato tuvo un escaso desarrollo y, con alguna excepción, estuvo ligado más bien al arte religioso, apareciendo los personajes como donantes.
Estas obras suelen mostrar una originalidad sorprendente y un naturalismo desconocidos en el envarado arte sacro. Las pinturas (o tapices) sobre campañas militares están realizados con una óptica casi «periodística», en el que la narración histórica se presenta como un verdadero reportaje (bien que realizado en muchos casos con decenios de retraso). Por lo demás, los testimonios conservados asombran por su altísima calidad.
Se comprende que de la alta Edad Media se conserven muy pocos ejemplos. Destacan los mosaicos del pavimento del Palacio Sagrado de Constantinopla y la decoración anicónica de la iglesia de San Julián de los Prados de Oviedo.
De la etapa gótica, destacan en primer lugar los murales que relatan hazañas militares, como los frescos del monasterio de Santa María de Valbuena en Valladolid, las pinturas de la conquista de Mallorca del Palacio Aguilar en Barcelona, y otros frescos de la misma temática conservados en el Palacio Real de Barcelona, en Cardona, Alcañiz y Melfi, en el sur de Italia.
Con una temática más mundana, nos encontramos con la vidriera denominada «La cacería» de la catedral de León, las pinturas mudéjares de la catedral de Teruel, los frescos de la llamada Sala del Ciervo, en el Palacio de los Papas en Aviñón, las pinturas del Palacio Comunal de Siena, el ciclo pictórico de Castello della Manta, en el Piamonte y las imágenes de constelaciones realizadas por Fernando Gallego para la Universidad de Salamanca.
Mención aparte merecen las tapicerías conservadas: el mencionado tapiz de Bayeux, el ciclo de tapices de la Dama y el Unicornio del Museo de Cluny de París; el llamado tapiz «de las Naves» de la seo zaragozana y los cuatro tapices de Pastrana que describen las conquistas portuguesas en el Norte de África.
Las muestras de escultura profana son aún más escasas. Mencionaremos el misterioso Regisole de Pavía, destruido en el siglo XVIII y de cronología muy discutida. Otra obra no menos enigmática es la escultura ecuestre de Rávena (¿de Teodorico?) que Carlomagno mando trasladar a Aquisgrán. Se han conservado la estatuilla de Carlomagno ecuestre del Louvre, el León de Brunswick (Alemania) y el busto de Federico II Hohenstaufen de Barletta (Italia). En relieve, y ya en el arte gótico, hay que mencionar los marfiles franceses dedicados al Roman de la Rose y otros temas galantes y el coro bajo de la catedral de Toledo que talló Rodrigón Alemán y que está dedicado a la conquista del Reino de Granada.
Por lo demás los mosaicos de la mezquita omeya de Damasco, las pinturas del castillo sirio de Qusair Amra, Damasco o las conservadas en la Alhambra nos señalan que tampoco el mundo árabe fue ajeno a esta práctica de decorar con escenas libres de todo contenido religioso o doctrinal.
En conclusión las alegorías de Botticelli o los esposos Arnolfini de Jan van Eyck hay que verlos más bien como cambios de rumbo o renovaciones de la temática del arte civil y profano, más que la supuesta resurrección de esta vertiente del arte perdida en los mal llamados «siglos oscuros»
Procedencia de la imagen:
Western South Dakota is home to incredible sights like the Badlands and the Needles of the Black Hills, but nothing “sticks out” quite like Mount Rushmore National Memorial. This giant monument celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2016. In honor of this milestone, here are 75 facts about the sculpture that has captured the imaginations of so many.
1. The idea of creating a sculpture in the Black Hills was dreamed up in 1923 by South Dakota historian Doane Robinson. He wanted to find a way to attract tourists to the state.
2. It worked. Mount Rushmore is now visited by nearly 3 million people annually.
3. Robinson initially wanted to sculpt the likenesses of Western heroes like Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, explorers Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody into the nearby stone pinnacles known as the Needles.
4. Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum was enlisted to help with the project. At the time, he was working on the massive carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia, but by his own account said the model was flawed and the monument wouldn’t stand the test of time. He was looking for a way out when South Dakota called.
5. Borglum, a good friend of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, dreamed of something bigger than the Needles. He wanted something that would draw people from around the world. He wanted to carve a mountain.
6. Besides, the Needles site was deemed too narrow for sculpting, and the mountain had better exposure to the sun.
7. Borglum and his son, Lincoln, thought the monument should have a national focus and decided that four presidents should be carved.
8. The presidents were chosen for their significant contribution to the founding, expansion, preservation and unification of the country.
9. George Washington (1789-1797) was chosen because he was our nation’s founding father.
10. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was chosen to represent expansion, because he was the president who signed the Louisiana Purchase and authored the Declaration of Independence.
11. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was chosen because he represented conservation and the industrial blossoming of the nation.
12. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was chosen because he led the country through the Civil War and believed in preserving the nation at any cost.
13. The mountain that Borglum chose to carve was known to the Lakota as the “Six Grandfathers.”
14. It had also been known as Cougar Mountain, Sugarloaf Mountain, Slaughterhouse Mountain and Keystone Cliffs, depending who you asked.
15. The mountain’s official name came from a New York lawyer who was surveying gold claims in the area in 1885.
16. Charles E. Rushmore asked his guide, William Challis, “What’s the name of that mountain?” Challis is said to have replied, “It’s never had one…till now…we’ll call the damn thing Rushmore.”
17. In 1930, the United States Board on Geographic Names officially recognized it as Mount Rushmore.
18. The carving of Mount Rushmore began in 1927 and finished in 1941.
19. The actual carving was done by a team of over 400 men.
20. Remarkably, no one died during construction.
21. The men who worked on the mountain were miners who had come to the Black Hills looking for gold.
22. Although they weren’t artists, they did know how to use dynamite and jackhammers.
23. The Borglums did hire one artist, Korczak Ziolkowski, to work as an assistant on the mountain. But after 19 days and a heated argument with Lincoln Borglum, Ziolkowski left the project. He would later begin another mountain carving nearby, Crazy Horse Memorial, which today is the world’s largest mountain sculpture in progress.
24. Mount Rushmore once had an amateur baseball team.
25. Because Gutzon and Lincoln Borglum were so competitive, they would often hire young men for their baseball skills rather than their carving and drilling skills.
26. In 1939, the Rushmore Memorial team took second place at the South Dakota amateur baseball tournament.
27. The image of the sculpture was mapped onto the mountain using an intricate “pointing machine” designed by Borglum.
28. It was based on a 1:12 scale model of the final sculpture.
29. 90% of the mountain was carved with dynamite, and more than 450,000 tons of rock was removed.
30. Afterwards, fine carving was done to create a surface about as smooth as a concrete sidewalk.
31. The drillers and finishers were lowered down the 500-foot face of the mountain in bosun chairs held by 3/8-inch-thick steel cables.
32. Workers at the top of the mountain would hand crank a winch to raise and lower the drillers.
33. If they went too fast, the person in the bosun chair would be dragged up the mountain on their face.
34. Young boys (known as call boys) were hired to sit on the side of the mountain to shout messages back and forth to the operators to speed up or slow down.
35. Each president’s face is 60 feet high.
36. The faces appear in the order: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln.
37. Jefferson was originally intended to be on Washington’s right.
38. After nearly two years of work on Jefferson, the rock was found to be unsuitable and the partially completed face was “erased” from the mountainside using dynamite.
39. Washington’s face was completed in 1934.
40. Jefferson’s in 1936.
41. Lincoln was finished in 1937.
42. In 1937, a bill was introduced to Congress to add the image of women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony to the mountain.
43. Congress then passed a bill requiring only the heads that had already been started be completed.
44. In 1938, Gutzon Borglum secretly began blasting a Hall of Records in the mountain behind the heads.
45. The Hall of Records was meant to be a vault containing the history of the nation and vital documents like the Constitution.
46. Congress found out about the project and demanded Borglum use the federal funding for the faces, not the Hall of Records.
47. Gutzon reluctantly stopped working on the hall in 1939, but vowed to complete it.
48. That same year, the last face — of Theodore Roosevelt — was completed.
49. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum died in March of 1941, leaving the completion of the monument to his son Lincoln.
50. The carving was originally meant to include the bodies of the presidents down to their waists.
51. A massive panel with 8-foot-tall gilded letters commemorating famous territorial acquisitions of the U.S. was also originally intended.
52. Funding ran out and the monument was declared complete on October 31, 1941.
53. Overall, the project cost $989,992.32 and took 14 years to finish.
54. It’s estimated only 6 years included actual carving, while 8.5 years were consumed with delays due to weather and lack of funds.
55. Charles E. Rushmore donated $5,000 toward the sculpting of the mountain that bore his name.
56. In 1998, Borglum’s vision for the Hall of Records was realized when porcelain tablets containing images and text from the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and biographies of the presidents and Borglum himself were sealed in a vault inside the unfinished hall.
57. The Hall of Records played a role in the plot of the 2007 movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets, starring Nicolas Cage.
58. Visitor facilities have been added over the years, including a visitor center, the Lincoln Borglum Museum and the Presidential Trail.
59. The Lincoln Borglum Museum features multimedia exhibits that let you use an old-style explosives plunger to recreate dynamite blasting the face of the mountain.
60. You can also visit the Sculptor’s Studio, where Gutzon Borglum worked on scale models of Mount Rushmore.
61. The Grand View Terrace — one of the best places from which to see Mount Rushmore — is located just above the museum.
62. The Grand View Terrace is at the end of the Avenue of Flags; it has flags from all 50 states, one district, three territories and two commonwealths of the United States of America.
63. The Presidential Trail is a 0.5-mile walking trail that offers up-close and different views of each face.
64. If you start the trail from the Sculptor’s Studio, you’ll have to climb 422 stairs. Enter the trail from the Grand View Terrace and you’ll have an easier time of it.
63. Rushmore’s resident mountain goats are descendants of a herd that was gifted to Custer State Park by Canada in 1924.
64. They evidently escaped (naughty goats!).
67. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Ben Black Elk, a famous Lakota holy man, personally greeted visitors to Mount Rushmore.
68. Every night, Mount Rushmore gets illuminated for two hours.
69. Since illumination can impact the natural environment (think lost moths, among other things), a new high-tech LED lighting system was installed in 2015 to minimize the negative effects of lighting Mount Rushmore.
70. Some believe you can see an elephant, or at least the stone face of an elephant, if you look to the right of Lincoln. Others believe if you look at a picture of the mountain rotated 90 degrees, you can see another face.
71. Mount Rushmore is granite, which erodes roughly 1 inch every 10,000 years.
72. Since each of the noses is about 240 inches long, they might last up to 2.4 million years before they completely wear away.
73. After about 500,000 years, the faces will likely have lost some of their definition. But at this rate the basic shape of the presidents’ heads might last up to 7 million years.
74. Numerous things are being done to preserve Mount Rushmore. This has included installing 8,000 feet of camouflaged copper wire in 1998 to help monitor 144 hairline cracks. The copper wire was replaced with fiber optic cable in 2009.
75. So far preservation efforts have been successful, with Mount Rushmore celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2016 — all four noses, chins and foreheads (as well as all 8 eyes, nostrils, lips and ears) intact!
Mount Rushmore National Memorial is centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore (Lakota: Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers) in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum created the sculpture's design and oversaw the project's execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features the 60-foot-tall (18 m) heads of four United States Presidents recommended by Borglum: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). The four presidents were chosen to represent the nation's birth, growth, development and preservation, respectively. The memorial park covers 1,278 acres (2.00 sq mi; 5.17 km2) and the actual mountain has an elevation of 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.
The sculptor and tribal representatives settled on Mount Rushmore, which also has the advantage of facing southeast for maximum sun exposure. Doane Robinson wanted it to feature American West heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud,[9] Buffalo Bill Cody, and Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse. Borglum believed that the sculpture should have broader appeal and chose the four presidents.
Peter Norbeck, U.S. senator from South Dakota, sponsored the project and secured federal funding. Construction began in 1927; the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. After Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln took over as leader of the construction project. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941.
Sometimes referred to as the "Shrine of Democracy", Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually.
Mount Rushmore was conceived with the intention of creating a site to lure tourists, representing "not only the wild grandeur of its local geography but also the triumph of western civilization over that geography through its anthropomorphic representation." Though for the latest occupants of the land at the time, the Lakota Sioux, as well as other tribes, the monument in their view "came to epitomize the loss of their sacred lands and the injustices they've suffered under the U.S. government." Under the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government promised the territory, including the entirety of the Black Hills, to the Sioux "so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase." After the discovery of gold on the land, American settlers migrated to the area in the 1870s. The federal government then forced the Sioux to relinquish the Black Hills portion of their reservation.
The four presidential faces were said to be carved into the granite with the intention of symbolizing "an accomplishment born, planned, and created in the minds and by the hands of Americans for Americans".
Mount Rushmore is known to the Lakota Sioux as "The Six Grandfathers" (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe) or "Cougar Mountain" (Igmútȟaŋka Pahá); but American settlers knew it variously as Cougar Mountain, Sugarloaf Mountain, Slaughterhouse Mountain and Keystone Cliffs. As Six Grandfathers, the mountain was on the route that Lakota leader Black Elk took in a spiritual journey that culminated at Black Elk Peak. Following a series of military campaigns from 1876 to 1878, the United States asserted control over the area, a claim that is still disputed on the basis of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.
Beginning with a prospecting expedition in 1885 with David Swanzey (husband of Carrie Ingalls), and Bill Challis, wealthy investor Charles E. Rushmore began visiting the area regularly on prospecting and hunting trips. He repeatedly joked with colleagues about naming the mountain after himself. The United States Board of Geographic Names officially recognized the name "Mount Rushmore" in June 1930.
Historian Doane Robinson conceived the idea for Mount Rushmore in 1923 to promote tourism in South Dakota. In 1924, Robinson persuaded sculptor Gutzon Borglum to travel to the Black Hills region to ensure the carving could be accomplished. The original plan was to make the carvings in granite pillars known as the Needles. However, Borglum realized that the eroded Needles were too thin to support sculpting. He chose Mount Rushmore, a grander location, partly because it faced southeast and enjoyed maximum exposure to the sun.
Borglum said upon seeing Mount Rushmore, "America will march along that skyline."
Borglum had been involved in sculpting the Stone Mountain Memorial to Confederate leaders in Georgia, but was in disagreement with the officials there.
U.S. Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson of South Dakota introduced bills in early 1925 for permission to use federal land, which passed easily. South Dakota legislation had less support, only passing narrowly on its third attempt, which Governor Carl Gunderson signed into law on March 5, 1925. Private funding came slowly and Borglum invited President Calvin Coolidge to an August 1927 dedication ceremony, at which he promised federal funding. Congress passed the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Act, signed by Coolidge, which authorized up to $250,000 in matching funds. The 1929 presidential transition to Herbert Hoover delayed funding until an initial federal match of $54,670.56 was acquired.
Carving started in 1927 and ended in 1941 with no fatalities.
Historian Doane Robinson conceived the idea for Mount Rushmore in 1923 to promote tourism in South Dakota. In 1924, Robinson persuaded sculptor Gutzon Borglum to travel to the Black Hills region to ensure the carving could be accomplished. The original plan was to make the carvings in granite pillars known as the Needles. However, Borglum realized that the eroded Needles were too thin to support sculpting. He chose Mount Rushmore, a grander location, partly because it faced southeast and enjoyed maximum exposure to the sun.
Borglum said upon seeing Mount Rushmore, "America will march along that skyline."
Borglum had been involved in sculpting the Stone Mountain Memorial to Confederate leaders in Georgia, but was in disagreement with the officials there.
U.S. Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson of South Dakota introduced bills in early 1925 for permission to use federal land, which passed easily. South Dakota legislation had less support, only passing narrowly on its third attempt, which Governor Carl Gunderson signed into law on March 5, 1925. Private funding came slowly and Borglum invited President Calvin Coolidge to an August 1927 dedication ceremony, at which he promised federal funding. Congress passed the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Act, signed by Coolidge, which authorized up to $250,000 in matching funds. The 1929 presidential transition to Herbert Hoover delayed funding until an initial federal match of $54,670.56 was acquired.
The chief carver of the mountain was Luigi Del Bianco, an artisan and stonemason in Port Chester, New York. Del Bianco emigrated to the U.S. from Friuli in Italy and was chosen to work on this project because of his understanding of sculptural language and ability to imbue emotion in the carved portraits.
In 1933, the National Park Service took Mount Rushmore under its jurisdiction. Julian Spotts helped with the project by improving its infrastructure. For example, he had the tram upgraded so it could reach the top of Mount Rushmore for the ease of workers. By July 4, 1934, Washington's face had been completed and was dedicated. The face of Thomas Jefferson was dedicated in 1936, and the face of Abraham Lincoln was dedicated on September 17, 1937. In 1937, a bill was introduced in Congress to add the head of civil-rights leader Susan B. Anthony, but a rider was passed on an appropriations bill requiring federal funds be used to finish only those heads that had already been started at that time. In 1939, the face of Theodore Roosevelt was dedicated.
The Sculptor's Studio – a display of unique plaster models and tools related to the sculpting – was built in 1939 under the direction of Borglum. Borglum died from an embolism in March 1941. His son, Lincoln Borglum, continued the project. Originally, it was planned that the figures would be carved from head to waist, but insufficient funding forced the carving to end. Borglum had also planned a massive panel in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase commemorating in eight-foot-tall gilded letters the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, Louisiana Purchase, and seven other territorial acquisitions from the Alaska purchase to the Panama Canal Zone. In total, the entire project cost US$989,992.32 (equivalent to $18.2 million in 2021).
Nick Clifford, the last remaining carver, died in November 2019 at age 98.
South Dakota is a landlocked U.S. state in the North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Dakota Sioux tribe, which comprises a large portion of the population with nine reservations currently in the state and has historically dominated the territory. South Dakota is the 17th largest by area, but the 5th least populous, and the 5th least densely populated of the 50 United States. Pierre is the state capital, and Sioux Falls, with a population of about 213,900, is South Dakota's most populous city. The state is bisected by the Missouri River, dividing South Dakota into two geographically and socially distinct halves, known to residents as "East River" and "West River". South Dakota is bordered by the states of North Dakota (to the north), Minnesota (to the east), Iowa (to the southeast), Nebraska (to the south), Wyoming (to the west), and Montana (to the northwest).
Humans have inhabited the area for several millennia, with the Sioux becoming dominant by the early 19th century. In the late 19th century, European-American settlement intensified after a gold rush in the Black Hills and the construction of railroads from the east. Encroaching miners and settlers triggered a number of Indian wars, ending with the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. As the southern part of the former Dakota Territory, South Dakota became a state on November 2, 1889, simultaneously with North Dakota. They are the 39th and 40th states admitted to the union; President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the statehood papers before signing them so that no one could tell which became a state first.
Key events in the 20th century included the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, increased federal spending during the 1940s and 1950s for agriculture and defense, and an industrialization of agriculture that has reduced family farming. Eastern South Dakota is home to most of the state's population, and the area's fertile soil is used to grow a variety of crops. West of the Missouri River, ranching is the predominant agricultural activity, and the economy is more dependent on tourism and defense spending. Most of the Native American reservations are in West River. The Black Hills, a group of low pine-covered mountains sacred to the Sioux, is in the southwest part of the state. Mount Rushmore, a major tourist destination, is there. South Dakota has a temperate continental climate, with four distinct seasons and precipitation ranging from moderate in the east to semi-arid in the west. The state's ecology features species typical of a North American grassland biome.
While several Democrats have represented South Dakota for multiple terms in both chambers of Congress, the state government is largely controlled by the Republican Party, whose nominees have carried South Dakota in each of the last 14 presidential elections. Historically dominated by an agricultural economy and a rural lifestyle, South Dakota has recently sought to diversify its economy in other areas to both attract and retain residents. South Dakota's history and rural character still strongly influence the state's culture.
The history of South Dakota describes the history of the U.S. state of South Dakota over the course of several millennia, from its first inhabitants to the recent issues facing the state.
Human beings have lived in what is today South Dakota for at least several thousand years. Early hunters are believed to have first entered North America at least 17,000 years ago via the Bering land bridge, which existed during the last ice age and connected Siberia with Alaska. Early settlers in what would become South Dakota were nomadic hunter-gatherers, using primitive Stone Age technology to hunt large prehistoric mammals in the area such as mammoths, sloths, and camels. The Paleolithic culture of these people disappeared around 5000 BC, after the extinction of most of their prey species.
Between AD 500 and 800, much of eastern South Dakota was inhabited by a people known as the 'Mound Builders'. The Mound Builders were hunters who lived in temporary villages and were named for the low earthen burial mounds they constructed, many of which still exist. Their settlement seems to have been concentrated around the watershed of the Big Sioux River and Big Stone Lake, although other sites have been excavated throughout eastern South Dakota. Either assimilation or warfare led to the demise of the Mound Builders by the year 800. Between 1250 and 1400 an agricultural people, likely the ancestors of the modern Mandan of North Dakota, arrived from the east and settled in the central part of the state. In 1325, what has become known as the Crow Creek Massacre occurred near Chamberlain. An archeological excavation of the site has discovered 486 bodies buried in a mass grave within a type of fortification; many of the skeletal remains show evidence of scalping and decapitation.
The Arikara, also known as the Ree, began arriving from the south in the 16th century. They spoke a Caddoan language similar to that of the Pawnee, and probably originated in what is now Kansas and Nebraska. Although they would at times travel to hunt or trade, the Arikara were far less nomadic than many of their neighbors, and lived for the most part in permanent villages. These villages usually consisted of a stockade enclosing a number of circular earthen lodges built on bluffs looking over the rivers. Each village had a semi-autonomous political structure, with the Arikara's various subtribes being connected in a loose alliance. In addition to hunting and growing crops such as corn, beans, pumpkin and other squash, the Arikara were also skilled traders, and would often serve as intermediaries between tribes to the north and south It was probably through their trading connections that Spanish horses first reached the region around 1760. The Arikara reached the height of their power in the 17th century, and may have included as many as 32 villages. Due both to disease as well as pressure from other tribes, the number of Arikara villages would decline to only two by the late 18th century, and the Arikara eventually merged entirely with the Mandan to the north.
The sister tribe of the Arikaras, the Pawnee, may have also had a small amount of land in the state. Both were Caddoan and were among the only known tribes in the continental U.S. to have committed human sacrifice, via a religious ritual that occurred once a year. It is said that the U.S. government worked hard to halt this practice before their homelands came to be heavily settled, for fear that the general public might react harshly or refuse to move there.
The Lakota Oral histories tell of them driving the Algonquian ancestors of the Cheyenne from the Black Hills regions, south of the Platte River, in the 18th century. Before that, the Cheyenne say that they were, in fact, two tribes, which they call the Tsitsistas & Sutaio After their defeat, much of their territory was contained to southeast Wyoming & western Nebraska. While they had been able to hold off the Sioux for quite some time, they were heavily damaged by a smallpox outbreak. They are also responsible for introducing the horse to the Lakota.
The Ioway, or Iowa people, also inhabited the region where the modern states of South Dakota, Minnesota & Iowa meet, north of the Missouri River. They also had a sister nation, known as the Otoe who lived south of them. They were Chiwere speaking, a very old variation of Siouan language said to have originated amongst the ancestors of the Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin. They also would have had a fairly similar culture to that of the Dhegihan Sioux tribes of Nebraska & Kansas.
By the 17th century, the Sioux, who would later come to dominate much of the state, had settled in what is today central and northern Minnesota. The Sioux spoke a language of the Siouan language family, and were divided into two culture groups – the Dakota & Nakota. By the early 18th century the Sioux would begin to move south and then west into the plains. This migration was due to several factors, including greater food availability to the west, as well as the fact that the rival Ojibwe & other related Algonquians had obtained rifles from the French at a time when the Sioux were still using the bow and arrow. Other tribes were also displaced during some sort of poorly understood conflict that occurred between Siouan & Algonquian peoples in the early 18th century.
In moving west into the prairies, the lifestyle of the Sioux would be greatly altered, coming to resemble that of a nomadic northern plains tribe much more so than a largely settled eastern woodlands one. Characteristics of this transformation include a greater dependence on the bison for food, a heavier reliance on the horse for transportation, and the adoption of the tipi for habitation, a dwelling more suited to the frequent movements of a nomadic people than their earlier semi-permanent lodges.
Once on the plains, a schism caused the two subgroups of the Sioux to divide into three separate nations—the Lakota, who migrated south, the Asiniboine who migrated back east to Minnesota & the remaining Sioux. It appears to be around this time that the Dakota people became more prominent over the Nakota & the entirety of the people came to call themselves as such.
The Lakota, who crossed the Missouri around 1760 and reached the Black Hills by 1776, would come to settle largely in western South Dakota, northwestern Nebraska, and southwestern North Dakota. The Yankton primarily settled in southeastern South Dakota, the Yanktonnais settled in northeastern South Dakota and southeastern North Dakota, and the Santee settled primarily in central and southern Minnesota. Due in large part to the Sioux migrations, a number of tribes would be driven from the area. The tribes in and around the Black Hills, most notably the Cheyenne, would be pushed to the west, the Arikara would move further north along the Missouri, and the Omaha would be driven out of southeastern South Dakota and into northeastern Nebraska.
Later, the Lakota & Assiniboine returned to the fold, forming a single confederacy known as the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven council fire. This was divided into four cultural groups—the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota & Nagoda-- & seven distinct tribes, each with their own chief—the Nakota Mdewakan (Note—Older attempts at Lakota language show a mistake in writing the sound 'bl' as 'md', such as summer, Bloketu, misprinted as mdoketu. Therefore, this word should be Blewakan.) & Wahpeton, the Dakota Santee & Sisseton, the Nagoda Yankton & Yanktonai & the Lakota Teton. In this form, they were able to secure from the U.S. government a homeland, commonly referred to as Mni-Sota Makoce, or the Lakotah Republic. However, conflicts increased between Sioux & American citizens in the decades leading up the Civil War & a poorly funded & organized Bureau of Indian Affairs had difficulty keeping peace between groups. This eventually resulted in the United States blaming the Sioux for the atrocities & rendering the treaty which recognized the nation of Lakotah null and void. The U.S., however, later recognized their fault in a Supreme Court case in the 1980s after several decades of failed lawsuits by the Sioux, yet little has been done to smooth the issue over to the best interests of both sides.
France was the first European nation to hold any real claim over what would become South Dakota. Its claims covered most of the modern state. However, at most a few French scouting parties may have entered eastern South Dakota. In 1679 Daniel G. Duluth sent explorers west from Lake Mille Lacs, and they may have reached Big Stone Lake and the Coteau des Prairies. Pierre Le Sueur's traders entered the Big Sioux River Valley on multiple occasions. Evidence for these journeys is from a 1701 map by William De L'Isle that shows a trail to below the falls of the Big Sioux River from the Mississippi River.
After 1713, France looked west to sustain its fur trade. The first Europeans to enter South Dakota from the north, the Verendrye brothers, began their expedition in 1743. The expedition started at Fort La Reine on Lake Manitoba, and was attempting to locate an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean. They buried a lead plate inscribed near Ft. Pierre; it was rediscovered by schoolchildren in 1913.
In 1762, France granted Spain all French territory west of the Mississippi River in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. The agreement, which was signed in secret, was motivated by a French desire to convince Spain to come to terms with Britain and accept defeat in the Seven Years' War. In an attempt to secure Spanish claims in the region against possible encroachment from other European powers, Spain adopted a policy for the upper Missouri which emphasized the development of closer trade relations with local tribes as well as greater exploration of the region, a primary focus of which would be a search for a water route to the Pacific Ocean. Although traders such as Jacques D'Eglise and Juan Munier had been active in the region for several years, these men had been operating independently, and a determined effort to reach the Pacific and solidify Spanish control of the region had never been undertaken. In 1793, a group commonly known as the Missouri Company was formed in St. Louis, with the twin goals of trading and exploring on the upper Missouri. The company sponsored several attempts to reach the Pacific Ocean, none of which made it further than the mouth of the Yellowstone. In 1794, Jean Truteau (also spelled Trudeau) built a cabin near the present-day location of Fort Randall, and in 1795 the Mackay-Evans Expedition traveled up the Missouri as far as present-day North Dakota, where they expelled several British traders who had been active in the area. In 1801, a post known as Fort aux Cedres was constructed by Registre Loisel of St. Louis, on Cedar Island on the Missouri about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of the present location of Pierre. This trading post was the major regional post until its destruction by fire in 1810.[30] In 1800, Spain gave Louisiana back to France in the Treaty of San Ildefonso.
In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon for $11,000,000. The territory included most of the western half of the Mississippi watershed and covered nearly all of present-day South Dakota, except for a small portion in the northeast corner of the state. The region was still largely unexplored and unsettled, and President Thomas Jefferson organized a group commonly referred to as the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the newly acquired region over a period of more than two years. The expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, was tasked with following the route of the Missouri to its source, continuing on to the Pacific Ocean, establishing diplomatic relations with the various tribes in the area, and taking cartographic, geologic, and botanical surveys of the area. The expedition left St. Louis on May 14, 1804, with 45 men and 15 tons of supplies in three boats (one keelboat and two pirogues). The party progressed slowly against the Missouri's current, reaching what is today South Dakota on August 22. Near present-day Vermillion, the party hiked to the Spirit Mound after hearing local legends of the place being inhabited by "little spirits" (or "devils"). Shortly after this, a peaceful meeting took place with the Yankton Sioux, while an encounter with the Lakota Sioux further north was not as uneventful. The Lakota mistook the party as traders, at one point stealing a horse. Weapons were brandished on both sides after it appeared as though the Lakota were going to further delay or even halt the expedition, but they eventually stood down and allowed the party to continue up the river and out of their territory. In north central South Dakota, the expedition acted as mediators between the warring Arikara and Mandan. After leaving the state on October 14, the party wintered with the Mandan in North Dakota before successfully reaching the Pacific Ocean and returning by the same route, safely reaching St. Louis in 1806. On the return trip, the expedition spent only 15 days in South Dakota, traveling more swiftly with the Missouri's current.
Pittsburgh lawyer Henry Marie Brackenridge was South Dakota's first recorded tourist. In 1811 he was hosted by fur trader Manuel Lisa.
In 1817, an American fur trading post was set up at present-day Fort Pierre, beginning continuous American settlement of the area. During the 1830s, fur trading was the dominant economic activity for the few white people who lived in the area. More than one hundred fur-trading posts were in present-day South Dakota in the first half of the 19th century, and Fort Pierre was the center of activity.[citation needed] General William Henry Ashley, Andrew Henry, and Jedediah Smith of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and Manuel Lisa and Joshua Pilcher of the St. Louis Fur Company, trapped in that region. Pierre Chouteau Jr. brought the steamship Yellowstone to Fort Tecumseh on the Missouri River in 1831. In 1832 the fort was replaced by Fort Pierre Chouteau Jr.: today's town of Fort Pierre. Pierre bought the Western Department of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and renamed it Pratte, Chouteau and Company, and then Pierre Chouteau and Company. It operated in present-day South Dakota from 1834 to 1858. Most trappers and traders left the area after European demand for furs dwindled around 1840.
Main articles: Kansas–Nebraska Act, Nebraska Territory, Organic act § List of organic acts, and Dakota Territory
In 1855, the U.S. Army bought Fort Pierre but abandoned it the following year in favor of Fort Randall to the south. Settlement by Americans and Europeans was by this time increasing rapidly, and in 1858 the Yankton Sioux signed the 1858 "Treaty of Washington", ceding most of present-day eastern South Dakota to the United States.
Land speculators founded two of eastern South Dakota's largest present-day cities: Sioux Falls in 1856 and Yankton in 1859. The Big Sioux River falls was the spot of an 1856 settlement established by a Dubuque, Iowa, company; that town was quickly removed by native residents. But in the following year, May 1857, the town was resettled and named Sioux Falls. That June, St. Paul, Minnesota's Dakota Land Company came to an adjacent 320 acres (130 ha), calling it Sioux Falls City. In June 1857, Flandreau and Medary, South Dakota, were established by the Dakota Land Company. Along with Yankton in 1859, Bon Homme, Elk Point, and Vermillion were among the new communities along the Missouri River or border with Minnesota. Settlers therein numbered about 5,000 in 1860. In 1861, Dakota Territory was established by the United States government (this initially included North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Montana and Wyoming). Settlers from Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, Czechoslovakia[citation needed] and Russia,[citation needed] as well as elsewhere in Europe and from the eastern U.S. states increased from a trickle to a flood, especially after the completion of an eastern railway link to the territorial capital of Yankton in 1872, and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 during a military expedition led by George A. Custer.
The Dakota Territory had significant regional tensions between the northern part and the southern part from the beginning, the southern part always being more populated – in the 1880 United States census, the population of the southern part (98,268) was more than two and a half times of the northern part (36,909), and southern Dakotans saw the northern part as bit of disreputable, "controlled by the wild folks, cattle ranchers, fur traders” and too frequently the site of conflict with the indigenous population. Also, the new railroads built connected the northern and southern parts to different hubs – northern part was closer tied to Minneapolis–Saint Paul area; and southern part to Sioux City and from there to Omaha. The last straw was territorial governor Nehemiah G. Ordway moving the territorial capital from Yankton to Bismarck in modern-day North Dakota. As the Southern part had the necessary population for statehood (60,000), they held a separate convention in September 1883 and drafted a constitution. Various bills to divide the Dakota Territory in half ended up stalling, until in 1887, when the Territorial Legislature submitted the question of division to a popular vote at the November general elections, where it was approved by 37,784 votes over 32,913. A bill for statehood for North Dakota and South Dakota (as well as Montana and Washington) titled the Enabling Act of 1889 was passed on February 22, 1889, during the Administration of Grover Cleveland, dividing Dakota along the seventh standard parallel. It was left to his successor, Benjamin Harrison, to sign proclamations formally admitting North and South Dakota to the Union on November 2, 1889. Harrison directed his Secretary of State James G. Blaine to shuffle the papers and obscure from him which he was signing first and the actual order went unrecorded.
With statehood South Dakota was now in a position to make decisions on the major issues it confronted: prohibition, women's suffrage, the location of the state capital, the opening of the Sioux lands for settlement, and the cyclical issues of drought (severe in 1889) and low wheat prices (1893–1896). In early 1889 a prohibition bill passed the new state legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Louis Church. Fierce opposition came from the wet German community, with financing from beer and liquor interests. The Yankee women organized to demand suffrage, as well as prohibition. Neither party supported their cause, and the wet element counter-organized to block women's suffrage. Popular interest reached a peak in the debates over locating the state capital. Prestige, real estate values and government jobs were at stake, as well as the question of access in such a large geographical region with limited railroads. Huron was the temporary site, centrally located Pierre was the best organized contender, and three other towns were in the running. Real estate speculators had money to toss around. Pierre, population 3200, made the most generous case to the voters—its promoters truly believed it would be the next Denver and be the railway hub of the Dakotas. The North Western railroad came through but not the others it expected. In 1938 Pierre counted 4000 people and three small hotels.
The national government continued to handle Indian affairs. The Army's 1874 Custer expedition took place despite the fact that the western half of present-day South Dakota had been granted to the Sioux by the Treaty of Fort Laramie as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. The Sioux declined to grant mining rights or land in the Black Hills, and the Great Sioux War of 1876 broke out after the U.S. failed to stop white miners and settlers from entering the region. The Sioux were eventually defeated and settled on reservations within South Dakota and North Dakota.
In 1889 Harrison sent general George Crook with a commission to persuade the Sioux to sell half their reservation land to the government. It was believed that the state would not be viable unless more land was made available to settlers. Crook used a number of dubious methods to secure agreement and obtain the land.
On December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. It was the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation, the massacre resulted in the deaths of 300 Sioux, many of them women and children. In addition 25 U.S. soldiers were also killed in the episode.
Railroads played a central role in South Dakota transportation from the late 19th century until the 1930s, when they were surpassed by highways. The Milwaukee Road and the Chicago & North Western were the state's largest railroads, and the Milwaukee's east–west transcontinental line traversed the northern tier of the state. About 4,420 miles (7,110 km) of railroad track were built in South Dakota during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though only 1,839 miles (2,960 km) were active in 2007.
The railroads sold land to prospective farmers at very low rates, expecting to make a profit by shipping farm products out and home goods in. They also set up small towns that would serve as shipping points and commercial centers, and attract businessmen and more farmers. The Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway (M&StL) in 1905, under the leadership of vice president and general manager L. F. Day, added lines from Watertown to LeBeau and from Conde through Aberdeen to Leola. It developed town sites along the new lines and by 1910, the new lines served 35 small communities.
Not all of the new towns survived. The M&StL situated LeBeau along the Missouri River on the eastern edge of the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. The new town was a hub for the cattle and grain industries. Livestock valued at one million dollars were shipped out in 1908, and the rail company planned a bridge across the Missouri River. Allotment of the Cheyenne River Reservation in 1909 promised further growth. By the early 1920s, however, troubles multiplied, with the murder of a local rancher, a fire that destroyed the business district, and drought that ruined ranchers and farmers alike. LeBeau became a ghost town.
Most of the traffic was freight, but the main lines also offered passenger service. After the European immigrants settled, there never were many people moving about inside the state. Profits were slim. Automobiles and busses were much more popular, but there was an increase during World War II when gasoline was scarce. All passenger service was ended in the state by 1969.
In the rural areas farmers and ranchers depended on local general stores that had a limited stock and slow turnover; they made enough profit to stay in operation by selling at high prices. Prices were not marked on each item; instead the customer negotiated a price. Men did most of the shopping, since the main criterion was credit rather than quality of goods. Indeed, most customers shopped on credit, paying off the bill when crops or cattle were later sold; the owner's ability to judge credit worthiness was vital to his success.
In the cities consumers had much more choice, and bought their dry goods and supplies at locally owned department stores. They had a much wider selection of goods than in the country general stores and price tags that gave the actual selling price. The department stores provided a very limited credit, and set up attractive displays and, after 1900, window displays as well. Their clerks—usually men before the 1940s—were experienced salesmen whose knowledge of the products appealed to the better educated middle-class housewives who did most of the shopping. The keys to success were a large variety of high-quality brand-name merchandise, high turnover, reasonable prices, and frequent special sales. The larger stores sent their buyers to Denver, Minneapolis, and Chicago once or twice a year to evaluate the newest trends in merchandising and stock up on the latest fashions. By the 1920s and 1930s, large mail-order houses such as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward provided serious competition, making the department stores rely even more on salesmanship and close integration with the community.
Many entrepreneurs built stores, shops, and offices along Main Street. The most handsome ones used pre-formed, sheet iron facades, especially those manufactured by the Mesker Brothers of St. Louis. These neoclassical, stylized facades added sophistication to brick or wood-frame buildings throughout the state.
During the 1930s, several economic and climatic conditions combined with disastrous results for South Dakota. A lack of rainfall, extremely high temperatures and over-cultivation of farmland produced what was known as the Dust Bowl in South Dakota and several other plains states. Fertile topsoil was blown away in massive dust storms, and several harvests were completely ruined. The experiences of the Dust Bowl, coupled with local bank foreclosures and the general economic effects of the Great Depression resulted in many South Dakotans leaving the state. The population of South Dakota declined by more than seven percent between 1930 and 1940.
Prosperity returned with the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, when demand for the state's agricultural and industrial products grew as the nation mobilized for war. Over 68,000 South Dakotans served in the armed forces during the war, of which over 2,200 were killed.
In 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan was passed as part of the Flood Control Act of 1944 by the U.S. Congress, resulting in the construction of six large dams on the Missouri River, four of which are at least partially located in South Dakota.[83] Flood control, hydroelectricity and recreational opportunities such as boating and fishing are provided by the dams and their reservoirs.
On the night of June 9–10, 1972, heavy rainfall in the eastern Black Hills caused the Canyon Lake Dam on Rapid Creek to fail. The failure of the dam, combined with heavy runoff from the storm, turned the usually small creek into a massive torrent that washed through central Rapid City. The flood resulted in 238 deaths and destroyed 1,335 homes and around 5,000 automobiles.[84] Damage from the flood totaled $160 million (the equivalent of $664 million today).
On April 19, 1993, Governor George S. Mickelson was killed in a plane crash in Iowa while returning from a business meeting in Cincinnati. Several other state officials were also killed in the crash. Mickelson, who was in the middle of his second term as governor, was succeeded by Walter Dale Miller.
In recent decades, South Dakota has transformed from a state dominated by agriculture to one with a more diversified economy. The tourism industry has grown considerably since the completion of the interstate system in the 1960s, with the Black Hills being especially impacted. The financial service industry began to grow in the state as well, with Citibank moving its credit card operations from New York to Sioux Falls in 1981, a move that has since been followed by several other financial companies. In 2007, the site of the recently closed Homestake gold mine near Lead was chosen as the location of a new underground research facility. Despite a growing state population and recent economic development, many rural areas have been struggling over the past 50 years with locally declining populations and the emigration of educated young adults to larger South Dakota cities, such as Rapid City or Sioux Falls, or to other states. The Cattleman's Blizzard of October 2013 killed tens of thousands of livestock in western South Dakota, and was one of the worst blizzards in the state's history.
IR converted Canon Rebel XTi. AEB +/-2 total of 3 exposures processed with Photomatix.
High Dynamic Range (HDR)
High-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI) is a high dynamic range (HDR) technique used in imaging and photography to reproduce a greater dynamic range of luminosity than is possible with standard digital imaging or photographic techniques. The aim is to present a similar range of luminance to that experienced through the human visual system. The human eye, through adaptation of the iris and other methods, adjusts constantly to adapt to a broad range of luminance present in the environment. The brain continuously interprets this information so that a viewer can see in a wide range of light conditions.
HDR images can represent a greater range of luminance levels than can be achieved using more 'traditional' methods, such as many real-world scenes containing very bright, direct sunlight to extreme shade, or very faint nebulae. This is often achieved by capturing and then combining several different, narrower range, exposures of the same subject matter. Non-HDR cameras take photographs with a limited exposure range, referred to as LDR, resulting in the loss of detail in highlights or shadows.
The two primary types of HDR images are computer renderings and images resulting from merging multiple low-dynamic-range (LDR) or standard-dynamic-range (SDR) photographs. HDR images can also be acquired using special image sensors, such as an oversampled binary image sensor.
Due to the limitations of printing and display contrast, the extended luminosity range of an HDR image has to be compressed to be made visible. The method of rendering an HDR image to a standard monitor or printing device is called tone mapping. This method reduces the overall contrast of an HDR image to facilitate display on devices or printouts with lower dynamic range, and can be applied to produce images with preserved local contrast (or exaggerated for artistic effect).
In photography, dynamic range is measured in exposure value (EV) differences (known as stops). An increase of one EV, or 'one stop', represents a doubling of the amount of light. Conversely, a decrease of one EV represents a halving of the amount of light. Therefore, revealing detail in the darkest of shadows requires high exposures, while preserving detail in very bright situations requires very low exposures. Most cameras cannot provide this range of exposure values within a single exposure, due to their low dynamic range. High-dynamic-range photographs are generally achieved by capturing multiple standard-exposure images, often using exposure bracketing, and then later merging them into a single HDR image, usually within a photo manipulation program). Digital images are often encoded in a camera's raw image format, because 8-bit JPEG encoding does not offer a wide enough range of values to allow fine transitions (and regarding HDR, later introduces undesirable effects due to lossy compression).
Any camera that allows manual exposure control can make images for HDR work, although one equipped with auto exposure bracketing (AEB) is far better suited. Images from film cameras are less suitable as they often must first be digitized, so that they can later be processed using software HDR methods.
In most imaging devices, the degree of exposure to light applied to the active element (be it film or CCD) can be altered in one of two ways: by either increasing/decreasing the size of the aperture or by increasing/decreasing the time of each exposure. Exposure variation in an HDR set is only done by altering the exposure time and not the aperture size; this is because altering the aperture size also affects the depth of field and so the resultant multiple images would be quite different, preventing their final combination into a single HDR image.
An important limitation for HDR photography is that any movement between successive images will impede or prevent success in combining them afterwards. Also, as one must create several images (often three or five and sometimes more) to obtain the desired luminance range, such a full 'set' of images takes extra time. HDR photographers have developed calculation methods and techniques to partially overcome these problems, but the use of a sturdy tripod is, at least, advised.
Some cameras have an auto exposure bracketing (AEB) feature with a far greater dynamic range than others, from the 3 EV of the Canon EOS 40D, to the 18 EV of the Canon EOS-1D Mark II. As the popularity of this imaging method grows, several camera manufactures are now offering built-in HDR features. For example, the Pentax K-7 DSLR has an HDR mode that captures an HDR image and outputs (only) a tone mapped JPEG file. The Canon PowerShot G12, Canon PowerShot S95 and Canon PowerShot S100 offer similar features in a smaller format.. Nikon's approach is called 'Active D-Lighting' which applies exposure compensation and tone mapping to the image as it comes from the sensor, with the accent being on retaing a realistic effect . Some smartphones provide HDR modes, and most mobile platforms have apps that provide HDR picture taking.
Camera characteristics such as gamma curves, sensor resolution, noise, photometric calibration and color calibration affect resulting high-dynamic-range images.
Color film negatives and slides consist of multiple film layers that respond to light differently. As a consequence, transparent originals (especially positive slides) feature a very high dynamic range
Tone mapping
Tone mapping reduces the dynamic range, or contrast ratio, of an entire image while retaining localized contrast. Although it is a distinct operation, tone mapping is often applied to HDRI files by the same software package.
Several software applications are available on the PC, Mac and Linux platforms for producing HDR files and tone mapped images. Notable titles include
Adobe Photoshop
Aurora HDR
Dynamic Photo HDR
HDR Efex Pro
HDR PhotoStudio
Luminance HDR
MagicRaw
Oloneo PhotoEngine
Photomatix Pro
PTGui
Information stored in high-dynamic-range images typically corresponds to the physical values of luminance or radiance that can be observed in the real world. This is different from traditional digital images, which represent colors as they should appear on a monitor or a paper print. Therefore, HDR image formats are often called scene-referred, in contrast to traditional digital images, which are device-referred or output-referred. Furthermore, traditional images are usually encoded for the human visual system (maximizing the visual information stored in the fixed number of bits), which is usually called gamma encoding or gamma correction. The values stored for HDR images are often gamma compressed (power law) or logarithmically encoded, or floating-point linear values, since fixed-point linear encodings are increasingly inefficient over higher dynamic ranges.
HDR images often don't use fixed ranges per color channel—other than traditional images—to represent many more colors over a much wider dynamic range. For that purpose, they don't use integer values to represent the single color channels (e.g., 0-255 in an 8 bit per pixel interval for red, green and blue) but instead use a floating point representation. Common are 16-bit (half precision) or 32-bit floating point numbers to represent HDR pixels. However, when the appropriate transfer function is used, HDR pixels for some applications can be represented with a color depth that has as few as 10–12 bits for luminance and 8 bits for chrominance without introducing any visible quantization artifacts.
History of HDR photography
The idea of using several exposures to adequately reproduce a too-extreme range of luminance was pioneered as early as the 1850s by Gustave Le Gray to render seascapes showing both the sky and the sea. Such rendering was impossible at the time using standard methods, as the luminosity range was too extreme. Le Gray used one negative for the sky, and another one with a longer exposure for the sea, and combined the two into one picture in positive.
Mid 20th century
Manual tone mapping was accomplished by dodging and burning – selectively increasing or decreasing the exposure of regions of the photograph to yield better tonality reproduction. This was effective because the dynamic range of the negative is significantly higher than would be available on the finished positive paper print when that is exposed via the negative in a uniform manner. An excellent example is the photograph Schweitzer at the Lamp by W. Eugene Smith, from his 1954 photo essay A Man of Mercy on Dr. Albert Schweitzer and his humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa. The image took 5 days to reproduce the tonal range of the scene, which ranges from a bright lamp (relative to the scene) to a dark shadow.
Ansel Adams elevated dodging and burning to an art form. Many of his famous prints were manipulated in the darkroom with these two methods. Adams wrote a comprehensive book on producing prints called The Print, which prominently features dodging and burning, in the context of his Zone System.
With the advent of color photography, tone mapping in the darkroom was no longer possible due to the specific timing needed during the developing process of color film. Photographers looked to film manufacturers to design new film stocks with improved response, or continued to shoot in black and white to use tone mapping methods.
Color film capable of directly recording high-dynamic-range images was developed by Charles Wyckoff and EG&G "in the course of a contract with the Department of the Air Force". This XR film had three emulsion layers, an upper layer having an ASA speed rating of 400, a middle layer with an intermediate rating, and a lower layer with an ASA rating of 0.004. The film was processed in a manner similar to color films, and each layer produced a different color. The dynamic range of this extended range film has been estimated as 1:108. It has been used to photograph nuclear explosions, for astronomical photography, for spectrographic research, and for medical imaging. Wyckoff's detailed pictures of nuclear explosions appeared on the cover of Life magazine in the mid-1950s.
Late 20th century
Georges Cornuéjols and licensees of his patents (Brdi, Hymatom) introduced the principle of HDR video image, in 1986, by interposing a matricial LCD screen in front of the camera's image sensor, increasing the sensors dynamic by five stops. The concept of neighborhood tone mapping was applied to video cameras by a group from the Technion in Israel led by Dr. Oliver Hilsenrath and Prof. Y.Y.Zeevi who filed for a patent on this concept in 1988.
In February and April 1990, Georges Cornuéjols introduced the first real-time HDR camera that combined two images captured by a sensor3435 or simultaneously3637 by two sensors of the camera. This process is known as bracketing used for a video stream.
In 1991, the first commercial video camera was introduced that performed real-time capturing of multiple images with different exposures, and producing an HDR video image, by Hymatom, licensee of Georges Cornuéjols.
Also in 1991, Georges Cornuéjols introduced the HDR+ image principle by non-linear accumulation of images to increase the sensitivity of the camera: for low-light environments, several successive images are accumulated, thus increasing the signal to noise ratio.
In 1993, another commercial medical camera producing an HDR video image, by the Technion.
Modern HDR imaging uses a completely different approach, based on making a high-dynamic-range luminance or light map using only global image operations (across the entire image), and then tone mapping the result. Global HDR was first introduced in 19931 resulting in a mathematical theory of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter that was published in 1995 by Steve Mann and Rosalind Picard.
On October 28, 1998, Ben Sarao created one of the first nighttime HDR+G (High Dynamic Range + Graphic image)of STS-95 on the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. It consisted of four film images of the shuttle at night that were digitally composited with additional digital graphic elements. The image was first exhibited at NASA Headquarters Great Hall, Washington DC in 1999 and then published in Hasselblad Forum, Issue 3 1993, Volume 35 ISSN 0282-5449.
The advent of consumer digital cameras produced a new demand for HDR imaging to improve the light response of digital camera sensors, which had a much smaller dynamic range than film. Steve Mann developed and patented the global-HDR method for producing digital images having extended dynamic range at the MIT Media Laboratory. Mann's method involved a two-step procedure: (1) generate one floating point image array by global-only image operations (operations that affect all pixels identically, without regard to their local neighborhoods); and then (2) convert this image array, using local neighborhood processing (tone-remapping, etc.), into an HDR image. The image array generated by the first step of Mann's process is called a lightspace image, lightspace picture, or radiance map. Another benefit of global-HDR imaging is that it provides access to the intermediate light or radiance map, which has been used for computer vision, and other image processing operations.
21st century
In 2005, Adobe Systems introduced several new features in Photoshop CS2 including Merge to HDR, 32 bit floating point image support, and HDR tone mapping.
On June 30, 2016, Microsoft added support for the digital compositing of HDR images to Windows 10 using the Universal Windows Platform.
HDR sensors
Modern CMOS image sensors can often capture a high dynamic range from a single exposure. The wide dynamic range of the captured image is non-linearly compressed into a smaller dynamic range electronic representation. However, with proper processing, the information from a single exposure can be used to create an HDR image.
Such HDR imaging is used in extreme dynamic range applications like welding or automotive work. Some other cameras designed for use in security applications can automatically provide two or more images for each frame, with changing exposure. For example, a sensor for 30fps video will give out 60fps with the odd frames at a short exposure time and the even frames at a longer exposure time. Some of the sensor may even combine the two images on-chip so that a wider dynamic range without in-pixel compression is directly available to the user for display or processing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynamic-range_imaging
Infrared Photography
In infrared photography, the film or image sensor used is sensitive to infrared light. The part of the spectrum used is referred to as near-infrared to distinguish it from far-infrared, which is the domain of thermal imaging. Wavelengths used for photography range from about 700 nm to about 900 nm. Film is usually sensitive to visible light too, so an infrared-passing filter is used; this lets infrared (IR) light pass through to the camera, but blocks all or most of the visible light spectrum (the filter thus looks black or deep red). ("Infrared filter" may refer either to this type of filter or to one that blocks infrared but passes other wavelengths.)
When these filters are used together with infrared-sensitive film or sensors, "in-camera effects" can be obtained; false-color or black-and-white images with a dreamlike or sometimes lurid appearance known as the "Wood Effect," an effect mainly caused by foliage (such as tree leaves and grass) strongly reflecting in the same way visible light is reflected from snow. There is a small contribution from chlorophyll fluorescence, but this is marginal and is not the real cause of the brightness seen in infrared photographs. The effect is named after the infrared photography pioneer Robert W. Wood, and not after the material wood, which does not strongly reflect infrared.
The other attributes of infrared photographs include very dark skies and penetration of atmospheric haze, caused by reduced Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering, respectively, compared to visible light. The dark skies, in turn, result in less infrared light in shadows and dark reflections of those skies from water, and clouds will stand out strongly. These wavelengths also penetrate a few millimeters into skin and give a milky look to portraits, although eyes often look black.
Until the early 20th century, infrared photography was not possible because silver halide emulsions are not sensitive to longer wavelengths than that of blue light (and to a lesser extent, green light) without the addition of a dye to act as a color sensitizer. The first infrared photographs (as distinct from spectrographs) to be published appeared in the February 1910 edition of The Century Magazine and in the October 1910 edition of the Royal Photographic Society Journal to illustrate papers by Robert W. Wood, who discovered the unusual effects that now bear his name. The RPS co-ordinated events to celebrate the centenary of this event in 2010. Wood's photographs were taken on experimental film that required very long exposures; thus, most of his work focused on landscapes. A further set of infrared landscapes taken by Wood in Italy in 1911 used plates provided for him by CEK Mees at Wratten & Wainwright. Mees also took a few infrared photographs in Portugal in 1910, which are now in the Kodak archives.
Infrared-sensitive photographic plates were developed in the United States during World War I for spectroscopic analysis, and infrared sensitizing dyes were investigated for improved haze penetration in aerial photography. After 1930, new emulsions from Kodak and other manufacturers became useful to infrared astronomy.
Infrared photography became popular with photography enthusiasts in the 1930s when suitable film was introduced commercially. The Times regularly published landscape and aerial photographs taken by their staff photographers using Ilford infrared film. By 1937 33 kinds of infrared film were available from five manufacturers including Agfa, Kodak and Ilford. Infrared movie film was also available and was used to create day-for-night effects in motion pictures, a notable example being the pseudo-night aerial sequences in the James Cagney/Bette Davis movie The Bride Came COD.
False-color infrared photography became widely practiced with the introduction of Kodak Ektachrome Infrared Aero Film and Ektachrome Infrared EIR. The first version of this, known as Kodacolor Aero-Reversal-Film, was developed by Clark and others at the Kodak for camouflage detection in the 1940s. The film became more widely available in 35mm form in the 1960s but KODAK AEROCHROME III Infrared Film 1443 has been discontinued.
Infrared photography became popular with a number of 1960s recording artists, because of the unusual results; Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Frank and a slow shutter speed without focus compensation, however wider apertures like f/2.0 can produce sharp photos only if the lens is meticulously refocused to the infrared index mark, and only if this index mark is the correct one for the filter and film in use. However, it should be noted that diffraction effects inside a camera are greater at infrared wavelengths so that stopping down the lens too far may actually reduce sharpness.
Most apochromatic ('APO') lenses do not have an Infrared index mark and do not need to be refocused for the infrared spectrum because they are already optically corrected into the near-infrared spectrum. Catadioptric lenses do not often require this adjustment because their mirror containing elements do not suffer from chromatic aberration and so the overall aberration is comparably less. Catadioptric lenses do, of course, still contain lenses, and these lenses do still have a dispersive property.
Infrared black-and-white films require special development times but development is usually achieved with standard black-and-white film developers and chemicals (like D-76). Kodak HIE film has a polyester film base that is very stable but extremely easy to scratch, therefore special care must be used in the handling of Kodak HIE throughout the development and printing/scanning process to avoid damage to the film. The Kodak HIE film was sensitive to 900 nm.
As of November 2, 2007, "KODAK is preannouncing the discontinuance" of HIE Infrared 35 mm film stating the reasons that, "Demand for these products has been declining significantly in recent years, and it is no longer practical to continue to manufacture given the low volume, the age of the product formulations and the complexity of the processes involved." At the time of this notice, HIE Infrared 135-36 was available at a street price of around $12.00 a roll at US mail order outlets.
Arguably the greatest obstacle to infrared film photography has been the increasing difficulty of obtaining infrared-sensitive film. However, despite the discontinuance of HIE, other newer infrared sensitive emulsions from EFKE, ROLLEI, and ILFORD are still available, but these formulations have differing sensitivity and specifications from the venerable KODAK HIE that has been around for at least two decades. Some of these infrared films are available in 120 and larger formats as well as 35 mm, which adds flexibility to their application. With the discontinuance of Kodak HIE, Efke's IR820 film has become the only IR film on the marketneeds update with good sensitivity beyond 750 nm, the Rollei film does extend beyond 750 nm but IR sensitivity falls off very rapidly.
Color infrared transparency films have three sensitized layers that, because of the way the dyes are coupled to these layers, reproduce infrared as red, red as green, and green as blue. All three layers are sensitive to blue so the film must be used with a yellow filter, since this will block blue light but allow the remaining colors to reach the film. The health of foliage can be determined from the relative strengths of green and infrared light reflected; this shows in color infrared as a shift from red (healthy) towards magenta (unhealthy). Early color infrared films were developed in the older E-4 process, but Kodak later manufactured a color transparency film that could be developed in standard E-6 chemistry, although more accurate results were obtained by developing using the AR-5 process. In general, color infrared does not need to be refocused to the infrared index mark on the lens.
In 2007 Kodak announced that production of the 35 mm version of their color infrared film (Ektachrome Professional Infrared/EIR) would cease as there was insufficient demand. Since 2011, all formats of color infrared film have been discontinued. Specifically, Aerochrome 1443 and SO-734.
There is no currently available digital camera that will produce the same results as Kodak color infrared film although the equivalent images can be produced by taking two exposures, one infrared and the other full-color, and combining in post-production. The color images produced by digital still cameras using infrared-pass filters are not equivalent to those produced on color infrared film. The colors result from varying amounts of infrared passing through the color filters on the photo sites, further amended by the Bayer filtering. While this makes such images unsuitable for the kind of applications for which the film was used, such as remote sensing of plant health, the resulting color tonality has proved popular artistically.
Color digital infrared, as part of full spectrum photography is gaining popularity. The ease of creating a softly colored photo with infrared characteristics has found interest among hobbyists and professionals.
In 2008, Los Angeles photographer, Dean Bennici started cutting and hand rolling Aerochrome color Infrared film. All Aerochrome medium and large format which exists today came directly from his lab. The trend in infrared photography continues to gain momentum with the success of photographer Richard Mosse and multiple users all around the world.
Digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to infrared light, which would interfere with the normal photography by confusing the autofocus calculations or softening the image (because infrared light is focused differently from visible light), or oversaturating the red channel. Also, some clothing is transparent in the infrared, leading to unintended (at least to the manufacturer) uses of video cameras. Thus, to improve image quality and protect privacy, many digital cameras employ infrared blockers. Depending on the subject matter, infrared photography may not be practical with these cameras because the exposure times become overly long, often in the range of 30 seconds, creating noise and motion blur in the final image. However, for some subject matter the long exposure does not matter or the motion blur effects actually add to the image. Some lenses will also show a 'hot spot' in the centre of the image as their coatings are optimised for visible light and not for IR.
An alternative method of DSLR infrared photography is to remove the infrared blocker in front of the sensor and replace it with a filter that removes visible light. This filter is behind the mirror, so the camera can be used normally - handheld, normal shutter speeds, normal composition through the viewfinder, and focus, all work like a normal camera. Metering works but is not always accurate because of the difference between visible and infrared refraction. When the IR blocker is removed, many lenses which did display a hotspot cease to do so, and become perfectly usable for infrared photography. Additionally, because the red, green and blue micro-filters remain and have transmissions not only in their respective color but also in the infrared, enhanced infrared color may be recorded.
Since the Bayer filters in most digital cameras absorb a significant fraction of the infrared light, these cameras are sometimes not very sensitive as infrared cameras and can sometimes produce false colors in the images. An alternative approach is to use a Foveon X3 sensor, which does not have absorptive filters on it; the Sigma SD10 DSLR has a removable IR blocking filter and dust protector, which can be simply omitted or replaced by a deep red or complete visible light blocking filter. The Sigma SD14 has an IR/UV blocking filter that can be removed/installed without tools. The result is a very sensitive digital IR camera.
While it is common to use a filter that blocks almost all visible light, the wavelength sensitivity of a digital camera without internal infrared blocking is such that a variety of artistic results can be obtained with more conventional filtration. For example, a very dark neutral density filter can be used (such as the Hoya ND400) which passes a very small amount of visible light compared to the near-infrared it allows through. Wider filtration permits an SLR viewfinder to be used and also passes more varied color information to the sensor without necessarily reducing the Wood effect. Wider filtration is however likely to reduce other infrared artefacts such as haze penetration and darkened skies. This technique mirrors the methods used by infrared film photographers where black-and-white infrared film was often used with a deep red filter rather than a visually opaque one.
Another common technique with near-infrared filters is to swap blue and red channels in software (e.g. photoshop) which retains much of the characteristic 'white foliage' while rendering skies a glorious blue.
Several Sony cameras had the so-called Night Shot facility, which physically moves the blocking filter away from the light path, which makes the cameras very sensitive to infrared light. Soon after its development, this facility was 'restricted' by Sony to make it difficult for people to take photos that saw through clothing. To do this the iris is opened fully and exposure duration is limited to long times of more than 1/30 second or so. It is possible to shoot infrared but neutral density filters must be used to reduce the camera's sensitivity and the long exposure times mean that care must be taken to avoid camera-shake artifacts.
Fuji have produced digital cameras for use in forensic criminology and medicine which have no infrared blocking filter. The first camera, designated the S3 PRO UVIR, also had extended ultraviolet sensitivity (digital sensors are usually less sensitive to UV than to IR). Optimum UV sensitivity requires special lenses, but ordinary lenses usually work well for IR. In 2007, FujiFilm introduced a new version of this camera, based on the Nikon D200/ FujiFilm S5 called the IS Pro, also able to take Nikon lenses. Fuji had earlier introduced a non-SLR infrared camera, the IS-1, a modified version of the FujiFilm FinePix S9100. Unlike the S3 PRO UVIR, the IS-1 does not offer UV sensitivity. FujiFilm restricts the sale of these cameras to professional users with their EULA specifically prohibiting "unethical photographic conduct".
Phase One digital camera backs can be ordered in an infrared modified form.
Remote sensing and thermographic cameras are sensitive to longer wavelengths of infrared (see Infrared spectrum#Commonly used sub-division scheme). They may be multispectral and use a variety of technologies which may not resemble common camera or filter designs. Cameras sensitive to longer infrared wavelengths including those used in infrared astronomy often require cooling to reduce thermally induced dark currents in the sensor (see Dark current (physics)). Lower cost uncooled thermographic digital cameras operate in the Long Wave infrared band (see Thermographic camera#Uncooled infrared detectors). These cameras are generally used for building inspection or preventative maintenance but can be used for artistic pursuits as well.
Le registre supérieur représente le monde divin sous forme humaine. Des symboles astraux représentent la Lune et le Soleil, qui est parfois figuré avec un visage. Le signe de Tanit, parfois sous forme humaine, est parfois figuré avec un cortège de divinités romaines dont Mercure, Cupidon ou Vénus représentés sur les deux côtés du fronton de la chapelle figurant le dédicant. Le personnage central tient une corne d'abondance d'où sortent gerbes de blé, raisins et grenades.
Le registre médian est occupé par un élément d'inspiration gréco-romaine, avec colonnes et fronton d'édifice.
Le dédicant est situé au milieu : il est debout dans ce qui semble être un temple ou une chapelle, avec colonnes et fronton.
Le dernier registre figure parfois des Atlantes portant l'étage supérieur comportant la chapelle, accompagnés parfois d'une scène de sacrifice, auquel est destiné un bœuf. Le sacrificateur est parfois figuré, comme sur l'une des stèles du musée du Bardo.
This is another vehicle that has been represented by diecast model maker EFE. Based at the historic Wellpark brewery in Glasgow, Tennent Caledonian describes itself as Scotland’s pre-eminent brewer. It brews an industry-leading portfolio of beers - led by the iconic Tennent’s Lager and Caledonia Best – for home and export markets across the world, Thanks to Graham Newell for the original monochrome image, an official Bedford photograph (21-Apr-19).
All rights reserved. For the avoidance of doubt, this means that it would be a criminal offence to post this image on Facebook or elsewhere (please post a link instead). Please follow the link below for further information about my Flickr collection:
www.flickr.com/photos/northernblue109/6046035749/in/set-7...
The Blue Bridge is an iron bridge across the River South Tyne at Haltwhistle in Northumberland, England.
The Grade II listed bridge was designed by George Gordon Page: it has three arches and wooden decking and was completed in 1875. The bridge was closed to road traffic in 1972 and, having been refurbished in 2003, remains in use for pedestrians. It forms part of National Cycle Route 68, the Pennine Cycleway.
Haltwhistle is a market town and civil parish in Northumberland, England, 22.9 miles (36.9 kilometres) east of Carlisle and 36.8 miles (59.2 kilometres) west of Newcastle upon Tyne. It had a population of 3,811 at the 2011 Census.
Haltwhistle is the closest community to Hadrian's Wall and to Northumberland National Park, both approximately 2 miles (3 kilometres) distant.
The name Haltwhistle has nothing to do with a railway stop. Early forms of the name are Hautwesel (1240), Hautwysel (1254), Hawtewysill (1279), Hautwysell (1381), Haltwesell (Speede 1610). The second part -twistle relates to two streams or rivers. It derives from two Old English words twicce or twise, 'twice', 'division into two' and wella, 'stream, brook'. The second word is reduced in the compound word to ull, making twicculla, twisella. All but one of the examples in place names represent a high tongue of land between two streams where they join.
The first part is probably derived from Old English hēafod, here 'hill-top', in general, 'head', 'headland', 'summit', 'upper end' or 'source of a stream'. If so, it describes the hill-top on which Holy Cross Church and the oldest part of Haltwhistle was built, enclosed on the north-east and west by Haltwhistle Burn and on the south by the South Tyne. Rowland suggests Hal from 'hill' A suggestion is French haut-, meaning 'high', since the settlement already existed long before the Norman Conquest.
A Town web site suggests that Haltwhistle signifies either "the high hill by two rivers" or "the watch on high".
Haltwhistle was probably in existence in Roman times, as it is one of the closest approaches of the River South Tyne in its upland reaches to Hadrian's Wall. The old Roman road known as the Stanegate, which is thought to predate Hadrian’s Wall by some forty years or so, passes just two miles (three kilometres) to the north of the town.
The town web site summarizes an important part of the history (late Middle Ages) of the community as: "for many centuries, the constant marauding of English and Scots caused turmoil in Haltwhistle and throughout the Borders". In 1598, "the infamous Armstrongs of Liddesdale fired and plundered Haltwhistle". Another important raid on Haltwhistle was made in 1601 by the Scots "who carried away prisoners and all their goods"; they were later reclaimed by a raid on Liddesdale. Scots, particularly the Armstrongs, later returned and burned many houses; that led to "years of feuds between the Armstrongs and the Ridley's of Haltwhistle".
Celia Fiennes did not entirely enjoy her visit in the 1690s:
"This Hartwhistle is a Little town, there was one Inn but they had noe hay nor would get none, and when my servants had got some Else where they were angry and would not Entertaine me, so I was forced to take up in a poor Cottage wch was open to ye Thatch and no partitions but hurdles plaistered. Indeed ye Loft as they Called it wch was over the other roomes was shelter'd but wth a hurdle; here I was fforced to take up my abode and ye Landlady brought me out her best sheetes wch serv'd to secure my own sheetes from her dirty blanckets, and Indeed I had her fine sheete to spread over ye top of the Clothes; but noe sleepe Could I get, they burning turff and their Chimneys are sort of fflews or open tunnills, yt ye smoake does annoy the roomes. This is but 12 miles [19 km] from another part of Scotland, the houses are but a Little better built, its true the inside of them are kept a Little better."
Dorothy, Lady Capell, endowed a school in Haltwhistle in her will of 1721.
The development of the town benefited from its location on the main Newcastle to Carlisle road and on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway line.
The expansion of Haltwhistle in the 18th and 19th centuries was due to coal mining in the area and to a lesser extent the use of Haltwhistle as a loading point for metal ores coming from the mines on Alston Moor to the south. In 1836 while some workmen were quarrying stone for the Directors of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway, on the top of Barcombe, a high hill in the township of Thorngrafton and Parish of Haltwhistle, one of them found a copper vessel containing 63 coins, 3 of them gold and 60 copper. The gold coins were, one of Claudius Caesar, reverse Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus; one of Nero and one of Vespasian. The find is known as the Thorngrafton Hoard and the empty arm-purse can still be seen in the museum at Chesters Fort.
More recently, paint manufacture became a major commercial force in the town, but has now stopped major production. Current local employers include factories making plastic bottles and de-icing products.
In the 21st century, the tourist industry dominates the economy with Hadrian's Wall and walking and rambling counting among the principal interests of tourists. The Town web site summarizes the appeal of the area which is "within easy reach of Newcastle and Carlisle".
Skirted by the Northumberland National Park and the North Pennines range, Haltwhistle is ideal for activity and family holidays, walking, cycling, fishing and climbing. Close to where the North & South Tynes meet, with many pretty villages dotted along both river valleys...
Haltwhistle was a market town for the exchange of local goods. In the 18th century two Quakers set up a baize manufactury and there was a weaving establishment. On the Haltwhistle Burn were fulling mills, dyeing and spinning mills. A walk along this stream to the Roman Wall, shows that it must have been a hive of industry with quarries, coal mining and lime burning kilns. The Directory of 1822 (Pigot) gives a whole range of craftsmen, shopkeepers and traders; 60 in number, including makers of clogs. The weekly market was held on Thursdays and there were fairs on 14 May and 22 November for cattle and sheep.
Hadrian's Wall to the north of the town is used as a major selling point for the town. The section of the wall closest to Haltwhistle is among the most spectacular and complete, with the wall striding eastwards from the lake at Crag Lough along the spine of the Whin Sill.
The remains of Haltwhistle Castle and the series of Bastles, and Haltwhistle Tower. Haltwhistle also claims to be at the geographic centre of Britain[15] – equidistant from the sea as measured along the principal points of the compass. A hotel in the centre of Haltwhistle is named the Centre of Britain Hotel in recognition of this claim. The claim is rather tenuous as it requires that the northern extremity is taken to be Orkney rather than Shetland. Depending on how the centre of the island is calculated, however, the centre can be said to be Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire. See centre points of the United Kingdom.
A Border reivers' Peel Tower, circa 15th century, is now part of the Centre of Britain hotel and the town contains five Bastle houses (fortified farm houses). Roughly three miles distant from the town centre are Blenkinsop Hall and Blenkinsopp Castle, both Grade II listed buildings. The Grade I listed Thirlwall Castle is located four miles from Haltwhistle.
Other historic properties nearby include Featherstone Castle, Unthank Hall, Bellister Castle and Coanwood Friends Meeting House.
Haltwhistle Viaduct lies to the south of the railway station and was the first major feature on the Alston Line to Alston, Cumbria.
Stone-built houses are a feature of Haltwhistle. It is one of two settlements in Great Britain which claim to be the exact geographic centre of the island, along with Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire, 71 miles (114 km) to the south.
The Church of the Holy Cross is situated below the Market Place, with views over the river and the valley. This is a Grade II listed building said to be "one of only a few early 13th century churches still functioning as a working church in England". One of the tombs is that of crusader Thomas de Blenkinsopp who died in 1388. There are a number of other medieval grave covers to the Blenkinsopps and the Thirlwells.
It is a good example of a North Country church, impressive considering the time when it was built in the thirteenth century. The chancel measures 46 by 20 feet (14.0 by 6.1 m), with lancet windows – combined three lights in the east end and four single lights on each side, the walls being supported by buttresses. Inside is a piscina (for washing) and three sedilia (seats for the clergy). The nave measures 63 by 46 feet (19 by 14 m) and has side aisles above which are clerestory windows. It has four bays with round columns and pointed arches, looking very spacious inside. The font, dated 1676, has some curious crude carvings on it, and there is another large circular bowl on a shaft, which is probably an earlier font. At the west end it has long lancet windows and a bell-cote, again typical of the North country.
Nearby, the village of Coanwood houses a small but historic chapel, designated as Grade II* by English Heritage. The summary states: "...dated 1760 on lintel. Squared stone with rusticated quoins and dressings".[19] Coanwood Friends Meeting House was a Quaker place of worship and is maintained to this day as a historical site open to visitors.
Haltwhistle is currently in the parliamentary constituency of Hexham; Guy Opperman of the Conservative Party is the Member of Parliament. In 2023 Joe Morris was selected to stand as the Labour Party candidate at the next General Election.
For Local Government purposes it belongs to Northumberland County Council a unitary authority, with Haltwhistle lying in the Tynedale Division. Prior to the 2009 structural changes to local government in England it was part of Tynedale Council. Prior to the 1974 great reorganisation, it belonged to the county of Northumberland. The Old Town Hall in Haltwhistle is now used as a hair salon.
An electoral ward with the same name still exists. This ward stretches from Hexham south up the River Tyne South and has a total population taken at the 2011 Census of 4,832.
Local news and television programmes are provided by BBC North East and Cumbria and ITV Tyne Tees. Television signals are received from Pontop Pike and the local relay transmitters.
Local radio stations are BBC Radio Newcastle, Capital North East, Heart North East and Metro Radio.
The town's local newspaper is the Hexham Courant.
The town is served by Haltwhistle railway station on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway, also known as the Tyne Valley Line. The line was opened in 1838, and links the city of Newcastle upon Tyne in Tyne and Wear with Carlisle in Cumbria. The line follows the course of the River Tyne through Northumberland.
Passenger services on the Tyne Valley Railway are operated by Northern and ScotRail. The line is also heavily used for freight. The railway station is on the south side of the town, close by the River South Tyne.
Until 1976, the railway station was also the junction of the branch line to Alston, in Cumbria, which was 13 miles (21 km) in length. Part of the southern section of the Haltwhistle to Alston line has been reopened as a 2 ft (610 mm) narrow gauge railway, known as the South Tynedale Railway, between Alston and Slaggyford. The trust that owns and operates the railway intends to reopen the entire branch line from Alston to Haltwhistle.
The A69 trunk road, which links Carlisle and Newcastle upon Tyne, formerly passed south of the town centre and through its western outskirts, until a full bypass was opened in 1997.
Northumberland is a ceremonial county in North East England, bordering Scotland. It is bordered by the Scottish Borders to the north, the North Sea to the east, Tyne and Wear and County Durham to the south, and Cumbria to the west. The town of Blyth is the largest settlement.
The county has an area of 5,013 km2 (1,936 sq mi) and a population of 320,274, making it the least-densely populated county in England. The south-east contains the largest towns: Blyth (37,339), Cramlington (27,683), Ashington (27,670), and Morpeth (14,304), which is the administrative centre. The remainder of the county is rural, and the largest towns are Berwick-upon-Tweed (12,043) in the far north and Hexham (13,097) in the west. For local government purposes the county is a unitary authority area. The county historically included the parts of Tyne and Wear north of the River Tyne.
The west of Northumberland contains part of the Cheviot Hills and North Pennines, while to the east the land becomes flatter before reaching the coast. The Cheviot (815 m (2,674 ft)), after which the range of hills is named, is the county's highest point. The county contains the source of the River North Tyne and much of the South Tyne; near Hexham they combine to form the Tyne, which exits into Tyne and Wear shortly downstream. The other major rivers in Northumberland are, from south to north, the Blyth, Coquet, Aln, Wansbeck and Tweed, the last of which forms part of the Scottish border. The county contains Northumberland National Park and two national landscapes: the Northumberland Coast and part of the North Pennines.
Much of the county's history has been defined by its position on a border. In the Roman era most of the county lay north of Hadrian's Wall, and the region was contested between England and Scotland into the Early Modern era, leading to the construction of many castles, peel towers and bastle houses, and the early modern fortifications at Berwick-upon-Tweed. Northumberland is also associated with Celtic Christianity, particularly the tidal island of Lindisfarne. During the Industrial Revolution the area had significant coal mining, shipbuilding, and armaments industries.
Northumberland, England's northernmost county, is a land where Roman occupiers once guarded a walled frontier, Anglian invaders fought with Celtic natives, and Norman lords built castles to suppress rebellion and defend a contested border with Scotland. The present-day county is a vestige of an independent kingdom that once stretched from Edinburgh to the Humber, hence its name, meaning literally 'north of the Humber'. Reflecting its tumultuous past, Northumberland has more castles than any other county in England, and the greatest number of recognised battle sites. Once an economically important region that supplied much of the coal that powered the industrial revolution, Northumberland is now a primarily rural county with a small and gradually shrinking population.
As attested by many instances of rock art, the Northumberland region has a rich prehistory. Archeologists have studied a Mesolithic structure at Howick, which dates to 7500 BC and was identified as Britain's oldest house until it lost this title in 2010 when the discovery of the even older Star Carr house in North Yorkshire was announced, which dates to 8770 BC. They have also found tools, ornaments, building structures and cairns dating to the bronze and iron ages, when the area was occupied by Brythonic Celtic peoples who had migrated from continental Europe, most likely the Votadini whose territory stretched from Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth to Northumberland. It is not clear where the boundary between the Votadini and the other large tribe, the Brigantes, was, although it probably frequently shifted as a result of wars and as smaller tribes and communities changed allegiances. Unlike neighbouring tribes, Votadini farms were surrounded by large walls, banks and ditches and the people made offerings of fine metal objects, but never wore massive armlets. There are also at least three very large hillforts in their territory (Yeavering Bell, Eildon Hill and Traprain Law, the latter two now in Scotland), each was located on the top of a prominent hill or mountain. The hillforts may have been used for over a thousand years by this time as places of refuge and as places for meetings for political and religious ceremonies. Duddo Five Stones in North Northumberland and the Goatstones near Hadrian's Wall are stone circles dating from the Bronze Age.
When Gnaeus Julius Agricola was appointed Roman governor of Britain in 78 AD, most of northern Britain was still controlled by native British tribes. During his governorship Agricola extended Roman control north of Eboracum (York) and into what is now Scotland. Roman settlements, garrisons and roads were established throughout the Northumberland region.
The northern frontier of the Roman occupation fluctuated between Pons Aelius (now Newcastle) and the Forth. Hadrian's Wall was completed by about 130 AD, to define and defend the northern boundary of Roman Britain. By 142, the Romans had completed the Antonine Wall, a more northerly defensive border lying between the Forth and Clyde. However, by 164 they abandoned the Antonine Wall to consolidate defences at Hadrian's Wall.
Two important Roman roads in the region were the Stanegate and Dere Street, the latter extending through the Cheviot Hills to locations well north of the Tweed. Located at the intersection of these two roads, Coria (Corbridge), a Roman supply-base, was the most northerly large town in the Roman Empire. The Roman forts of Vercovicium (Housesteads) on Hadrian's Wall, and Vindolanda (Chesterholm) built to guard the Stanegate, had extensive civil settlements surrounding them.
The Celtic peoples living in the region between the Tyne and the Forth were known to the Romans as the Votadini. When not under direct Roman rule, they functioned as a friendly client kingdom, a somewhat porous buffer against the more warlike Picts to the north.
The gradual Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century led to a poorly documented age of conflict and chaos as different peoples contested territories in northern Britain.
Nearly 2000-year-old Roman boxing gloves were uncovered at Vindolanda in 2017 by the Vidolanda Trust experts led by Dr Andrew Birley. According to the Guardian, being similar in style and function to the full-hand modern boxing gloves, these two gloves found at Vindolanda look like leather bands date back to 120 AD. It is suggested that based on their difference from gladiator gloves warriors using this type of gloves had no purpose to kill each other. These gloves were probably used in a sport for promoting fighting skills. The gloves are currently displayed at Vindolanda's museum.
Conquests by Anglian invaders led to the establishment of the kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia. The first Anglian settlement was effected in 547 by Ida, who, accompanied by his six sons, pushed through the narrow strip of territory between the Cheviots and the sea, and set up a fortress at Bamburgh, which became the royal seat of the Bernician kings. About the end of the 6th century Bernicia was first united with the rival kingdom of Deira under the rule of Æthelfrith of Northumbria, and the district between the Humber and the Forth became known as the kingdom of Northumbria.
After Æthelfrith was killed in battle around 616, Edwin of Deira became king of Northumbria. Æthelfrith's son Oswald fled northwest to the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata where he was converted to Christianity by the monks of Iona. Meanwhile, Paulinus, the first bishop of York, converted King Edwin to Roman Christianity and began an extensive program of conversion and baptism. By his time the kingdom must have reached the west coast, as Edwin is said to have conquered the islands of Anglesey and Man. Under Edwin the Northumbrian kingdom became the chief power in Britain. However, when Cadwallon ap Cadfan defeated Edwin at Hatfield Chase in 633, Northumbria was divided into the former kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira and Christianity suffered a temporary decline.
In 634, Oswald defeated Cadwallon ap Cadfan at the Battle of Heavenfield, resulting in the re-unification of Northumbria. Oswald re-established Christianity in the kingdom and assigned a bishopric at Hexham, where Wilfrid erected a famous early English church. Reunification was followed by a period of Northumbrian expansion into Pictish territory and growing dominance over the Celtic kingdoms of Dál Riata and Strathclyde to the west. Northumbrian encroachments were abruptly curtailed in 685, when Ecgfrith suffered complete defeat by a Pictish force at the Battle of Nechtansmere.
When Saint Aidan came at the request of Oswald to preach to the Northumbrians he chose the island of Lindisfarne as the site of his church and monastery, and made it the head of the diocese which he founded in 635. For some years the see continued in peace, numbering among its bishops Saint Cuthbert, but in 793 Vikings landed on the island and burnt the settlement, killing many of the monks. The survivors, however, rebuilt the church and continued to live there until 883, when, through fear of a second invasion of the Danes, they fled inland, taking with them the body of Cuthbert and other holy relics.
Against this background, the monasteries of Northumbria developed some remarkably influential cultural products. Cædmon, a monk at Whitby Abbey, authored one of the earliest surviving examples of Old English poetry some time before 680. The Lindisfarne Gospels, an early example of insular art, is attributed to Eadfrith, the bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 to 721. Stenton (1971, p. 191) describes the book as follows.
In mere script it is no more than an admirable example of a noble style, and the figure drawing of its illustrations, though probably based on classical models, has more than a touch of naïveté. Its unique importance is due to the beauty and astonishing intricacy of its decoration. The nature of its ornament connects it very closely with a group of Irish manuscripts of which the Book of Kells is the most famous.
Bede's writing, at the Northumbrian monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, gained him a reputation as the most learned scholar of his age. His work is notable for both its breadth (encompassing history, theology, science and literature) and quality, exemplified by the rigorous use of citation. Bede's most famous work is Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is regarded as a highly influential early model of historical scholarship.
The kingdom of Northumbria ceased to exist in 927, when it was incorporated into England as an earldom by Athelstan, the first king of a united England[citation needed].. In 937, Athelstan's victory over a combined Norse-Celtic force in the battle of Brunanburh secured England's control of its northern territory.
The Scottish king Indulf captured Edinburgh in 954, which thenceforth remained in possession of the Scots. His successors made repeated attempts to extend their territory southwards. Malcolm II was finally successful, when, in 1018, he annihilated the Northumbrian army at Carham on the Tweed, and Eadulf the earl of Northumbria ceded all his territory to the north of that river as the price of peace. Henceforth Lothian, consisting of the former region of Northumbria between the Forth and the Tweed, remained in possession of the Scottish kings.
The term Northumberland was first recorded in its contracted modern sense in 1065 in an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relating to a rebellion against Tostig Godwinson.
The vigorous resistance of Northumbria to William the Conqueror was punished by ruthless harrying, mostly south of the River Tees. As recounted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
A.D. 1068. This year King William gave Earl Robert the earldom over Northumberland; but the landsmen attacked him in the town of Durham, and slew him, and nine hundred men with him. Soon afterwards Edgar Etheling came with all the Northumbrians to York; and the townsmen made a treaty with him: but King William came from the South unawares on them with a large army, and put them to flight, and slew on the spot those who could not escape; which were many hundred men; and plundered the town. St. Peter's minster he made a profanation, and all other places also he despoiled and trampled upon; and the ethelling went back again to Scotland.
The Normans rebuilt the Anglian monasteries of Lindisfarne, Hexham and Tynemouth, and founded Norman abbeys at Newminster (1139), Alnwick (1147), Brinkburn (1180), Hulne, and Blanchland. Castles were built at Newcastle (1080), Alnwick (1096), Bamburgh (1131), Harbottle (1157), Prudhoe (1172), Warkworth (1205), Chillingham, Ford (1287), Dunstanburgh (1313), Morpeth, Langley (1350), Wark on Tweed and Norham (1121), the latter an enclave of the palatine bishops of Durham.
Northumberland county is not mentioned in the Domesday Survey, but the account of the issues of the county, as rendered by Odard the sheriff, is entered in the Great Roll of the Exchequer for 1131.
In 1237, Scotland renounced claims to Northumberland county in the Treaty of York.
During the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), the county of Northumberland was the district between the Tees and the Tweed, and had within it several scattered liberties subject to other powers: Durham, Sadberge, Bedlingtonshire, and Norhamshire belonging to the bishop of Durham; Hexhamshire to the archbishop of York; Tynedale to the king of Scotland; Emildon to the earl of Lancaster; and Redesdale to Gilbert de Umfraville, Earl of Angus. These franchises were exempt from the ordinary jurisdiction of the shire. Over time, some were incorporated within the county: Tynedale in 1495; Hexhamshire in 1572; and Norhamshire, Islandshire and Bedlingtonshire by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844.
The county court for Northumberland was held at different times at Newcastle, Alnwick and Morpeth, until by statute of 1549 it was ordered that the court should thenceforth be held in the town and castle of Alnwick. Under the same statute the sheriffs of Northumberland, who had been in the habit of appropriating the issues of the county to their private use, were required thereafter to deliver in their accounts to the Exchequer in the same manner as the sheriffs of other counties.
From the Norman Conquest until the union of England and Scotland under James I and VI, Northumberland was the scene of perpetual inroads and devastations by the Scots. Norham, Alnwick and Wark were captured by David I of Scotland in the wars of Stephen's reign. In 1174, during his invasion of Northumbria, William I of Scotland, also known as William the Lion, was captured by a party of about four hundred mounted knights, led by Ranulf de Glanvill. This incident became known as the Battle of Alnwick. In 1295, Robert de Ros and the earls of Athol and Menteith ravaged Redesdale, Coquetdale and Tynedale. In 1314 the county was ravaged by king Robert Bruce. And so dire was the Scottish threat in 1382, that by special enactment the earl of Northumberland was ordered to remain on his estates to protect the border. In 1388, Henry Percy was taken prisoner and 1500 of his men slain at the battle of Otterburn, immortalised in the ballad of Chevy Chase.
Alnwick, Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh were garrisoned for the Lancastrian cause in 1462, but after the Yorkist victories of Hexham and Hedgley Moor in 1464, Alnwick and Dunstanburgh surrendered, and Bamburgh was taken by storm.
In September 1513, King James IV of Scotland was killed at the Battle of Flodden on Branxton Moor.
Roman Catholic support in Northumberland for Mary, Queen of Scots, led to the Rising of the North in 1569.
After uniting the English and Scottish thrones, James VI and I sharply curbed the lawlessness of the border reivers and brought relative peace to the region. There were Church of Scotland congregations in Northumberland in the 17th and 18th centuries.
During the Civil War of the 17th century, Newcastle was garrisoned for the king by the earl of Newcastle, but in 1644 it was captured by the Scots under the earl of Leven, and in 1646 Charles I was led there a captive under the charge of David Leslie.
Many of the chief Northumberland families were ruined in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715.
The mineral resources of the area appear to have been exploited to some extent from remote times. It is certain that coal was used by the Romans in Northumberland, and some coal ornaments found at Angerton have been attributed to the 7th century. In a 13th-century grant to Newminster Abbey a road for the conveyance of sea coal from the shore about Blyth is mentioned, and the Blyth coal field was worked throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. The coal trade on the Tyne did not exist to any extent before the 13th century, but from that period it developed rapidly, and Newcastle acquired the monopoly of the river shipping and coal trade. Lead was exported from Newcastle in the 12th century, probably from Hexhamshire, the lead mines of which were very prosperous throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. In a charter from Richard I to Hugh de Puiset creating him earl of Northumberland, mines of silver and iron are mentioned. A salt pan is mentioned at Warkworth in the 12th century; in the 13th century the salt industry flourished at the mouth of the river Blyth, and in the 15th century formed the principal occupation of the inhabitants of North and South Shields. In the reign of Elizabeth I, glass factories were set up at Newcastle by foreign refugees, and the industry spread rapidly along the Tyne. Tanning, both of leather and of nets, was largely practised in the 13th century, and the salmon fisheries in the Tyne were famous in the reign of Henry I.
John Smeaton designed the Coldstream Bridge and a bridge at Hexham.
Stephenson's Rocket
Invention of the steam turbine by Charles Algernon Parsons
Represent the title of a book in your image.
Shug points out to Celie that life must be enjoyed. When they are in a field of purple flowers,
Shug tells Celie to look at the flowers and embrace their beauty. "You must look at all the good
and acknowledge them because God placed them all on earth." The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
Taken at The Regency, Laguna Woods, California. © 2013 All Rights Reserved.
My images are not to be used, copied, edited, or blogged without my explicit permission.
Please!! NO Glittery Awards or Large Graphics...Buddy Icons are OK. Thank You!
Thank you for playing along yesterday! You are the best, my Flickr friends! Enjoy your weekend!
L’Aigle royal est un rapace de l’Hémisphère Nord. Ce grand aigle est souvent représenté sur les armoiries nationales de plusieurs pays car il est réputé pour sa puissance et sa bravoure.
Cette espèce est également très appréciée en fauconnerie où l’on peut admirer ses évolutions majestueuses.
L’Aigle royal adulte a les parties supérieures d’un brun foncé assez uniforme, excepté la calotte, la nuque et les couvertures médianes qui sont plus pâles et présentent des plumes aux extrémités fauve clair.
Les rémiges sont grises avec des vexilles internes plus sombres. La queue a la base grise barrée de brun, et une bande terminale brun foncé.
Les parties inférieures sont plus foncées. Le dessous des ailes présente des petites couvertures brun-roux. Les médianes sont plus sombres. Les grandes couvertures sont grises comme les rémiges.
Les ailes sont larges et rectangulaires, et la queue relativement longue et large avec l’extrémité arrondie.
Sur la tête, la face, le front et le devant de la calotte sont brun foncé alors que l’arrière de la calotte, la nuque et l’arrière du cou sont brun-doré, s’étendant sur les côtés du cou.
Les aigles du Léman Parc animalier à Sciez. Haute Savoie
This monument represents a white marble temple house, cut in two in the middle. Inside the thin gap, two red granite walls, arranged face to face, bear the names of the peoples who were victims of genocide in the 20th century. The space between the two parts is lit, symbolizing the energy of healing. The broken house rests on five sleepers representing the five continents: an allegory of our responsibility towards a humanity repeatedly struck by all sorts of misfortunes.
A strong commemorative gesture, Reparation constrains memory and chases the genocides of the 20th century and their victims from oblivion. The monument makes this public space a place in the heart of the city which, beyond pain, loss and resentment, offers forgiveness and peace, as its title says: the beginning of reparation. Furthermore, Larivée decided to develop the site as a set of small places for reflection. Paths, analogies of human existence in its movements and deportations, go up temporal spaces in a slow ascent, which leads us to the summit, where the white temple stands.
Parc Marcelin-Wilson, Montréal (Ahuntsic-Cartierville), Québec.
Representing the latest inventions right from the busy workshops of Stonewald, the LW2000 model SE is here!
Featuring the agile yet durable design that has made Lenfald Wagons famous, the practical, lightweight design and the addition of the newly invented LW Spotted Accelerator Pig © makes this wagon a must-have for any fashionable Roawian with a speedy lifestyle!
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A little late-night tablescrap I built yesterday in honour of Ádám's hilarious LW 2000 ;)
A photograph that represents both the South Wales Valleys and the Maltese Islands.
In 1968 Aberdare Urban District Council bought six AEC Reliances with Willowbrook dual-door bodies, numbered 1-6 (TNY 491-6G). Three of these - 4-6 - were exported to Malta in the early 1980s with a large number of Bedford and Ford buses and coaches.
All three subsequently had their centre doors removed.
Former 5 was allocated number 300 in the Route Bus fleet, initially carrying green and white livery and plate Y-300-M, and in the yellow, white and orange livery era, was further re-registered DBY 300
Whilst the other pair operated more or less in the same condition as when they were imported (bar the loss of their centre doors), DBY 300 was subject to a number of modifications, including the loss of her AEC engine in favour of a Cummins unit. She was always immaculately presented and would often be found operating what were then Services 45 (Cirkewwa-Valletta) and 49 (Bugibba-Valletta).
This shot from February 2010 shows her approaching Cirkewwa, from where the ferry service operates to and from the neighbouring island of Gozo.
When the Government Transport Reforms were introduced in June 2011, I believe that she was retained by her owner. However, I don't know her subsequent fate.
Inspired by Gareth Pugh's men suit collection, this edgy formal contains symbolic references about the country I represent, and sublimates the intricate styling into sharp, contemporary lines.
The deep anthracite - bright red one buttoned jacket is long, opening in a deep V-shaped neckline which lets exposed the sheer-lace shirt worn behind; the shirt collar's corners are buttoned down by little gems whose shape recalls a red flower; a red jewel look-a-like necklace replaces the classical tie.
The red flower boutonnière is big and red, as roses are symbol of passion and virility.
The straight suit pants give the whole outfit the glamorous elegance of the one-color suit, but are enriched by drapes on the side, recalling the shape of the big flamenco skirt when moving and the geometric red-colored insert of the jacket.
Formal shoes are bi-colored as well, with silver inserts matching both the jacket's button and the monocle, which is giving the outfit a gentleman's retro touch.
Gloves are elegant, silky, red as all the inserts, as it is the headdress, a couture recalling of the basque hat, worn rigorously inclined and flat on the head.
STYLE CREDITS:
Headwear: *LODE* - Elix, red (edited)
Lace: CaTwA - Left Jungle Ribbon Forehead (re-colored)
Hair: Action - Inkubator Hair Thomas (edited)
Jacket: [sYs] - Icone Jacket black/red
Shirt: GizzA - Lace Shirt (taken from Baroque Sicily ensamble)
Shirt collar: @-> ISD - Secrets of Nature Shirt Collar - Fire [Right Pendant] (edited and re-colored)
Shirt's collar buttons: self made using Mesh Silhouettes*Nano - Camelia (recolored, resized, copied)
Boutonniere: Lapointe&Bastchild - Evocative Floral "Rose" Scarlet v1
Pants with skirts drapes: Glam Dreams - Caesar's wish (created forMr.Virtual World 2015)
Shoes: FATEstep - Stiller Shoes for Slink
Socks: Ama Slink Av.Enhance applier
Tie/Necklace: [MANDALA] - Smexy Tie Necklace/Japan Rock Red
Monocle: AIR - George, left
Gloves: Sweet Tea - Formal Gloves Essential 2.2 Slink applier
Cigarette: YV - Coco, Cigarette Lipstick White
Fish, any of approximately 34,000 species of vertebrate animals (phylum Chordata) found in the fresh and salt waters of the world. Living species range from the primitive jawless lampreys and hagfishes through the cartilaginous sharks, skates, and rays to the abundant and diverse bony fishes. Most fish species are cold-blooded; however, one species, the opah (Lampris guttatus), is warm-blooded.
The term fish is applied to a variety of vertebrates of several evolutionary lines. It describes a life-form rather than a taxonomic group. As members of the phylum Chordata, fish share certain features with other vertebrates. These features are gill slits at some point in the life cycle, a notochord, or skeletal supporting rod, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, and a tail. Living fishes represent some five classes, which are as distinct from one another as are the four classes of familiar air-breathing animals—amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. For example, the jawless fishes (Agnatha) have gills in pouches and lack limb girdles. Extant agnathans are the lampreys and the hagfishes. As the name implies, the skeletons of fishes of the class Chondrichthyes (from chondr, “cartilage,” and ichthyes, “fish”) are made entirely of cartilage. Modern fish of this class lack a swim bladder, and their scales and teeth are made up of the same placoid material. Sharks, skates, and rays are examples of cartilaginous fishes. The bony fishes are by far the largest class. Examples range from the tiny seahorse to the 450-kg (1,000-pound) blue marlin, from the flattened soles and flounders to the boxy puffers and ocean sunfishes. Unlike the scales of the cartilaginous fishes, those of bony fishes, when present, grow throughout life and are made up of thin overlapping plates of bone. Bony fishes also have an operculum that covers the gill slits.
The study of fishes, the science of ichthyology, is of broad importance. Fishes are of interest to humans for many reasons, the most important being their relationship with and dependence on the environment. A more obvious reason for interest in fishes is their role as a moderate but important part of the world’s food supply. This resource, once thought unlimited, is now realized to be finite and in delicate balance with the biological, chemical, and physical factors of the aquatic environment. Overfishing, pollution, and alteration of the environment are the chief enemies of proper fisheries management, both in fresh waters and in the ocean. (For a detailed discussion of the technology and economics of fisheries, see commercial fishing.) Another practical reason for studying fishes is their use in disease control. As predators on mosquito larvae, they help curb malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.
Fishes are valuable laboratory animals in many aspects of medical and biological research. For example, the readiness of many fishes to acclimate to captivity has allowed biologists to study behaviour, physiology, and even ecology under relatively natural conditions. Fishes have been especially important in the study of animal behaviour, where research on fishes has provided a broad base for the understanding of the more flexible behaviour of the higher vertebrates. The zebra fish is used as a model in studies of gene expression.
There are aesthetic and recreational reasons for an interest in fishes. Millions of people keep live fishes in home aquariums for the simple pleasure of observing the beauty and behaviour of animals otherwise unfamiliar to them. Aquarium fishes provide a personal challenge to many aquarists, allowing them to test their ability to keep a small section of the natural environment in their homes. Sportfishing is another way of enjoying the natural environment, also indulged in by millions of people every year. Interest in aquarium fishes and sportfishing supports multimillion-dollar industries throughout the world.
Fishes have been in existence for more than 450 million years, during which time they have evolved repeatedly to fit into almost every conceivable type of aquatic habitat. In a sense, land vertebrates are simply highly modified fishes: when fishes colonized the land habitat, they became tetrapod (four-legged) land vertebrates. The popular conception of a fish as a slippery, streamlined aquatic animal that possesses fins and breathes by gills applies to many fishes, but far more fishes deviate from that conception than conform to it. For example, the body is elongate in many forms and greatly shortened in others; the body is flattened in some (principally in bottom-dwelling fishes) and laterally compressed in many others; the fins may be elaborately extended, forming intricate shapes, or they may be reduced or even lost; and the positions of the mouth, eyes, nostrils, and gill openings vary widely. Air breathers have appeared in several evolutionary lines.
Many fishes are cryptically coloured and shaped, closely matching their respective environments; others are among the most brilliantly coloured of all organisms, with a wide range of hues, often of striking intensity, on a single individual. The brilliance of pigments may be enhanced by the surface structure of the fish, so that it almost seems to glow. A number of unrelated fishes have actual light-producing organs. Many fishes are able to alter their coloration—some for the purpose of camouflage, others for the enhancement of behavioral signals.
Fishes range in adult length from less than 10 mm (0.4 inch) to more than 20 metres (60 feet) and in weight from about 1.5 grams (less than 0.06 ounce) to many thousands of kilograms. Some live in shallow thermal springs at temperatures slightly above 42 °C (100 °F), others in cold Arctic seas a few degrees below 0 °C (32 °F) or in cold deep waters more than 4,000 metres (13,100 feet) beneath the ocean surface. The structural and, especially, the physiological adaptations for life at such extremes are relatively poorly known and provide the scientifically curious with great incentive for study.
Almost all natural bodies of water bear fish life, the exceptions being very hot thermal ponds and extremely salt-alkaline lakes, such as the Dead Sea in Asia and the Great Salt Lake in North America. The present distribution of fishes is a result of the geological history and development of Earth as well as the ability of fishes to undergo evolutionary change and to adapt to the available habitats. Fishes may be seen to be distributed according to habitat and according to geographical area. Major habitat differences are marine and freshwater. For the most part, the fishes in a marine habitat differ from those in a freshwater habitat, even in adjacent areas, but some, such as the salmon, migrate from one to the other. The freshwater habitats may be seen to be of many kinds. Fishes found in mountain torrents, Arctic lakes, tropical lakes, temperate streams, and tropical rivers will all differ from each other, both in obvious gross structure and in physiological attributes. Even in closely adjacent habitats where, for example, a tropical mountain torrent enters a lowland stream, the fish fauna will differ. The marine habitats can be divided into deep ocean floors (benthic), mid-water oceanic (bathypelagic), surface oceanic (pelagic), rocky coast, sandy coast, muddy shores, bays, estuaries, and others. Also, for example, rocky coastal shores in tropical and temperate regions will have different fish faunas, even when such habitats occur along the same coastline.
Although much is known about the present geographical distribution of fishes, far less is known about how that distribution came about. Many parts of the fish fauna of the fresh waters of North America and Eurasia are related and undoubtedly have a common origin. The faunas of Africa and South America are related, extremely old, and probably an expression of the drifting apart of the two continents. The fauna of southern Asia is related to that of Central Asia, and some of it appears to have entered Africa. The extremely large shore-fish faunas of the Indian and tropical Pacific oceans comprise a related complex, but the tropical shore fauna of the Atlantic, although containing Indo-Pacific components, is relatively limited and probably younger. The Arctic and Antarctic marine faunas are quite different from each other. The shore fauna of the North Pacific is quite distinct, and that of the North Atlantic more limited and probably younger. Pelagic oceanic fishes, especially those in deep waters, are similar the world over, showing little geographical isolation in terms of family groups. The deep oceanic habitat is very much the same throughout the world, but species differences do exist, showing geographical areas determined by oceanic currents and water masses.
All aspects of the life of a fish are closely correlated with adaptation to the total environment, physical, chemical, and biological. In studies, all the interdependent aspects of fish, such as behaviour, locomotion, reproduction, and physical and physiological characteristics, must be taken into account.
Correlated with their adaptation to an extremely wide variety of habitats is the extremely wide variety of life cycles that fishes display. The great majority hatch from relatively small eggs a few days to several weeks or more after the eggs are scattered in the water. Newly hatched young are still partially undeveloped and are called larvae until body structures such as fins, skeleton, and some organs are fully formed. Larval life is often very short, usually less than a few weeks, but it can be very long, some lampreys continuing as larvae for at least five years. Young and larval fishes, before reaching sexual maturity, must grow considerably, and their small size and other factors often dictate that they live in a habitat different than that of the adults. For example, most tropical marine shore fishes have pelagic larvae. Larval food also is different, and larval fishes often live in shallow waters, where they may be less exposed to predators.
After a fish reaches adult size, the length of its life is subject to many factors, such as innate rates of aging, predation pressure, and the nature of the local climate. The longevity of a species in the protected environment of an aquarium may have nothing to do with how long members of that species live in the wild. Many small fishes live only one to three years at the most. In some species, however, individuals may live as long as 10 or 20 or even 100 years.
Fish behaviour is a complicated and varied subject. As in almost all animals with a central nervous system, the nature of a response of an individual fish to stimuli from its environment depends upon the inherited characteristics of its nervous system, on what it has learned from past experience, and on the nature of the stimuli. Compared with the variety of human responses, however, that of a fish is stereotyped, not subject to much modification by “thought” or learning, and investigators must guard against anthropomorphic interpretations of fish behaviour.
Fishes perceive the world around them by the usual senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste and by special lateral line water-current detectors. In the few fishes that generate electric fields, a process that might best be called electrolocation aids in perception. One or another of these senses often is emphasized at the expense of others, depending upon the fish’s other adaptations. In fishes with large eyes, the sense of smell may be reduced; others, with small eyes, hunt and feed primarily by smell (such as some eels).
Specialized behaviour is primarily concerned with the three most important activities in the fish’s life: feeding, reproduction, and escape from enemies. Schooling behaviour of sardines on the high seas, for instance, is largely a protective device to avoid enemies, but it is also associated with and modified by their breeding and feeding requirements. Predatory fishes are often solitary, lying in wait to dart suddenly after their prey, a kind of locomotion impossible for beaked parrot fishes, which feed on coral, swimming in small groups from one coral head to the next. In addition, some predatory fishes that inhabit pelagic environments, such as tunas, often school.
Sleep in fishes, all of which lack true eyelids, consists of a seemingly listless state in which the fish maintains its balance but moves slowly. If attacked or disturbed, most can dart away. A few kinds of fishes lie on the bottom to sleep. Most catfishes, some loaches, and some eels and electric fishes are strictly nocturnal, being active and hunting for food during the night and retiring during the day to holes, thick vegetation, or other protective parts of the environment.
Communication between members of a species or between members of two or more species often is extremely important, especially in breeding behaviour (see below Reproduction). The mode of communication may be visual, as between the small so-called cleaner fish and a large fish of a very different species. The larger fish often allows the cleaner to enter its mouth to remove gill parasites. The cleaner is recognized by its distinctive colour and actions and therefore is not eaten, even if the larger fish is normally a predator. Communication is often chemical, signals being sent by specific chemicals called pheromones.
Many fishes have a streamlined body and swim freely in open water. Fish locomotion is closely correlated with habitat and ecological niche (the general position of the animal to its environment).
Many fishes in both marine and fresh waters swim at the surface and have mouths adapted to feed best (and sometimes only) at the surface. Often such fishes are long and slender, able to dart at surface insects or at other surface fishes and in turn to dart away from predators; needlefishes, halfbeaks, and topminnows (such as killifish and mosquito fish) are good examples. Oceanic flying fishes escape their predators by gathering speed above the water surface, with the lower lobe of the tail providing thrust in the water. They then glide hundreds of yards on enlarged, winglike pectoral and pelvic fins. South American freshwater flying fishes escape their enemies by jumping and propelling their strongly keeled bodies out of the water.
So-called mid-water swimmers, the most common type of fish, are of many kinds and live in many habitats. The powerful fusiform tunas and the trouts, for example, are adapted for strong, fast swimming, the tunas to capture prey speedily in the open ocean and the trouts to cope with the swift currents of streams and rivers. The trout body form is well adapted to many habitats. Fishes that live in relatively quiet waters such as bays or lake shores or slow rivers usually are not strong, fast swimmers but are capable of short, quick bursts of speed to escape a predator. Many of these fishes have their sides flattened, examples being the sunfish and the freshwater angelfish of aquarists. Fish associated with the bottom or substrate usually are slow swimmers. Open-water plankton-feeding fishes almost always remain fusiform and are capable of rapid, strong movement (for example, sardines and herrings of the open ocean and also many small minnows of streams and lakes).
Bottom-living fishes are of many kinds and have undergone many types of modification of their body shape and swimming habits. Rays, which evolved from strong-swimming mid-water sharks, usually stay close to the bottom and move by undulating their large pectoral fins. Flounders live in a similar habitat and move over the bottom by undulating the entire body. Many bottom fishes dart from place to place, resting on the bottom between movements, a motion common in gobies. One goby relative, the mudskipper, has taken to living at the edge of pools along the shore of muddy mangrove swamps. It escapes its enemies by flipping rapidly over the mud, out of the water. Some catfishes, synbranchid eels, the so-called climbing perch, and a few other fishes venture out over damp ground to find more promising waters than those that they left. They move by wriggling their bodies, sometimes using strong pectoral fins; most have accessory air-breathing organs. Many bottom-dwelling fishes live in mud holes or rocky crevices. Marine eels and gobies commonly are found in such habitats and for the most part venture far beyond their cavelike homes. Some bottom dwellers, such as the clingfishes (Gobiesocidae), have developed powerful adhesive disks that enable them to remain in place on the substrate in areas such as rocky coasts, where the action of the waves is great.
The methods of reproduction in fishes are varied, but most fishes lay a large number of small eggs, fertilized and scattered outside of the body. The eggs of pelagic fishes usually remain suspended in the open water. Many shore and freshwater fishes lay eggs on the bottom or among plants. Some have adhesive eggs. The mortality of the young and especially of the eggs is very high, and often only a few individuals grow to maturity out of hundreds, thousands, and in some cases millions of eggs laid.
Males produce sperm, usually as a milky white substance called milt, in two (sometimes one) testes within the body cavity. In bony fishes a sperm duct leads from each testis to a urogenital opening behind the vent or anus. In sharks and rays and in cyclostomes the duct leads to a cloaca. Sometimes the pelvic fins are modified to help transmit the milt to the eggs at the female’s vent or on the substrate where the female has placed them. Sometimes accessory organs are used to fertilize females internally—for example, the claspers of many sharks and rays.
In the females the eggs are formed in two ovaries (sometimes only one) and pass through the ovaries to the urogenital opening and to the outside. In some fishes the eggs are fertilized internally but are shed before development takes place. Members of about a dozen families each of bony fishes (teleosts) and sharks bear live young. Many skates and rays also bear live young. In some bony fishes the eggs simply develop within the female, the young emerging when the eggs hatch (ovoviviparous). Others develop within the ovary and are nourished by ovarian tissues after hatching (viviparous). There are also other methods utilized by fishes to nourish young within the female. In all live-bearers the young are born at a relatively large size and are few in number. In one family of primarily marine fishes, the surfperches from the Pacific coast of North America, Japan, and Korea, the males of at least one species are born sexually mature, although they are not fully grown.
Some fishes are hermaphroditic—an individual producing both sperm and eggs, usually at different stages of its life. Self-fertilization, however, is probably rare.
Successful reproduction and, in many cases, defense of the eggs and the young are assured by rather stereotypical but often elaborate courtship and parental behaviour, either by the male or the female or both. Some fishes prepare nests by hollowing out depressions in the sand bottom (cichlids, for example), build nests with plant materials and sticky threads excreted by the kidneys (sticklebacks), or blow a cluster of mucus-covered bubbles at the water surface (gouramis). The eggs are laid in these structures. Some varieties of cichlids and catfishes incubate eggs in their mouths.
Some fishes, such as salmon, undergo long migrations from the ocean and up large rivers to spawn in the gravel beds where they themselves hatched (anadromous fishes). Some, such as the freshwater eels (family Anguillidae), live and grow to maturity in fresh water and migrate to the sea to spawn (catadromous fishes). Other fishes undertake shorter migrations from lakes into streams, within the ocean, or enter spawning habitats that they do not ordinarily occupy in other ways.
The basic structure and function of the fish body are similar to those of all other vertebrates. The usual four types of tissues are present: surface or epithelial, connective (bone, cartilage, and fibrous tissues, as well as their derivative, blood), nerve, and muscle tissues. In addition, the fish’s organs and organ systems parallel those of other vertebrates.
The typical fish body is streamlined and spindle-shaped, with an anterior head, a gill apparatus, and a heart, the latter lying in the midline just below the gill chamber. The body cavity, containing the vital organs, is situated behind the head in the lower anterior part of the body. The anus usually marks the posterior termination of the body cavity and most often occurs just in front of the base of the anal fin. The spinal cord and vertebral column continue from the posterior part of the head to the base of the tail fin, passing dorsal to the body cavity and through the caudal (tail) region behind the body cavity. Most of the body is of muscular tissue, a high proportion of which is necessitated by swimming. In the course of evolution this basic body plan has been modified repeatedly into the many varieties of fish shapes that exist today.
The skeleton forms an integral part of the fish’s locomotion system, as well as serving to protect vital parts. The internal skeleton consists of the skull bones (except for the roofing bones of the head, which are really part of the external skeleton), the vertebral column, and the fin supports (fin rays). The fin supports are derived from the external skeleton but will be treated here because of their close functional relationship to the internal skeleton. The internal skeleton of cyclostomes, sharks, and rays is of cartilage; that of many fossil groups and some primitive living fishes is mostly of cartilage but may include some bone. In place of the vertebral column, the earliest vertebrates had a fully developed notochord, a flexible stiff rod of viscous cells surrounded by a strong fibrous sheath. During the evolution of modern fishes the rod was replaced in part by cartilage and then by ossified cartilage. Sharks and rays retain a cartilaginous vertebral column; bony fishes have spool-shaped vertebrae that in the more primitive living forms only partially replace the notochord. The skull, including the gill arches and jaws of bony fishes, is fully, or at least partially, ossified. That of sharks and rays remains cartilaginous, at times partially replaced by calcium deposits but never by true bone.
The supportive elements of the fins (basal or radial bones or both) have changed greatly during fish evolution. Some of these changes are described in the section below (Evolution and paleontology). Most fishes possess a single dorsal fin on the midline of the back. Many have two and a few have three dorsal fins. The other fins are the single tail and anal fins and paired pelvic and pectoral fins. A small fin, the adipose fin, with hairlike fin rays, occurs in many of the relatively primitive teleosts (such as trout) on the back near the base of the caudal fin.
The skin of a fish must serve many functions. It aids in maintaining the osmotic balance, provides physical protection for the body, is the site of coloration, contains sensory receptors, and, in some fishes, functions in respiration. Mucous glands, which aid in maintaining the water balance and offer protection from bacteria, are extremely numerous in fish skin, especially in cyclostomes and teleosts. Since mucous glands are present in the modern lampreys, it is reasonable to assume that they were present in primitive fishes, such as the ancient Silurian and Devonian agnathans. Protection from abrasion and predation is another function of the fish skin, and dermal (skin) bone arose early in fish evolution in response to this need. It is thought that bone first evolved in skin and only later invaded the cartilaginous areas of the fish’s body, to provide additional support and protection. There is some argument as to which came first, cartilage or bone, and fossil evidence does not settle the question. In any event, dermal bone has played an important part in fish evolution and has different characteristics in different groups of fishes. Several groups are characterized at least in part by the kind of bony scales they possess.
Scales have played an important part in the evolution of fishes. Primitive fishes usually had thick bony plates or thick scales in several layers of bone, enamel, and related substances. Modern teleost fishes have scales of bone, which, while still protective, allow much more freedom of motion in the body. A few modern teleosts (some catfishes, sticklebacks, and others) have secondarily acquired bony plates in the skin. Modern and early sharks possessed placoid scales, a relatively primitive type of scale with a toothlike structure, consisting of an outside layer of enamel-like substance (vitrodentine), an inner layer of dentine, and a pulp cavity containing nerves and blood vessels. Primitive bony fishes had thick scales of either the ganoid or the cosmoid type. Cosmoid scales have a hard, enamel-like outer layer, an inner layer of cosmine (a form of dentine), and then a layer of vascular bone (isopedine). In ganoid scales the hard outer layer is different chemically and is called ganoin. Under this is a cosminelike layer and then a vascular bony layer. The thin, translucent bony scales of modern fishes, called cycloid and ctenoid (the latter distinguished by serrations at the edges), lack enameloid and dentine layers.
Skin has several other functions in fishes. It is well supplied with nerve endings and presumably receives tactile, thermal, and pain stimuli. Skin is also well supplied with blood vessels. Some fishes breathe in part through the skin, by the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the surrounding water and numerous small blood vessels near the skin surface.
Skin serves as protection through the control of coloration. Fishes exhibit an almost limitless range of colours. The colours often blend closely with the surroundings, effectively hiding the animal. Many fishes use bright colours for territorial advertisement or as recognition marks for other members of their own species, or sometimes for members of other species. Many fishes can change their colour to a greater or lesser degree, by movement of pigment within the pigment cells (chromatophores). Black pigment cells (melanophores), of almost universal occurrence in fishes, are often juxtaposed with other pigment cells. When placed beneath iridocytes or leucophores (bearing the silvery or white pigment guanine), melanophores produce structural colours of blue and green. These colours are often extremely intense, because they are formed by refraction of light through the needlelike crystals of guanine. The blue and green refracted colours are often relatively pure, lacking the red and yellow rays, which have been absorbed by the black pigment (melanin) of the melanophores. Yellow, orange, and red colours are produced by erythrophores, cells containing the appropriate carotenoid pigments. Other colours are produced by combinations of melanophores, erythrophores, and iridocytes.
The major portion of the body of most fishes consists of muscles. Most of the mass is trunk musculature, the fin muscles usually being relatively small. The caudal fin is usually the most powerful fin, being moved by the trunk musculature. The body musculature is usually arranged in rows of chevron-shaped segments on each side. Contractions of these segments, each attached to adjacent vertebrae and vertebral processes, bends the body on the vertebral joint, producing successive undulations of the body, passing from the head to the tail, and producing driving strokes of the tail. It is the latter that provides the strong forward movement for most fishes.
The digestive system, in a functional sense, starts at the mouth, with the teeth used to capture prey or collect plant foods. Mouth shape and tooth structure vary greatly in fishes, depending on the kind of food normally eaten. Most fishes are predacious, feeding on small invertebrates or other fishes and have simple conical teeth on the jaws, on at least some of the bones of the roof of the mouth, and on special gill arch structures just in front of the esophagus. The latter are throat teeth. Most predacious fishes swallow their prey whole, and the teeth are used for grasping and holding prey, for orienting prey to be swallowed (head first) and for working the prey toward the esophagus. There are a variety of tooth types in fishes. Some fishes, such as sharks and piranhas, have cutting teeth for biting chunks out of their victims. A shark’s tooth, although superficially like that of a piranha, appears in many respects to be a modified scale, while that of the piranha is like that of other bony fishes, consisting of dentine and enamel. Parrot fishes have beaklike mouths with short incisor-like teeth for breaking off coral and have heavy pavementlike throat teeth for crushing the coral. Some catfishes have small brushlike teeth, arranged in rows on the jaws, for scraping plant and animal growth from rocks. Many fishes (such as the Cyprinidae or minnows) have no jaw teeth at all but have very strong throat teeth.
Some fishes gather planktonic food by straining it from their gill cavities with numerous elongate stiff rods (gill rakers) anchored by one end to the gill bars. The food collected on these rods is passed to the throat, where it is swallowed. Most fishes have only short gill rakers that help keep food particles from escaping out the mouth cavity into the gill chamber.
Once reaching the throat, food enters a short, often greatly distensible esophagus, a simple tube with a muscular wall leading into a stomach. The stomach varies greatly in fishes, depending upon the diet. In most predacious fishes it is a simple straight or curved tube or pouch with a muscular wall and a glandular lining. Food is largely digested there and leaves the stomach in liquid form.
Between the stomach and the intestine, ducts enter the digestive tube from the liver and pancreas. The liver is a large, clearly defined organ. The pancreas may be embedded in it, diffused through it, or broken into small parts spread along some of the intestine. The junction between the stomach and the intestine is marked by a muscular valve. Pyloric ceca (blind sacs) occur in some fishes at this junction and have a digestive or absorptive function or both.
The intestine itself is quite variable in length, depending upon the fish’s diet. It is short in predacious forms, sometimes no longer than the body cavity, but long in herbivorous forms, being coiled and several times longer than the entire length of the fish in some species of South American catfishes. The intestine is primarily an organ for absorbing nutrients into the bloodstream. The larger its internal surface, the greater its absorptive efficiency, and a spiral valve is one method of increasing its absorption surface.
Sharks, rays, chimaeras, lungfishes, surviving chondrosteans, holosteans, and even a few of the more primitive teleosts have a spiral valve or at least traces of it in the intestine. Most modern teleosts have increased the area of the intestinal walls by having numerous folds and villi (fingerlike projections) somewhat like those in humans. Undigested substances are passed to the exterior through the anus in most teleost fishes. In lungfishes, sharks, and rays, it is first passed through the cloaca, a common cavity receiving the intestinal opening and the ducts from the urogenital system.
Oxygen and carbon dioxide dissolve in water, and most fishes exchange dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide in water by means of the gills. The gills lie behind and to the side of the mouth cavity and consist of fleshy filaments supported by the gill arches and filled with blood vessels, which give gills a bright red colour. Water taken in continuously through the mouth passes backward between the gill bars and over the gill filaments, where the exchange of gases takes place. The gills are protected by a gill cover in teleosts and many other fishes but by flaps of skin in sharks, rays, and some of the older fossil fish groups. The blood capillaries in the gill filaments are close to the gill surface to take up oxygen from the water and to give up excess carbon dioxide to the water.
Most modern fishes have a hydrostatic (ballast) organ, called the swim bladder, that lies in the body cavity just below the kidney and above the stomach and intestine. It originated as a diverticulum of the digestive canal. In advanced teleosts, especially the acanthopterygians, the bladder has lost its connection with the digestive tract, a condition called physoclistic. The connection has been retained (physostomous) by many relatively primitive teleosts. In several unrelated lines of fishes, the bladder has become specialized as a lung or, at least, as a highly vascularized accessory breathing organ. Some fishes with such accessory organs are obligate air breathers and will drown if denied access to the surface, even in well-oxygenated water. Fishes with a hydrostatic form of swim bladder can control their depth by regulating the amount of gas in the bladder. The gas, mostly oxygen, is secreted into the bladder by special glands, rendering the fish more buoyant; the gas is absorbed into the bloodstream by another special organ, reducing the overall buoyancy and allowing the fish to sink. Some deep-sea fishes may have oils, rather than gas, in the bladder. Other deep-sea and some bottom-living forms have much-reduced swim bladders or have lost the organ entirely.
The swim bladder of fishes follows the same developmental pattern as the lungs of land vertebrates. There is no doubt that the two structures have the same historical origin in primitive fishes. More or less intermediate forms still survive among the more primitive types of fishes, such as the lungfishes Lepidosiren and Protopterus.
The circulatory, or blood vascular, system consists of the heart, the arteries, the capillaries, and the veins. It is in the capillaries that the interchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide, nutrients, and other substances such as hormones and waste products takes place. The capillaries lead to the veins, which return the venous blood with its waste products to the heart, kidneys, and gills. There are two kinds of capillary beds: those in the gills and those in the rest of the body. The heart, a folded continuous muscular tube with three or four saclike enlargements, undergoes rhythmic contractions and receives venous blood in a sinus venosus. It passes the blood to an auricle and then into a thick muscular pump, the ventricle. From the ventricle the blood goes to a bulbous structure at the base of a ventral aorta just below the gills. The blood passes to the afferent (receiving) arteries of the gill arches and then to the gill capillaries. There waste gases are given off to the environment, and oxygen is absorbed. The oxygenated blood enters efferent (exuant) arteries of the gill arches and then flows into the dorsal aorta. From there blood is distributed to the tissues and organs of the body. One-way valves prevent backflow. The circulation of fishes thus differs from that of the reptiles, birds, and mammals in that oxygenated blood is not returned to the heart prior to distribution to the other parts of the body.
The primary excretory organ in fishes, as in other vertebrates, is the kidney. In fishes some excretion also takes place in the digestive tract, skin, and especially the gills (where ammonia is given off). Compared with land vertebrates, fishes have a special problem in maintaining their internal environment at a constant concentration of water and dissolved substances, such as salts. Proper balance of the internal environment (homeostasis) of a fish is in a great part maintained by the excretory system, especially the kidney.
The kidney, gills, and skin play an important role in maintaining a fish’s internal environment and checking the effects of osmosis. Marine fishes live in an environment in which the water around them has a greater concentration of salts than they can have inside their body and still maintain life. Freshwater fishes, on the other hand, live in water with a much lower concentration of salts than they require inside their bodies. Osmosis tends to promote the loss of water from the body of a marine fish and absorption of water by that of a freshwater fish. Mucus in the skin tends to slow the process but is not a sufficient barrier to prevent the movement of fluids through the permeable skin. When solutions on two sides of a permeable membrane have different concentrations of dissolved substances, water will pass through the membrane into the more concentrated solution, while the dissolved chemicals move into the area of lower concentration (diffusion).
The kidney of freshwater fishes is often larger in relation to body weight than that of marine fishes. In both groups the kidney excretes wastes from the body, but the kidney of freshwater fishes also excretes large amounts of water, counteracting the water absorbed through the skin. Freshwater fishes tend to lose salt to the environment and must replace it. They get some salt from their food, but the gills and skin inside the mouth actively absorb salt from water passed through the mouth. This absorption is performed by special cells capable of moving salts against the diffusion gradient. Freshwater fishes drink very little water and take in little water with their food.
Marine fishes must conserve water, and therefore their kidneys excrete little water. To maintain their water balance, marine fishes drink large quantities of seawater, retaining most of the water and excreting the salt. Most nitrogenous waste in marine fishes appears to be secreted by the gills as ammonia. Marine fishes can excrete salt by clusters of special cells (chloride cells) in the gills.
There are several teleosts—for example, the salmon—that travel between fresh water and seawater and must adjust to the reversal of osmotic gradients. They adjust their physiological processes by spending time (often surprisingly little time) in the intermediate brackish environment.
Marine hagfishes, sharks, and rays have osmotic concentrations in their blood about equal to that of seawater and so do not have to drink water nor perform much physiological work to maintain their osmotic balance. In sharks and rays the osmotic concentration is kept high by retention of urea in the blood. Freshwater sharks have a lowered concentration of urea in the blood.
Endocrine glands secrete their products into the bloodstream and body tissues and, along with the central nervous system, control and regulate many kinds of body functions. Cyclostomes have a well-developed endocrine system, and presumably it was well developed in the early Agnatha, ancestral to modern fishes. Although the endocrine system in fishes is similar to that of higher vertebrates, there are numerous differences in detail. The pituitary, the thyroid, the suprarenals, the adrenals, the pancreatic islets, the sex glands (ovaries and testes), the inner wall of the intestine, and the bodies of the ultimobranchial gland make up the endocrine system in fishes. There are some others whose function is not well understood. These organs regulate sexual activity and reproduction, growth, osmotic pressure, general metabolic activities such as the storage of fat and the utilization of foodstuffs, blood pressure, and certain aspects of skin colour. Many of these activities are also controlled in part by the central nervous system, which works with the endocrine system in maintaining the life of a fish. Some parts of the endocrine system are developmentally, and undoubtedly evolutionarily, derived from the nervous system.
As in all vertebrates, the nervous system of fishes is the primary mechanism coordinating body activities, as well as integrating these activities in the appropriate manner with stimuli from the environment. The central nervous system, consisting of the brain and spinal cord, is the primary integrating mechanism. The peripheral nervous system, consisting of nerves that connect the brain and spinal cord to various body organs, carries sensory information from special receptor organs such as the eyes, internal ears, nares (sense of smell), taste glands, and others to the integrating centres of the brain and spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system also carries information via different nerve cells from the integrating centres of the brain and spinal cord. This coded information is carried to the various organs and body systems, such as the skeletal muscular system, for appropriate action in response to the original external or internal stimulus. Another branch of the nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, helps to coordinate the activities of many glands and organs and is itself closely connected to the integrating centres of the brain.
The brain of the fish is divided into several anatomical and functional parts, all closely interconnected but each serving as the primary centre of integrating particular kinds of responses and activities. Several of these centres or parts are primarily associated with one type of sensory perception, such as sight, hearing, or smell (olfaction).
The sense of smell is important in almost all fishes. Certain eels with tiny eyes depend mostly on smell for location of food. The olfactory, or nasal, organ of fishes is located on the dorsal surface of the snout. The lining of the nasal organ has special sensory cells that perceive chemicals dissolved in the water, such as substances from food material, and send sensory information to the brain by way of the first cranial nerve. Odour also serves as an alarm system. Many fishes, especially various species of freshwater minnows, react with alarm to a chemical released from the skin of an injured member of their own species.
Many fishes have a well-developed sense of taste, and tiny pitlike taste buds or organs are located not only within their mouth cavities but also over their heads and parts of their body. Catfishes, which often have poor vision, have barbels (“whiskers”) that serve as supplementary taste organs, those around the mouth being actively used to search out food on the bottom. Some species of naturally blind cave fishes are especially well supplied with taste buds, which often cover most of their body surface.
Sight is extremely important in most fishes. The eye of a fish is basically like that of all other vertebrates, but the eyes of fishes are extremely varied in structure and adaptation. In general, fishes living in dark and dim water habitats have large eyes, unless they have specialized in some compensatory way so that another sense (such as smell) is dominant, in which case the eyes will often be reduced. Fishes living in brightly lighted shallow waters often will have relatively small but efficient eyes. Cyclostomes have somewhat less elaborate eyes than other fishes, with skin stretched over the eyeball perhaps making their vision somewhat less effective. Most fishes have a spherical lens and accommodate their vision to far or near subjects by moving the lens within the eyeball. A few sharks accommodate by changing the shape of the lens, as in land vertebrates. Those fishes that are heavily dependent upon the eyes have especially strong muscles for accommodation. Most fishes see well, despite the restrictions imposed by frequent turbidity of the water and by light refraction.
Fossil evidence suggests that colour vision evolved in fishes more than 300 million years ago, but not all living fishes have retained this ability. Experimental evidence indicates that many shallow-water fishes, if not all, have colour vision and see some colours especially well, but some bottom-dwelling shore fishes live in areas where the water is sufficiently deep to filter out most if not all colours, and these fishes apparently never see colours. When tested in shallow water, they apparently are unable to respond to colour differences.
Sound perception and balance are intimately associated senses in a fish. The organs of hearing are entirely internal, located within the skull, on each side of the brain and somewhat behind the eyes. Sound waves, especially those of low frequencies, travel readily through water and impinge directly upon the bones and fluids of the head and body, to be transmitted to the hearing organs. Fishes readily respond to sound; for example, a trout conditioned to escape by the approach of fishermen will take flight upon perceiving footsteps on a stream bank even if it cannot see a fisherman. Compared with humans, however, the range of sound frequencies heard by fishes is greatly restricted. Many fishes communicate with each other by producing sounds in their swim bladders, in their throats by rasping their teeth, and in other ways.
A fish or other vertebrate seldom has to rely on a single type of sensory information to determine the nature of the environment around it. A catfish uses taste and touch when examining a food object with its oral barbels. Like most other animals, fishes have many touch receptors over their body surface. Pain and temperature receptors also are present in fishes and presumably produce the same kind of information to a fish as to humans. Fishes react in a negative fashion to stimuli that would be painful to human beings, suggesting that they feel a sensation of pain.
An important sensory system in fishes that is absent in other vertebrates (except some amphibians) is the lateral line system. This consists of a series of heavily innervated small canals located in the skin and bone around the eyes, along the lower jaw, over the head, and down the mid-side of the body, where it is associated with the scales. Intermittently along these canals are located tiny sensory organs (pit organs) that apparently detect changes in pressure. The system allows a fish to sense changes in water currents and pressure, thereby helping the fish to orient itself to the various changes that occur in the physical environment.
No antigo Egito era uma ave sagrada, criada nos templos e enterrada mumificada junto aos faraós.
Tot, o Deus do Tempo e da Sabedoria, era representado como tendo a cabeça de um Íbis.
BRF HQ, Ballymurphy Street,
Belfast
____
The 9th august 1971, 11 civilians where killed by the british army during Operation Demetrius in Belfast.
40 years later the catholic community prepare to commemorate the anniversary of the Ballymurphy Massacre.
Each catholic district is striving to erect its giant bonfire, where the union jack colors will burn at midnight.
Belfast Bonfires 18/20
Part of www.flickr.com/photos/tranuf/sets/72157627800291813/
Phillip Mould:
The recent rediscovery of this important portrait represents a significant addition to the iconography of Henry VIII. Holbein’s emphatically dominating mural portrait of Henry VIII in the Royal Palace at Whitehall has come to define the image of Henry VIII as the strong, statuesque Tudor monarch. Its destruction by fire in the seventeenth century has meant that only two portraits of Henry VIII by Holbein himself survive: the much smaller and more intimate head and shoulders portrait in the Thyssen Collection; and one half of the cartoon for the mural, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
History’s most striking images of Henry have therefore depended on a small number of highly finished portraits produced by talented followers from within Holbein’s circle, and perhaps even his own workshop. It has long been thought that were only two high quality versions of the three-quarter length portrait derived from the Whitehall mural; one in the Royal Collection, and the other in the National Gallery of Art, Rome. The Hamilton portrait now represents a third version.
A lack of comparable technical evidence makes it difficult to ascertain if all three are by the same hand. All three versions are almost identical in pose and dimensions, suggesting that the same cartoon was used for each (the presence of pouncing marks under infra-red examination confirms that the Hamilton portrait was based on a cartoon). The three portraits also share Holbein’s trademark blue smalt background – but they differ in costume, confirming the apparent rule that no two commissioned portraits of a monarch should be identical. The dendrochronological suggestion of an earliest felling date of 1538 for the panels used in this portrait dates the portrait to well within Holbein’s lifetime. It seems, therefore, that although there is insufficient evidence on Holbein’s working practice to know if he certainly employed studio assistants, this portrait was undoubtedly completed by one who was well acquainted with his techniques and designs. Certainly, the fine detailing in this example rivals that of the Rome version (considered until recently to be by Holbein himself), while the drawing seen here, such as in the dagger’s hilt, is entirely redolent of the vigour and exquisite draughtmanship of Holbein’s own designs.
The provenance of this portrait is particularly important. This picture was sold by the present Duke of Hamilton & Brandon, marking the completion of a gradual dispersal of one of the greatest picture collections yet assembled in Britain. The dispersal began with a famous sale in 1882, with more sales following the demolition of Hamilton Palace in the 1930s. Until now, the present portrait has hung at Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence in Scotland, of which the Dukes of Hamilton are hereditary Keepers.
The portrait is first recorded as being in the possession of James, 3rd Marquess of Hamilton KG, and later 1st Duke of Hamilton. He was a noted favourite of Charles I, the King signing his letters ‘Your faithful friend and loving cousin, Charles R’. Hamilton was not only an ardent Royalist, but, after Charles himself, perhaps the greatest art collectors of his generation – thought it should be remembered occasionally Hamilton and Charles’ mutual art collecting had positive political benefits for the Duke. Hamilton’s father was a noted collector, and his brother-in-law, Basil Feilding, was ambassador to Venice, and acted as art agent to him and the King. Between 1634-39 Hamilton purchased over 400 pieces, mostly through acquiring entire collections in Europe. He also bought works of art while campaigning in Germany, and gave, exchanged and sold paintings to Charles I (of which more below). As Master of the Horse and Gentleman to the King’s Bedchamber, Hamilton lived in Whitehall Palace, occupying a suite of about 20 rooms, as well as maintaining accommodation at Hampton Court, which he used to house part of his picture collection. He was building a large house in Chelsea, with a gallery to house his pictures, when the approaching Civil War intervened. Unable to resist acquiring works offered him; ‘[I am] to much bewitched with those intysing things’.’
As a great collecting family, the Hamiltons were astute in keeping inventories of their pictures. The earliest inventory is dated 1624, and lists the collection of the 1st Duke’s father, the 2nd Marquess. There is no mention here of a portrait of Henry VIII, nor in the subsequent inventories from between 1634-9, entitled ‘Note of pictures for my Lord Marquis from my Lord Fielding’. This would suggest that the picture was not in the collection of the 1st Duke’s father, and nor was it acquired from abroad.
An inventory [MSS5] dated pre- 1643 of the 1st Duke’s pictures, headed ‘A Catalogue of My Lord Marquis’s pictures’ lists over thirty cases (it is possible that this refers to pictures packed in cases for Hamilton’s journey from London to Scotland c. 1638, as tensions between King and Parliament grew.) Here the ‘Thirty One Case’ contains one ‘Kinge Harry 8th’. A later inventory dated 1643-49 [MSS6] contains a similar list of cases, but not a case 31. Instead there is ‘In the Closet’ a ‘King Henry, the 8 picture’ [location unstated]. An inventory dated 1704 [MSS12] ‘A List of His Grace’s the Duke of Hamiltons pictures in the Abby of Holyrood House, taken this 5 day of October 1704,as they are now hung an numbred, the numbers being on the forepart of some, and on the back of Others’, reveals, ‘In the Great Dining Roome’ of Holyroodhouse, a ‘square picture [no. 154] of King Hnery 8th a halfe length by Holbin.’ It seems almost certain therefore that the present portrait was acquired by the 1st Duke of Hamilton in the 1630s, and has hung in Holyrood since at least 1704.
The question then arises as to where the Duke of Hamilton acquired the portrait. First, it seems certain the picture did not come from Fielding’s purchases in Italy. Germany seems a possible, though unlikely, source with Hamilton writing to Charles I about acquiring paintings and sculptures in Munich . No detailed list survives of any purchases in Germany, however, and it seems most of these were acquired for Charles I. It therefore seems most likely that an English source is the most probable.
Though there is at present no documentary evidence that suggests a direct source, it is possible that the Hamilton portrait may have come from Charles I himself, not least because we know that Hamilton was at the nexus of art collecting in England with Charles from between 1620s to 1640s. There is plenty evidence of pictures being given or exchanged with the Hamilton in Van der Doort’s inventory of Charles I’s collection . Indeed, we know that Charles gave Hamilton’s father, the 2nd Marquess of Hamilton, a portrait by Holbein; Van der Doort tells us of a picture “Chaunged with the decd Lo. Marquess of Hambleton when yor Maatie was Prince” “Item a little intire Picture with a little white dogg lying by, said to be the Lord Daker – Comprtoller to King Henry the 8ts houshould” [p.78 in the Walpole edition, St James’ Cabinet Room no. 9] Van der Doort lists 13 pictures either given, exchanged, or bought by Charles I with the 1st Duke of Hamilton. Furthermore, the presence of Rubens’ Daniel in the Lions’ Den in the 1643 Hamilton inventory confirms that exchanges either continued between Charles I and Hamilton post the 1639 date of Van der Doort’s inventory (for it appears in the 1639 inventory of the Royal Collection with no note by Van der Doort of an exchange or gift to Hamilton) or that Van der Doort’s keeping of records was not overly accurate as far as Charles’ dealings with the Hamilton’s were concerned. It seems unlikely that the exchanges of art continued between Charles and Hamilton after the latter’s move to Scotland in 1638.
Though there is no direct evidence, for example in Van der Doort’s inventory of Charles I’s collection, of a Henry VIII passing from Charles I’s collections in Whitehall - but there were many other palaces from where exchanges or gifts could have been made. It seems that there is evidence from, for example, the inventories of King Edward VI, that there were a number of paintings of Henry VIII for Charles to exchange or give away. There are at least eight contemporary examples of what we would now call ‘portraits’ of Henry VIII in the Royal Collection in the mid sixteenth century. Two are of the King when young, one is listed as a ‘physionamy’ (head and shoulders), two are listed as ‘whole stature’, and one, intriguingly, as ‘nott finished’. The two portraits of Henry VIII when young were still in the Royal Collection in 1639. However, both the ‘whole statures’, the ‘nott finished’, the ‘physionomye’, the diptych, and one other portrait of Henry VIII appear to have left the Royal Collection according to Van der Doort. This supposition would appear to be confirmed by at most four portraits of Henry VIII in the Commonwealth Sales of the Royal Collection after the execution of Charles I.
p139 Scally, Political Career of James, Duke of Hamilton PhD thesis, Cambridge 1992
30th April 1632, SRO GD406/1/158, Burnet's Memoirs, p.28.
Walpole Soceity, 27th Volume 1958-1960, Abraham Van Der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collections of Charles I, edited by Oliver Millar.
Meet the first judge; Anna Follet (Anna will be representing me)
Name: Anna Follet
Role(What she does in the competition): Host, main judge, and creative director
Occuption: Model, activist, and fashion designer
I - Interviewer
A- Anna
I: Hey there Anna, thanks for letting us interview you
A: No problem, it's my pleasure.
I: So, Anna, you're the host, and main judge, of POISE how does that feel.
A: It's incredible and just so surreal. I never thought I would get the opportuinty to be involved with such an amazing production like POISE, let alone be the main judge and host. I'm so honoured that I was chosen out of all the amazing people that the producers good have chose, I'm going to make sure they don't regret their choice ;)
I: Now, as the host, do you know any infromation the other judges don't or are you more involved in any way?
A: Well initially, the producers came to me asking if I would host this amazing project and of course I said yes. When we sat down to talk I had to be brutally honest with them and tell them that the logo they had was tacky. They asked me if I could change it and well I ended up completely reconfiguring the entire competition :)
I: That's amazing, it must have been so much fun. Tell me, where did the slogan "Sleek, Sophisticated, Fierce" come from?
A:Well, when I was redesigning the logo, I wanted something simple, classy, yet effective. That's sort of where the slogan came from because that's what I wanted the logo and competition to be. That's actully why the judges' pictures are black, to add that sophisticated touch.
I: So what are you expecting to see in the competition?
A: I'm expecting to see some fierce and competitive models. I expect them to all be at the top of their game and ready to fight it out and win. I want all the girls to give it their all and really show everyone why they're here. I want them to give it their all so that whoever wins can really feel like they earned it.
I: What do you hope to see?
A: I hope all the girls give it their all and really show everyone why they're here. I want them to give it their all so that whoever wins can really feel like they've earned it.
I: Have you had any previous judging experienc?
A: No I haven't, but as a model I've been critiqued a lot in the past. I hope that I've really learned from the critiques I've recieved over the years and that they can help me with my own judging style.
I: Finally, what do you think the hardest part about judging the girls will be and how do you think you'll overcome that.
A: That's easy, I know the hardest part will be choosing which girl goes home. I know how difficult it can be in a competition and any one slip up can land you in the bottom. I have experience, I was in the same position not too long ago, I know how stressful it is. I'm so glad I have co-judges. Their the ones who will help me make the decision and hopefully overcome the obstacle of eliminating girls. I honestly don't know how I would manage without any co-judges.
I: Anna, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, it was great talking to you.
A: Thank you so much, it was a pleasure to meet you.
AI cyberbods represent an intriguing and rapidly evolving frontier in the world of artificial intelligence and robotics. These advanced, humanoid-like machines are designed to mimic the form and functions of the human body, taking AI capabilities beyond the confines of traditional computer hardware and software. Powered by sophisticated neural networks and machine learning algorithms, cyberbods are able to perceive their surroundings, process information, and execute complex physical movements with a level of dexterity and autonomy that rivals their human counterparts. Far more than just rigid, metallic frames, these cybernetic entities are imbued with a sense of embodied intelligence, able to fluidly navigate environments, manipulate objects with precision, and even exhibit lifelike expressions and behaviors. As the technology continues to progress, the potential applications for AI cyberbods are vast - from performing hazardous tasks in place of humans, to serving as intelligent companions, to aiding in medical procedures and scientific exploration. Of course, the rise of these humanoid AI systems also raises a host of ethical and philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, the boundaries between man and machine, and the future of human-robot interaction. Nevertheless, the rapid advancements in AI cyberbod technology remain a captivating frontier, one that promises to reshape our understanding of intelligence, agency, and what it means to be human in the digital age.
Represented by SL Talent
Stroke my ego and follow me: Instagram ≈ 500px ≈ flickr ≈ tumblr
© Copyright 2014 Barrie Spence. All rights reserved and moral rights asserted. Theses images are not in the public domain and may not be used without licence.
Comments are very welcome and very much appreciated, but any with linked/embedded images will be removed.
+++ DISCLAIMER +++
Nothing you see here is real, even though the model, the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!
Some background:
The AMD Mystère S represents one of the many evolutionary steps in French 2nd generation jet fighter aircraft design, which began with the straight-wing Dassault Ouragan and progressed through the Mystère II/III and Mystère IV to the supersonic Super Mystère SM2B. Internally designated AMD 461 and originally called the Mystère X (Roman numeral “10”, not the letter “X”), the new aircraft was the attempt to improve the successful Mystère IV from 1953 in many respects, following Marcel Dassaults strategy to take small, evolutionary steps instead of radical quantum leaps. While the overall outlines were similar and followed the proven layout of the former Dassault jet fighters, the AMD 461 was a completely new design, though.
First of all, the machine was from the start designed around the indigenous axial-flow Atar 101 jet engine, since it had become obvious that the former radial-flow engines used in Dassault’s fighters, like the Rolls-Royce Tay and its French-built version, the Hispano-Suiza Verdon 350, did not offer the potential for sustained supersonic performance in level flight. As a result, the fuselage became thinner and the aircraft had a less tubby look. Furthermore, in order to achieve the ambitious performance goals, a new wing was devised, and it incorporated leading edges made from novel composite materials. The wing shape was more complex than previous AMD designs: unlike the simple trapezoid Mystère II and IV wing designs, the AMD 461’s wings had kinked wing leading edges at about half span, so that the wing root sections were extended forward and had a slightly stronger sweep than the outer wing sections (47° vs. 45°), resulting in a crescent planform with rounded tips. Dogteeth at the kinks’ position increased the wings’ critical Mach number, augmented by small boundary layer fences. A novelty were power-operated ailerons. The tail surfaces were swept, too, and featured a variable-incidence tail plane.
The Mystère IV’s circular nose air intake arrangement was retained, but the intake received a sharper lip for better aerodynamic efficiency at high speed. The intake ducts were split deeper down inside of the fuselage, flanking the cockpit and the weapon bay behind it (see below) on both sides. The small ranging radar, originally developed for the upgraded Mystère IVB (which never made it into series production due to a fatal prototype crash and the progress of AMD’s other supersonic projects), was relocated and now mounted on top of the intake section, reminiscent of the F-86’s arrangement. A gun camera was placed outside of the intake in a small fairing on the starboard side. Two pitots under the air intake (one main and a secondary sensor) replaced the Mystère IV’s single wing-mounted sensor boom.
Being a classic “gunfighter”, the AMD 461’s main armament comprised a pair of 30mm DEFA cannon in the lower front fuselage, taken over from the Mystère IV, and a retractable Type 103 pannier for 45 unguided MATRA missiles against air or ground targets behind the front wheel well. Four underwing hardpoints could carry a total payload of 1.500 kg (3.300 lb), including a pair of supersonic 625 l drop tanks on the inner pair of pylons. A typical fighter weapon were lightweight Matra Type 116M launchers, each with 19 unguided SNEB-68 air-to-air rockets. Up to four could be carried under the wings. In a secondary attack/fighter bomber role, bombs of various caliber (up to 500 kg/1.100 lb on the inner and 250 kg/550 lb on the outer hardpoints) and other unguided missiles/pods were possible, too.
The first Mystère X prototype was powered by the Atar 101D with 29,420 N (6,610 lbf) of thrust, and it flew successfully in June 1953. However, due to the lack of an afterburner at this stage, the machine could only become supersonic in a dive, just like the former Mystère fighters, and it offered in this guise only minimal performance improvements – even though the handling near Mach 1 was already noticeably better. The initial flight test program was successful, though, and the Armée de l’Air immediately placed an order for 100 Mystère X aircraft, intended to improve the Armée de l’Air’s interception capabilities as soon as possible. Serial production started instantaneously, even while the flight tests were still ongoing, and the production machines were powered by the newly developed Atar 101F, which had just been cleared for production and operation on the Mystère X prototype. The Atar 101F was basically a D model with an afterburner added to it, to produce a temporary thrust of 37,300 N (8,400 lbf) and ensure the desired top speed in level flight of more than Mach 1. As a result, the Mystère X’s tail section had to be modified to accommodate the new engine’s longer tailpipe, which did not feature an adjustable nozzle yet – it was simply extended beyond the fin’s trailing edge, and even then the longer jet pipe protruded from the hull. However, this modification was successful and incorporated into the serial aircraft. With the Atar 101F, the serial production Mystère X’s performance was appreciably improved: beyond supersonic top speed, initial rate of climb was almost doubled in comparison with the Mystère IV, but the thirsty afterburner engine almost nullified any gain in range from the new type’s higher internal fuel capacity. Drop tanks had to be carried almost all the time.
The quick (if not hastened) order for the Mystère X also served as an insurance policy in the event of the AMD effort failing to produce an even more capable supersonic aircraft with the Mystère XX, a project that had been under development as a private venture in parallel, but with a time lag of about two years and benefitting from the research that had been done for the AMD 461. However, both designs turned out to be successful and both were adopted for service. They became known to the public as the Mystère S (for ‘supersonique’) and the Super Mystère, respectively. The first Super Mystère prototype, powered by a Rolls-Royce Avon RA.7R, took to the air on 2 March 1955, and the promising aircraft already broke the sound barrier in level flight the following day. The Super Mystère turned out to be the more capable and modern aircraft thanks to its new, more powerful Atar 109G-2 engine.
The more capable Super Mystère was immediately favored and, as a consequence, the running Mystère S order was cancelled in May 1955 and its initial production run limited to a mere 54 airframes - the number that had been completed until that point. The Super Mystère became the Armée de l’Air’s standard fighter for the late Fifties and production was quickly switched to the new type, 180 specimen were eventually built. Since a mix of types in the operational fighter squadrons was not economical, the Armée de l’Air decided to separate them and find a different role for the young but relatively small Mystère S fleet. Since the aircraft had a rugged airframe and had shown very good handling characteristics at medium to low altitude, and because the Armée de l’Air was lacking a fast, tactical and indigenous reconnaissance aircraft at that time (the standard type was the RF-84F), the Armée de l’Air decided in 1956 to convert the Mystère S fighters accordingly.
This modification was a relatively easy task: The retractable missile pannier (which was hardly ever used) was removed and its well behind the cockpit offered sufficient internal space for optical reconnaissance equipment in a conditioned compartment. This comprised four OMERA cameras (less than the RF-84F’s six cameras), covered by a ventral canoe fairing. One camera was facing forward, two were set on mounts that allowed vertical photography or camera orientation to either port or starboard, and the fourth camera had a panoramic field of view. After these modifications, the machines were re-designated Mystère SR to reflect their new role and capabilities.
Initially, the converted machines retained the twin DEFA cannon armament and full external stores capability. Typical load in the new photo-recce role was the standard pair of drop tanks, plus optional flares for night photography. In this guise the Mystère SR fleet was distributed among two reconnaissance units, ER 2/33 “Savoie” and ER 3/33 “Moselle” in Eastern France, close to the German border, starting service in April 1957.
Later in their career, the Mystère SR’s guns and also the ranging radar equipment (even though the empty small radome was retained) were often removed. This was initially a weight-saving measure for better performance, but due to their short legs many Mystère SRs had extra fuel tanks added to the former gun and ammunition bays. In some cases the space was used to house additional mission equipment, the aircrafts’ designation did not change, though. The integration of the new Matra R.550 Magic AAM was considered briefly in 1970, but not deemed relevant for the Mystère SR’s mission profile. However, eight late-production Mystère SRs received a new, bigger panoramic OMERA camera, which necessitated a larger ventral fairing and some other internal changes. These machines were re-designated Mystère SRP (‘panoramique’). Another early Mystère SR was used for the development of indigenous infra-red linescan and side looking airborne radar systems, which were both later incorporated in an under-fuselage pod for the Mirage IIIR.
Having become quickly obsolete through the introduction of 3rd generation jet fighters in the early Sixties – namely the Mirage III – the Mystère SR’s active career only lasted a mere 10 years, and the Mirage III’s fighter variants quickly replaced the Super Mystère, too. Due to its many limitations, the Mystère SR was soon replaced by the Mirage IIIR reconnaissance version, by 1974 all aircraft had been retired. Another reason for this early operational end were durability problems with the composite elements on the aircraft’s wings – there had been no long-term experience with the new material, but the elements tended to become brittle and collapse under stress or upon bird strikes. AMD conceived a plan to replace the affected panels with light metal sheets, but this update, which would have prolonged service life for 10 more years, was not carried out. After spending 5 years in mothballed storage, all surviving Mystère SR airframes were scrapped between 1980 and 1981.
General characteristics:
Crew: 1
Length: 42 ft 3 in (12.88 m) overall
42 ft 3 in (12.88 m) w/o pitots
Wingspan: 32 ft 4 in (9.86 m)
Height: 3.75 m (12 ft 4 in)
Wing area: 345.5 sq ft (32.2 m²)
Empty weight: 13,435 lb (6,094 kg)
Gross weight: 21,673 lb (9,831 kg)
Fuel capacity: 3,540 l (778 imp gal; 934 US gal) internally
plus 2x 625 l (72 imp gal; 165 US gal) drop tanks
Powerplant:
1× Atar 101F turbojet, rated at 29.42 kN (6,610 lbf) dry thrust
and with 37.3 kN (8,400 lbf) with afterburner
Performance:
Maximum speed: 1,110 km/h (600 kn, 690 mph) at sea level
1,180 km/h (637 kn 732 mph,) at 11,000 m (36,089 ft)
Combat range: 915 km (494 nmi, 570 mi) with internal fuel only
Maximum range: 1,175 km (730 mi, 634 nmi)
Service ceiling: 45,800 ft (14,000 m)
Rate of climb: 14,660 ft/min (74.5 m/s)
Time to altitude: 40,000 ft (12,000 m) in 4 minutes 41 seconds
Armament:
2x 30mm (1.18 in) DEFA 552 cannon with 150 rounds per gun (later frequently deleted)
Four underwing hardpoints for 1.500 kg (3.300 lb) of ordnance,
including a pair of 625 liter drop tanks, flares and various unguided missiles and iron bombs
The kit and its assembly:
A project I had on my idea list for a long time – there were so many AMD jet fighter designs (both that entered service but also many paper projects and prototypes) during the Fifties and Sixties that I wondered if I could smuggle a what-if type somewhere into the lineage. A potential basis appeared when I recognized that the British Supermarine Swift had a fuselage shape quite similar to the contemporary French fighters, and from this impression the idea was born to “Frenchize” a Swift.
This called for a kitbash, and I used a Matchbox Mystère IV (Revell re-boxing) for the French donor elements that would be grafted onto an Xtrakit FR.5 model, which looks good in the box but has serious fit issues, e.g. between the rear fuselage halves or when the wings have to be mated with the completed fuselage.
The transplantations from the rather primitive/blunt Matchbox Mystère included the whole cockpit section except for the interior, which was taken from the in this respect much better Swift, the glazing, the spine and the whole tail with fin and stabilizers. The Swift provided most of the fuselage, the wings and the landing gear, even though I used the Mystère’s main wheels because of their characteristic hub caps/brake arrangement.
Mating the fuselage sections from the two models became a major stunt, though, because the diameters and shapes were rather different. Three-dimensional gaps and steps behihd the cockpit had to be bridged, initially with 2C putty for the rough overall shape and then with NC putty for a smooth finish. A gap in the spine in front of the fin had to be improvised/filled, too, and the Mystère’s fin had to be tailored to the different Swift rear fuselage shape, too.
The result looks a little odd, though, the Swift’s original air intake ducts now look from certain angles like hamster cheeks – but after all, the ducts have to pass the central cockpit section on both sides somehow, so that the arrangement makes nonetheless sense. And the small dorsal spine taken over from the Mystère changes the Swift’s profile considerably, as well as the shorter Dassault-style canopy.
The small ranging radar radome is just a piece of sprue from the Mystère kit, blended into the rest of the fuselage with putty. The interior of the air intake was heavily modified – the original splitter, positioned directly inside of the intake, was deleted and the walls trimmed down for a much thinner/sharper lip. Inside of the intake a bulkhead was added as a sight blocker, and a new splitter was mounted to the new bulkhead in a much deeper position. The gun camera fairing is a piece of styrene profile, the new twin pitots (reminiscent of the SM2B’s arrangement) were made from heated sprue material.
The camera fairing is the lower half from a P-47 drop tank, left over from a Hobby Boss kit, IIRC, and in order to fit the Swift’s cockpit tub into the Mystère’s fuselage the rear bulkhead had to be re-created with the help of paper tissue drenched with white glue.
The drop tanks come from a KP MiG-19, which had the benefit of integral, thin pylons at a suitable position for the Mystère SR. For a different look I just canted their fins downwards.
Painting and markings:
For a subtle impression I settled for an authentic livery: the French rendition of the USAF SEA scheme for the F-100 with local CELOMER tones, which was not only applied to the Armée de l’Air’s F-100s (these were originally delivered in NMF and camouflaged later in the Sixties), but also to the Super Mystères - the SM2Bs actually carried a quite faithful adaptation of the USAF’s F-100 pattern! However, the indigenous CELOMER paints differed from the original U.S. Federal Standard tones (FS 30219, 34102, 34079 and 36622, respectively), esp. the reddish light tan was more of an earth tone, and the dark green had a more bluish hue.
This offered some freedom – even more so because real life pictures of French reference aircraft show a wide range of shades of these basic tones and frequent serious weathering. Instead of the U.S. tan I went for RAF Dark Earth (Humbrol 29), the dark Forest Green was replaced with Humbrol 75 (Bronze Green). The light green became a 2:1 mix of Humbrol 117 (the original FS 34102) with Humbrol 78 (RAF Cockpit Green), for more contrast and less yellow in the tone. The undersides were painted with Humbrol 166 (RAF Light Aircraft Grey).
After a black ink wash I gave the model a thorough panel post-shading and recreated some lost panel lines with the help of silver paint, too. I also added some paint patches and touch-ups, for a rather worn look of the aircraft.
The black areas around the gun muzzles were created with the help of decal material, generic black decal sheet material was also used to create the camera windows. Grey (Revell 75) dielectric panels were added to the fin tip and behind the cockpit. The cockpit interior became very dark grey (Revell 09, Anthracite, with some dry-painted medium grey on top), while the landing gear and the respective wells were left in aluminum (Humbrol 56).
The decals are a mix from various sources. The ER 2/33 markings came from a Heller Mirage III sheet, which offers an optional IIIR from 1984. I also settled for relatively small roundels (from a Mirage F.1C) – a trend which started in the Armée de l’Air in the early Seventies and also comprised the deletion of the fin flash. Contemporary real world SM2Bs with the French SEA cammo frequently carried a similar type of subdued markings instead of earlier, bigger roundels found on the machines in NMF finish or on the aircraft from EC 1/12 "Cambresis" with their unique and different camouflage in two shades of green and a rather sandy tan, almost like a desert paint scheme. The white tactical code “33-PS” was improvised with single 4mm letters from TL Modellbau. The stencils were puzzled together from various Mirage III/V/F.1C sheets and also from an IAI Kfir.
The kit received some additional dry-painting with silver to simulate more wear, and was finally sealed with a coat of matt acrylic varnish.
Another “missing link” build, but I think that my Mystère S fits stylistically well into the (non-existent, though) gap between the Mystère IV and the Super Mystère, sporting vintage details like the round air intake but coupled with highly swept wings and the Swift’s elegant lines. The “traditional” French paint scheme adds to the realism - and, when put in the right background/landscape context, turns out to be very effective. Not a spectacular model, despite serious body work around the cockpit, but a convincing result.