This
View allAll Photos Tagged pathology
Fuji X-Pro1 plus Pergear fisheye lens 10mm/F5.6. I can't really translate "Blumenzwang". It is a medical condition that has not yet been taken seriously. The sufferer from this condition feels a need to be permanently surrounded by flowers. It can lead to traumatic experiences. Apart from this, I am trying out this tiny and inexpensive fisheye lens.
The department of pathology of the Oxford University. In this place in 1940 the compound of the penicillin was isolated for the first time by a team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. The penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. At the end of WWII, Fleming, Florey and Chain received the Nobel prize for Medicine.
The start of the new short film project entitled "The Death and 21 Grams". More i will not spoliern now.
The wonderfully dated pathology labs at Whitchurch Hospital, the building closed in 2016, but these had clearly been disused for many years beforehand.
The size (2cm in length) and anatomic features suggest development equivalent to a nine-week pregnancy (or seven weeks post ovulation). In obstetrics, pregnancy is dated from the first day of the last menstrual period, which is about two weeks prior to the ovulation that resulted in the pregnancy
There is another image of a 10-week embryo on Flickr, which is quite spectacular.
Guido Reni 1575-1642 Bologna
La Sibylle 1635
Bologna Pinacoteca Nazionale
THE WOMAN IN THE PAINTING OF THE CATHOLIC AND HUMANIST EUROPE
Art in general, and painting in particular, bear witness to the importance accorded to women in European civilization.
But the image of women has evolved according to the ideological context, the beliefs in force at this or that time in European history.
By starting the European art history around 500, ie with Christianity, the subject of women in the painting of Europe will be evoked through five dossiers :
1 ° The woman in the painting of Catholic Europe. From 500 to 1500 approximately. However easel painting began only around 1300. Previously painting is manifested through the frescoes, mosaics, stained glass and in books: the illuminations.
2 ° The woman in the painting of Catholic and Humanist Europe. From 1500 to 1800 approximately
3 ° The woman in the painting of the Protestant Netherlands in the 17th century
4 ° The woman in the painting of the ideologically plural Europe of the 19th century. 1800-1950 approximately
5 ° The woman in the Official Contemporary Art. 1950 ...
The image of woman in European painting diversified a lot in the Renaissance, in certain social circles.
To understand this evolution one must first make a little some true history. This is why we have to leave the woman, during a few paragraphs (A), in order to explain the title, quite unusual in historiography, given at this period in the history of Europe: Catholic and Humanist Europe. Then it will be possible to study the image of the woman (B). A woman, who in this file of 74 paintings, will be less represented by the Virgin Mary and the Saints (18 paintings) but more by Venus, Diana or Bathsheba. But it is certain that this choice does not reflect, in number, the production of the artists of these three centuries, a production which is thematically very balanced between Catholicism and Humanism. The Church remains indeed throughout the period a decisive sponsor for the art of European painting. From the point of view of style, he is the same throughout these three centuries: "the full painting", in three dimensions, as well as she's finished developing herself towards 1500 following a persevering collaboration between the Italian South and the Flemish and Germanic North of Europe
A/
From the years 1500s onward, it is the "Renaisssance", for the official western historiography, the history taught and divulged widely, since the 19th century
In reality, Europe does not know in the 16th century, in relation to the immediately preceding centuries, any Renaissance: neither economic, nor political, nor artistic, nor scientific, nor technical, nor spiritual, nor intellectual, nor moral of course. These rebirths are much earlier, they are done, gradually but continuously, after the year 1000, to adopt a memorable date.
On the other hand, at the "Renaissance" the European aristocratic elite, including the high clergy, Popes in the lead, undertakes a new approach to the thought of Greco-Roman antiquity, discovery which is enriched by the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, and the consecutive exile of great Byzantine intellectuals with their ancient documents.
"The Renaissance" is a return to the past of Greek and Roman Europe, and a rehabilitation of certain values peculiar to ancient paganism. Certainly ancient thought was partly known by the the Scolasticism of the Middle Ages, but it is undeniable that in the intellectual, aristocratic and very great bourgeois circles of Western Europe, the interpretation imposed by Catholic Christianity in the reading of ancient texts ceases to be binding at the end of the 15th century.
It is this ideological turn that modern and contemporary historiography, "formatted" by the "Enlightenment", calls a "Renaissance". As if the Europe of that time had come out of the deep shadows of previous centuries.
Man does not like facts that do not conform to his world view. When the facts are contrary to his beliefs, he ignores them. Elites can even invent facts that have never existed, but have the advantage of concordant with the beliefs they want to impose on peoples : These are "the ideological facts". These facts are not facts, they do not exist, they are totally imagined to serve a cause. "The Renaissance" is largely an "ideological fact". A major ideological fact, entirely built on a few real facts and others not real at all.
However, it is true that Rebirth also has existed as a real fact. But not a renaissance of Europe, a renaissance of antiquity. It is Humanism that appears. A conception of the world, an ideology, quite simple, somewhat egocentric: The belief in human begins to appear under the belief in God. It is in Greco-Roman antiquity that the elites of the 16th century will seek the premises of the ideology of the primacy of man. It is true that ancient art is to the glory of the human being: All Gods are in his image. And even Zeus comes to seek among the mortals some of his many mistresses.
In painting the "growth" of the human throughout the Catholic period and at the beginning of the Catholic-Humanist period is very obvious: The donor couples of the early Gothic are very small characters at the bottom of the painting. Gradually over the decades ... they grow, and gradually they settle on the side flaps, then in the middle of the central part. They even push God and his cohort of saints off the picture. But where are we going? Until there is only the donors.
For the ideologues and historians of the "Enlightenment", who analyze the phenomenon of rebirth two or three centuries later, through their own rationalist, atheistic, materialistic and progressive ideology, it is "The Renaissance". For it is the beginning of a new revelation, the premises of a New New Testament. The "Reason Goddess" will prevail over Catholic religious Obscurantism (Jews and Protestants are apparently more enlightened). Victory is certain because Progress is irresistible (Condorcet). The humanism of the Renaissance, which was a form of respect for the man different from the Catholic version, but not incompatible with it, has become, over the centuries, "The Hommisme", in other words the cult of human. The recognition of human dignity within a complex universe that must be respected, has become the adoration of human aspiring to the total mastery of the universe. The divinity is now distant, accessory, absent even, and man can thus settle in the center of the world. And soon the man will be God. This is the current ideological project of the West for the world, the Globalist project. The present of the West is only one step on the path of universal society, governing the Whole Earth, a society enlightened by the new man, the god-man.
These ideological, profane, secular, supposedly rationalist delusions, in reality Gnostics and Kabbalistic, belong to the same kind of thinking as certain religious fanaticism. They have nothing to do with the conceptions of the world of Greco-Roman antiquity.
In the visions of the world of Greco-Roman antiquity human was not the center of the Universe. The man had to respect the Universal Harmony, not to disturb the Order of the World by his pretensions and his untimely actions. The major fault for the ancient man, Greek or Roman, was the Hubris: the Pride, the demeasurement, which leads the man to believe himself the equal of the Gods.
The Man-God, is simply Luciferian. In Christian symbolism it is the Angel who wants to take the place of God. A vision of the world that has seduced many humans for millennia, under multiple forms allegedly esoteric and magical.
The God-Man, Master of the universe, is absolutely not a characteristic concept of Greco-Roman antiquity, despite some misunderstood appearances. Except for the pathological case of Alexander, a pathology denounced in his own time. The divinization of the Ptolemaic or Roman emperors was only a political process, which no elite of these times took seriously beyond its social and civic utility.
For the new ideology of the "Enlightenment", apparently rationalist but in fact Kabbalistic, after the Renaissance came the essential stage of the Reformation, then the determining one of the French Revolution, then that of "proletarian Internationalism", finally that of the newest winner: the Capitalistic globalism. The Globalism, the last avatar of the thought of the "lights", claims to illuminate the whole planet. Christians, Muslims, Hinduists, Buddhists, Confucianists, Shintoists, Animists, Atheists, Agnostics, Pagans. All will have to submit to the "Light", the only one, the true one. All will have to submit to "Reason", the only one, the true one. The ideological and political elite of Europe and the West no longer belong to humanist thought, they practices the "Hommisme", the adoration of man. The adoration of the human "Master of the World" has replaced his perception, wise and measured, as a simple element of a universe that surpasses it infinitely. The Science being one of the great references of the contemporary era it is necessary to specify that the God-Man is not a scientific concept either. Or only of a science betrayed, enslaved, used by the political and ideological elites to justify their religion of the Human.
At the time of the "Renaissance" the history of ideas has not yet arrived at this stage. Indeed, a remarkable feature of this "Renaissance" is that it does not concern the lives of peoples.
It is a strictly elitist ideological phenomenon. Catholicism remains the generally uncontested belief in the population. And likewise among the elites, Catholicism is absolutely not invalidated. The Church is also at the head of this movement. The ideological and political elites of Europe only grant themselves an opening on other ideological horizons, other visions of the world, other morals, in parallel with the catholic beliefs but not in replacement of them.
In the painting, and especially that of the woman the implications are going to be very important. But only in a certain art, an art reserved, confidential, intended for the aristocratic elite and very large bourgeois. Nothing changes in painting and sculpture destined for the populations and the middle classes. Mary and the Saints continue to dominate absolutely. But even in the painting for the aristocracy the art influenced by Humanism is added only to the painting inspired by the Church. A two-speed art thus appears in the aristocratic and plutocratic milieus, where the two visions of the world rub shoulders, without any confrontation.
That is why the period of European history that will follow, until around 1800, can be called "Catholic and Humanist Europe".
The agreement is not perfect between the two ideologies, but it is balanced, it will last three centuries in a large part of the Mediterranean, Celtic, Germanic and Slavic Europe of the west.
This appellation cannot obviously apply to the Slavic Orthodox Europe, nor of course to Europe colonised by the Ottomans, whose paths are diferent.
It is also necessary to exclude the part of Europe which was "reformed", protestant, in the north essentially, Europe which had remained outside the limits of the Roman Empire.
But in reality the reform is, for the most part, triple at that time: Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist. These reforms are not exactly the same in their cultural consequences, and it is the Calvinist reform in the Low Countries of the north which, for various reasons, political and religious, constitutes the most obvious break with Catholicism, but also has with Humanism. The northern Netherlands will set up a completely original and new paint in which the image of the woman will change dramatically.
On the other hand, in North Germany, Christian Lutheran, the aristocracy has retained a political power distinct from the upper middle class. The aristocracy has also preserved memories and institutions of the times of the Holy Germanic Empire turned towards Rome and Italy. This reformed Germany remains culturally much more connected to Catholic Europe and especially Humanist than the Netherlands. Her art and in particular the image of the woman is not different from that which can be seen in France or Italy. England has been an island for a long time, and English painting is also somewhat different from that of the Continent. England is no longer Catholic since 1534, she is Anglican. A schism whose motives are entirely political. After much hesitation and going back and forth, finally, Anglicanism is not quite Puritanism. The Mayflower pilgrims have noticed this. In addition, the memories of antiquity are very far away and English painting has never cultivated much Greek mythology. But the themes of English painting are much more aristocratic than those of Dutch painting. The image of the woman is closer to that existing on the continent outside the Netherlands. However, the female nude is almost completely absent from English painting.
B/
Thematically the image of women in European painting has evolved over the centuries.
1° Throughout the Gothic period the woman is triply symbolic.
- Symbol of the fall of man (Eve) Then symbol of his redemption (Mary). First dialectical symbolic, subtly evocative of the relations between man and woman.
- Symbol of sacred, mystical love, with the Virgin Mary and the saints. Symbol also of the love of the child and the family.
- More global symbol of the love of beings and their protection, especially the poor and the weak against the rich and the violent. This symbol is evoked by the iconography of Virgins of Protection or Mercy.
2° In the 16th century, the image of the woman is also inspired, parallel to this first symbolic Catholic and Orthodox, which does not disappear, representations of Greek Antiquity.
An ancient Civilization for which the woman is doubly symbolic of Love and Beauty.
- The woman is symbolic of a form of Sacred Love. Sacred Love which through the goddess of Love, and also other major or minor Goddesses, is the reminder of the creative, centripetal link which is at the source of the primordial Life; and who perpetuates it in all beings since the origin of the worlds. The woman is then the symbol of Eros, which in Greek cosmogony, as evoked by Hesiod in his Theogony, is one of the primordial forces, binding, aggregating, which presided over the formation of the world. This Eros should not be confused with Eros (Cupid) the companion of Aphrodite (Venus). It is a Primordial Force that is at the origin of the World, an intuitive evocation, in mythical form, of the universal attraction of Isaac Newton.
- The beautiful woman, naked or dressed, is also for the Greeks the reflection and the symbol of the Beauty of the Universe. As also the male beauty, equally celebrated. The human being must be beautiful because he must be in the image of the Harmony of the World and that the Beautiful is an invitation to the Good and the True and thus an essential element of the Order of the World
The image of the woman, who was totally monopolized by Mary and the Holy Women in the period of Catholic Europe, Has diversified greatly in 1500.
Two new iconographic sources appear:
- The Greco-Roman antiquity, from the historical angle or from the mythological angle
- The Old Testament, of which some texts, not very many, are conducive to painting the woman.
These two sources all go in the same direction: they allow to introduce in European painting many possibilities to represent the female nude.
For the ancient source nothing surprising, the Greek and Roman Antiquity has constantly celebrated both female and male nudity.
For the Semitic source, on the contrary, it is very surprising. The entire Semitic culture is very hostile to the nude and moreover aniconic: totally unfavorable to the images. The use of the Old Testament to celebrate the female nude is clearly the hallmark of a non-Semitic, Indo-European interpretation of the Old Testament.
At the Renaissance, so there is a big change: Eve is nolonger the only one to be naked.
Catholicism, unlike Hinduism, is not favorable to the representation of the nude, feminine or masculine. And we will see by studying the painting of the Netherlands that Protestantism is even more unfavorable to the nude.
With Humanism, all the goddesses of Greece and of ancient Rome, the Olympian ones, or those more minor, will be reborn. The Renaissance is, in painting, an explosion of Goddesses, Nymphs, Bacchantes, Maenads and beautiful mortals mistresses of Zeus. All these women are little dressed, and often not at all.
The Old Testament is less rich: Bathsheba, Suzanne, Judith, the daughters of Lot, Dalila ..... The list is not long, but it will serve a lot, until the 20th century.
The people, on the other hand, must remain chaste, so it is not concerned by this new painting and this new image of women, which is reserved for the secular and religious aristocracy. The princes of the Church are most often the juniors of the Princes in political and military power. Not exclusively, however, because the Church has been a very effective social lift. Private salons of bishops and cardinals do not exhibit the same paint as churches and public halls.
In short, to make it simple:
Humanism it is for the European aristocracy, not for the peoples.
Catholicism it is for the European peoples, and also for the aristocracy.
However, the Old Testament will penetrate much more than in the previous period, all religious painting for popular use. In the Catholic Europe of medieval times rare are the scenes taken from the Old Testament. This is not the case after 1500. Obviously new influences have been exercised, which are not only humanist. But in art inspired by the Old Testament, for the people, the woman is dressed (Esther for example). The girls of Lot, Bathsheba, Suzanne, Judith ... are representations reserved for aristocrats.
Mary and the Holy Women remain quite present at all levels of society, in the churches, in the popular houses, in the bourgeois salons, in the palaces of the aristocracy and kings. Indeed the European elite, humanist, remains profoundly Catholic for a few centuries yet.
Ultimately in the Renaissance, the big change in the representation of the woman is that she puts herself naked. This event should not be underestimated. This is another reason, for many men, to see an immense progress there. After a thousand years during which it was only possible to see a naked woman, Eve, and from time to time, the breast of a nursing mother. Sometimes also some damned, because in Catholic iconography before the Renaissance the elect are dressed, but the damned can be naked. Nudity being a sign of diabolical lust.
The reintroduction of the nude into European painting in the 16th century is a return to certain values of Greek-Roman and pagan antiquity. Values that belong to the very old Indo-European fund. It is clearly a break with Christian conceptions very inspired by a culture completely foreign to Europe: the Semitic Jewish culture, very hostile to the nude and eroticism, which had triumphed over the Greco-Roman culture of inspiration towards 500 ac.
Change is important, but in painting only, because in everyday life, European humanity has not deprived itself of anything at all, and certainly not lust, during these thousand years, at all levels of society. Despite Catholicism, Mary, the Saints, Saint Michael and the Holy Spirit, the "Devil" has never been very far from men.
The renaissance is therefore also a real fact, at least in painting and sculpture, because it is not only a renaissance of antiquity, it is also a renaissance of the female nude and the male nude.
A rebirth of lust? Certainly not, everything just continues as before.
Catholic and humanist Europe will last three centuries, and the image of the woman that his painting will spread takes on a tremendous scale, carnal, with Pierre Paul Rubens whose art represents the summit of the collaboration between Catholicism and the Humanism.
There is not with Rubens the distant reserve of Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael. The wife of Rubens is absolutely queen, glorious, fulfilled, including in his flesh. Except Mary, of course, but not puritanical. The virgins of Rubens are reserved as they should, But they are women, women to whom peoples can identify themselves .
This art to the glory of the woman is highly political, it has been painted to counter the sad flesh of Protestant art and regain ground, especially throughout Eastern Europe and southern Germany. A battle won otherwise than by arms. Through the art.
This is the whole explanation of the golds, stuccoes, frescoes and of the superlative paintings of Baroque: The Baroque is a Counter-Reformation, the affirmation of a Humanist Catholicism that was expressed artistically and used the woman in his fight against Protestantism. The Church of that time did not lack a certain audacity, and did not cultivate sad repentance. Art, painting, women have gained a lot in this policy.
In the catholic-humanist Europe, reconquered on the Reformation, during two more centuries, the woman will be constantly present in one form or another, always beautiful, always representative of her sex, always a little, or much naked, sometimes sacred sometimes profane, sometimes Catholic, sometimes Greek or Roman.
At the end of the period, however, the art of Baroque-Rococo, in the 18th century, gives of the woman a very profane image, a woman of lighter manners with painters like François Boucher, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, Jean Honore Fragonard, Jean Baptiste Pater. This art of the "carpe diem" will spread in almost all the aristocratic Europe of the time. This theme of women is relatively new because it moves away from the Catholic religion, it is obvious. But it is also moving away from the humanist vision. It is a painting in which the feminine nude is cultivated for itself, without passing through the pretext of ancient or biblical references. This lightweight art is also the antithesis of the image of the Protestant woman of the Netherlands, which we will see in the next chapter.
It is necessary to say a word of the technique, even if the technique is not specific to the representation of the woman but obviously concerns all the themes of the paint. The technique is essential, because it will make the woman more pulpy, more vaporous, but more realistic, less symbolic, than in times of strictly Catholic Europe. The linear woman of the First Gothic, like that of the International Gothic, looks a little like the models of contemporary fashion shows. Infinitely better than skeletons, but she may lack some tasty curves.
Gothic spirituality is a little detrimental to the materiality of the image of women. The Gothic woman has angles. The woman of the humanist Renaissance, becomes more tangible, takes forms much more enveloping, more tactile, more realistic, more seductive.
However, the Renaissance is not, as far as the pictorial technique is concerned, a revolution. It is more a point of arrival than a point of departure. The rebirth is certainly the starting point, towards more than three centuries, of a painting perfectly imitating Nature. A paint perfectly imitating the woman. But the Renaissance is also the culmination of a long path undertaken since the middle of the Gothic to paint in three dimensions, and not only in two dimensions as in the Byzantine times, in the Romanesque period and early Gothic. From the 13th century to the 16th century European painting technically went from "flat painting" in two dimensions to "full painting" in three dimensions. From an approximate, sketched and symbolic representation of the world to an exact, faithful representation of nature. Exact representation that does not exclude the symbolic interpretation.
But a woman in three dimensions, from a certain point of view, is better than a woman in two dimensions.
Italy have finalizing around 1490-1510 two decisive techniques for the representation of space in three dimensions on a flat surface:
- The mathematical perspective, more exact, but not more aesthetically credible, than that intuitive of Gothic, or the atmospheric perspective of Flemish painters (Patinir, Bruhegel Jan, Momper ...)
- The Sfumato, "the Maniera Moderna", which merges the objects and the figures, in their spatial environment. Space then gently envelops beings and things, in a more credible way, than in the first Gothic painting, and even that of a certain terminal Gothic, called "International Gothic", with linear tendencies and acute contours.
But the Cologne school with Stephan Lochner and especially the Flemish school with Jan Van Eyck, had shown since the 1440s that painters from the North of Europe had invented a perspective that, although imperfectly mathematically, was everything actually aesthetically credible. They had also been able to represent perfectly in their environment, in an insensitive, melted way, the Virgins and Children who were the theme of their painting. These Flemish "Primitives" knew perfectly well how to create a progressive, gentle atmosphere, in line with our vision of the world. The art of Jan Van Eyck, Stephan Lochner, and Hans Memling still 40 and 20 years before 1500, is less linearly Gothic than that of Botticcelli, for example in "The Birth of Venus" (1480). So the Renaissance is not only Italian, the so-called "Primitives" Flemings have participated a lot, even if it is within the framework of an exclusively Catholic thematique, which is not considered, by the historiography dependent on "Enlightenment", like progressist.
The Mona Lisa is certainly a brilliant perfection of the Sfumato, and of the "maniera moderna", the art of melting the beings and the things in the atmosphere, but, at the same era, Giorgione, often finished by Titian because of the premature death of Giorgione, realizes very similar works, in regards to technique.
The Mona Lisa is more significant, exemplary even, as an archetype of the new spirit, of the new symbolism of the woman, and even of the symbolism of the human in general. The Mona Lisa is in the painting a model completed, exemplary, of the humanist spirit. The Mona Lisa is not Mary, this is important at the ideological level, for some it is even a decisive progress, but it is not Venus either. The Mona Lisa is not Catholic, without being anti-Catholic, and without being Antique. She is a new archetype, and especially universal
The Mona Lisa is the expression of the timeless, universal humanism of Leonardo da Vinci. All of Leonardo da Vinci's work is absolutely exemplary in its themes of the intelligent balance between Catholicism and Humanism, which was established during the Renaissance. This is his greatness which is not only technical. Technically the work of Vinci is a magnificent achievement, which like other works of the same period, will serve this model, for about 350 years, to European painting. But conceptually, metaphysically, the Mona Lisa is still, in our time, even for other civilizations, a living reference, shared at the elite level and instinctively at the popular level. Try to photograph it in the Louvre, if you are not a professional! The crowd of the public is proof that the Mona Lisa is the illustration of a true universalism, cultivated and rooted in the wisdom of particular and different peoples.
The Mona Lisa is intelligently and spiritually universal, she is at the antipodes of a globalism, universally accultured, whose manufactured speech, and the "conceptualist" pretentions masks the poverty of spirit of its projects for the world. She is the opposite of the so-called culture of a globalism of uprooted and robotic mens.
Consequence for the woman of this technical evolution of the European painting, multisecular evolution that culminates to the rebirth?
With the return to the Antique and the end of the ban thrown on the nude, the woman wraps herself even better in her nakedness. She is softer, but apparently only. Judith savagely slays the poor Holofernes, as Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio show. Caravaggio's painting belongs for many of his works to Catholic iconography. The Church is always a key sponsor if an artist wants to succeed. But the art of Caravaggio is also often inspired by a more aggressive, subtly anti-Catholic humanism. Angelo Merisi was not an Angel, or rather a fallen angel, as in his "Victorious Love".
Similarly, in a completely different style, Paolo Veronese, whose religious paintings are often a shining display of consumerist and futile materialism. Unlike Tintoretto. The Church was not mistaken, who frowned at some of Veronese's paintings. Yet the Church at Venice, well kept in hand by a very merchant-minded aristocracy of mind, was broad-minded. So there are tensions between the two ideologies, tensions that will grow over the centuries.
The art of the Baroque-Rococo, of the 18th century French, which then spread throughout Europe is a very obvious expression of the appearance of new trends. It is the woman of Jean Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean Honoré Fragonard.
Because a more systematic, more simplistic, more materialistic ideology than Humanism is settling, surreptitious at first, then more and more effectively to reign undivided on the West.
Humanism is the expression of a thought which, in order not to be of a religious spirit according to the definition of religion which imposes itself with the Christian monotheism, was, however, of spiritualistic and highly philosophical tendencies. Hence the agreement preserved with Catholicism. At the 18th century arises a materialistic thought, intellectually limited, whose French Rococo art is a first testimony. And the image of the woman changes accordingly.
The public may prefer Mary to Judith, if he wants to forge himself an exemplary image of the woman.
But he may prefer also Aphrodite-Venus or Mary Magdalene, not too repentant yet. In the Renaissance and long after it, the aristocrat and the big bourgeois now have the choice between several images of the woman. And most often they cultivate the two, or three, or four images of the woman simultaneously or successively. Sometimes a Virgin Mary adoring the Child, sometimes a triumphant Venus, sometimes an ambiguous Diana, sometimes a repentant Mary Magdalene, sometimes a San Sebastian, androgynous equally ambiguous.
This globally bipolar balance situation of the image of women in the art of painting will continue, throughout Catholic and Humanist Europe, until the French Revolution. Always in an simplified dating, but memorable and synthetically exact.
But there is a "reserve", an exception, which is the Protestant Netherlands in the 17th century. Until the middle of the 19th century the European woman will paint herself, outside the Netherlands, according to the double dialectical criterion of Catholicism and Humanism, and in the style of "the full painting" to which painters from all over Europe had succeeded around 1510-1520. In the northern Netherlands, Protestants, Reformed Calvinists will change the image of the woman. They will not change the image of the woman technically, because the technique of "full painting", perfectly imitating the surrounding world, is acquired for more than three centuries, until about 1850. But the Protestant painters -calvinists of the Netherlands will change the image of the woman thematically. As much as the rebirth had done, but in other directions.
(To be continued!)
Australia’s first medical school began at Melbourne University in 1862 and the Old Pathology Building at Parkville was built around 1885 to accommodate the first Professor of Anatomy and Pathology, H B Allen, and his collection of specimens on a range of illnesses that faced the medical profession of the time. The building's English Gothic style has it on the Victorian heritage list.
Enrico Catellani 1930-2017
Superficie blanche
White area 1967
Bologna MAMBO (Museo d'arte Moderna di Bologna)
LE CORONART. THE CORONART. THE COVIDART
La dénomination italienne d'arte povera, "l'art pauvre" présente cet intérêt, en comparaison d'autres comme "l'art conceptuel", qu'elle appelle un chat un chat et ne dissimule pas la vérité : Effectivement l'art contemporain officiel est un art pauvre. Pauvre en beauté et pauvre en signification partagée. Sa seule richesse est sa parfaite conformité avec l'idéologie mondialiste : c'est un art sans racines ethniques et culturelles. Cet art contemporain officiel s'est imposé dans tout l'Occident et cherche à conquérir la planète, on pourrait aussi l'appeler l'art viral, le Coronart, le Covidart, car il est une pandémie mortelle pour les Beaux-Arts.
The Italian denomination of arte povera, "poor art" has this interest, in comparison with others such as "conceptual art", which it calls a cat a cat and does not hide the truth: indeed, official contemporary art is poor art. Poor in beauty and poor in shared meaning. Its only richness is its perfect conformity with the globalist ideology : : it is an art without ethnic and cultural roots. This official contemporary art has imposed itself throughout the West and is trying to conquer the planet. We could also call it viral art, the "Coronart", the "Covidart" because it is a deadly pandemic for the Fine Arts.
UNDERSTAND THE CONTEMPORARY CONCEPTUAL ART (4) THE ART OF THE TOP EYE. A SMALL HISTORY OF PATHOLOGY.
"Look at our art, we have the aesthetics of our ethics: a cry in the desert."
Jean DUCHE. The Shield of Athena The West, its history, its destiny 1983
"You can make to peoples swallow anything," says one expert: MARCEL DUCHAMP (interview on the express 23 July 1964) Under the name of art, for more than a hundred years now, to peoples have been made to swallow anything. We are in the midst of unreality, what is officially considered to be the art of the 20th century and the beginning of the current century has no connection with art, it is anti-art, non-art, hoax.
JEAN LOUIS HARROUEL Contemporary Art, Great Falsification Jean Cyrille Godefroy 2009
"A work is recognized as a work of art because it has won the test of criticism, public opinion and time."
Mikel DUFRENNE (1910-1995 Universalis. Artwork)
1) The old pathologies: the chosen peoples.
2) A new pathology: the enlightened
3) Political and social consequences of the new pathology: The Initiation.
4) Back to art. The Contemporary Conceptual Art or the Art of the Top Eye
Art is what you believe. And art makes you believe in what you believe. Art also makes you believe in what you would not believe, if you were free to believe.
1) The old pathologies: the chosen peoples.
When visiting the Museums of Contemporary Art of Europe, always installed in very expensive buildings, with a very generally remarkable architecture, designed by prestigious architects, the visitor is necessarily led to ask himself: How do they manage to impose this official contemporary anti-art, everywhere ugly, absurd, provocative, botched, sad, uprooted, obsessional, and as a result of all this, totally artificial ?
How do they manage to hold this obscure, incomprehensible, hermetic discourse everywhere, closed to the common people? And why is that?
It's easy to understand: They do it on purpose.
The Why is also simple to understand, as for ancient art, it is the ideology that inspires this art.
Official Contemporary Art is not a coincidence, an accident, a temporary error, it is a will, a project, in the long term, for society. A project which corresponds to a relatively recent ideology in human history, a new religion, that of man and of his reason. It is in the name of this faith in the human Raison that our elites want an art separated from the peoples, an art for an avant-garde of the chosen ones of the Intelligence, of Initiates, to which they claim to belong. For the elites of past centuries, art was a means of communicating with peoples and influencing them through the transmission of a shared ideological message. Art was not reserved, but rather a common good between elites and peoples.
Contemporary ideological and political elites have turned official contemporary art into an apartheid art, an art reserved for the enlightened, the initiated. It is true that these elites have new means of communication and propaganda towards the peoples: Schools, television, cinema, radio, mass media, advertising. The role of art as an instrument of indoctrination has become less essential and much more indirect. The art have could settle himself in "reserve". The Conceptual Contemporary Art, this art reserved for the "enlightened", is an excellent revealer of the values that animate the ideological and political elites of our time and in particular of one of the essential characteristics of contemporary political ideology: the claim of these elites to the possession of "higher lights", of higher knowledge, which can only be acquired through the mechanism of Initiation and which legitimizes their power of government. A doctrine that inspires all discourse, hermetic and nebulous, that is inseparable from official contemporary art, and that has considerable political and sociological implications, that go well beyond the museums of contemporary art alone.
Museums of contemporary art are only, in the aesthetic field, the apparent tip of an iceberg that concerns the entire Western society and whose invisible presence they reveal.
The pathology we are about to discuss here, considered from a collective, social point of view, is that of the chosen, the initiated and the enlightened. History has always known the chosen by race, ethnicity, nation, and God's chosen ones, who have influenced world events for millennia. For about three centuries now, representatives of a very similar neurosis have appeared in Europe, but whose doctrines and ideological justifications are different, and even often opposed: the chosen of Reason.
The pathology of "elected peoples", "superiors" by their races, native lands, cultures, and/or religions is very old. She has been active in all cultures, it is not possible to be complete.
The Aryans in India, or Nazi Germany,
The Greeks opposing the Barbarians,
The Chinese consider themselves the only "Sons of Heaven", but also the Japanese or Koreans (Moon)
The Jews, "Chosen People", "People of the Covenant" with the only true God, "people priest", people of the only true End Time Messiah.....
Muslims, Faithful to Allah, the One, vindictive and merciful, the only true one, as opposed to God or the Gods of the Infidels, condemned to eternal hell,
The Aztecs, the chosen people of Huitzilopochtli, a solar deity, practising human sacrifice by the tens of thousands annually to the detriment of the surrounding peoples.
The Inca, son of the Sun, reigning over a totalitarian society, so popular that it collapsed at the mere sight of a few dozen Spaniards.
The Protestants, predestined for salvation by the Grace of God alone, without the works being necessary.
The list would be long to establish of all the "superior peoples" and "True Believers" in human history.
The Lazarist Catholic Fathers Huc and Gabet, missionaries crossing Tibet in 1844-1846, were very sincerely frightened of the mass of the damned whom they met on their journey. They did not seem to have understood the distant humour of some of the Buddhist sages they met, who recognized the great spiritual and moral interest of Catholic teaching. Without however converting, Or maybe they didn't want their true thinking to show through in their book, for fear of attracting the wrath of their own hierarchy.
It is certain that by the cross effect of the reciprocal damnations of the various religions, especially Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the Infernos del Ciel must have been saturated with people for two millennia.
The Hells on Earth have also multiplied, in the name of these many true antagonistic faiths, eager to convert all those who did not ask them anything. Muslims have imposed themselves from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean via the suburbs of Vienna. Catholic Spain has been illustrated in this regard in South and Central America. But Protestants were not more tolerant one or two centuries later in North America. Even the Bisons will not escape the conversion with rifle.
All these "chosen ones", these "enlightened ones", these "initiates" have existed, and still exist, in an infinity of religions which, with very rare exceptions, conceive of truth and salvation, for themselves (which is their right), but also unfortunately for others, only through doctrines always based on the divine election, of a particular people or of believers without ethnic distinction but the sole holders of the Truth.
Ecumenism is publicly displayed, but mental reservations are alive and well. Doctrines are one thing, practices and behaviours can be different. But the doctrines of the monotheistic religions, derived from Semitic thought (Judaism, Christianity, Islamism), are all very marked by the same handicap: the simplistic belief in the existence on earth, within reach of human thought, of one Truth, and only one . This is not the case with the religious and philosophical doctrines of the Far East, such as the Hinduisms, Buddhisms, Taoisms, Confucianism and Shintoism, which distinguish all the truths to which the human mind can have access, multiple and even apparently contradictory, and the Metaphysical Truth, of which man cannot be aware during his lifetime. Far eastern religious thought is, as a result of this fundamental analysis, in theory much more tolerant than Western religious thought. For centuries, Hindu philosophical and religious thought in particular has been based on the principle that all the great religions of the world, despite their different and sometimes opposing discourses, are bearers of saving truths.
These pathologies of the belief in a unique truth and in a particular excellence of which a group of humans would be the sole holder because of a membership, ethnic or cultural, a filiation or a divine election, a faith or of an initiation, have long been based essentially on the race or the land of birth and on religion, these sources being able to be combined.
It is important to observe that these neuroses of superiority are not harmful in themselves but by the action of men, what men do with them. Religious beliefs, even exclusive ones, have not only had bad consequences in terms of civilization and art, contrary to the doctrine spread by their contemporary atheist opponents. History and in particular art history demonstrate this. The alchemy of pathology and normality is complex in human beings. Well-controlled and compensated neuroses can be stimulating and creative of memorable actions, of admirable and lasting civilizations. Without too much collateral damage. But other pathologies have been little creative or totally destructive, especially for those who were not chosen, elected, enlightened, initiated, those outside.
The pathology of election by belonging to a nation, a land and a culture of origin, for example, has wreaked havoc in Europe when it has lost its sense of proportion. When the neurosis became obsessive. When fidelity to a past and a culture has become an aggression against the past and the culture of others. This ultra-nationalism was the consequence of and reaction to the absurd conquests of the French Revolution and the First Empire. The whole 19th and first half of the 20th century was a period of dramatic clashes of multiple ultra-nationalist neuroses that were exported to Japan.
This ultra-nationalism was in no way born of the spontaneous passions of peoples, it was totally created and fuelled by the ideological and political elites of the time because it served their interests. Peoples always slaughter each other by order from above. And it is certainly not the simplistic dream of the "enlightened" of a Universal Republic, the new ideological mega-neurosis of globalism, that will be an obstacle to the massacres of peoples.
Since 1945 it is indeed the opposite neurosis that the elites have been imposing: nationalism, the simple feeling of national belonging, is described as a racist abomination, and it is the contempt for the nation, the land and the culture of birth, which is the mandatory correct thought under penalty of criminal conviction. What has happened so that in half a century the hypertrophied adoration of the nation becomes its utterest execration? The same speech that was worth the Legion of Honour in 1900 is worth prison in 2000. It is because a new ideology, which appeared in Europe in the 18th century, was imposed on peoples by the political-economical elites.
2) A new pathology: the enlightened
The important novelty with major political consequences is that all the superiority complexes, which were exclusively ethnocultural and/or religious in inspiration for millennia, were able, from the end of the 18th century, the famous "Enlightenment", to base oneself on totally secular, profane, rationalist ideologies, even claiming to be scientific.
This is the great recent progress of human civilization. The chosen one of Reason was born, and gradually imposed himself against the chosen one of God or certain Gods and against the feeling of belonging to a culture or a territory. There is often opposition between God's chosen ones, always very active in certain regions, and the chosen ones of Reason, but there is also very often an alliance. It depends on which God and which chosen people it is. And what a chosen people is hidden behind the chosens of reason. The vocabulary has evolved accordingly: the "enlightened" "the Illuminated", were both ben added and opposed to the "chosen of God" to the "believers", the "faithful", the "sons of Heaven"...
The "enlightened" are the spiritual sons of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a profound neurotic but highly gifted to found a system. These "enlightened" will have considerable political success: they are certainly the minority, but they are the exclusive legitimate interpreters of the General Will, the only true because the only one founded in Reason. This General Will, in reality particular, property of a handful of self-proclaimed enlightened people, is superior to the will of the majority of peoples supposedly lost by passions. The enlightened are inhabited by Reason while the peoples are only inhabited by passions.
This doctrine of "General Will", the expression of a minority enlightened by Reason, founded the new democratic, republican aristocracy, the modern, rationalist and materialistic aristocracy. Jean Jacques Rousseau is the Founder Father of the new conception of the political and ideological elite still in force throughout the West and Eurasia and which has even spread to the Far East, China and Korea.
The "avant-garde enlightened" by the lights of the dialectical and scientific materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, are indeed a direct avatar, adapted to the scientism of the 19th century, of the Rousseauist ideology. A century after Rousseau, it was necessary to be less literary, less "philosophical" and more "scientific". Hence Marxism Leninism, Maoism.....
These "enlightened" represent a double betrayal: betrayal of true philosophy, that of Socrates or Confucius, and betrayal of true science, just as modest, when it can express itself freely apart from the pressures of ideological drifts and political and economic ambitions.
The pathology of the "initiated" by their belonging to an esoteric doctrine and a network of elected officials is therefore not endangered, because religions have, in certain regions of the earth, less power over men than in the past. The chosen ones of God or of the Gods are no longer alone: they are neighboring, collaborating with, or facing, a new and growing category of chosen ones, those of Reason and Science. A reason and a science misguided, of course, but spirituality and religion too have been misguided.
The "superior men" thus continue to proliferate, who sometimes self-proclaim themselves with sincerity and good faith, almost innocently, as authorized and only able to teach and govern the mass of the uneducated, unelected, non- messianic, not predestined, unenlightened, unrelated, uninitiated, uneducated, in short all the poor inferior men misguided in their irrationality. Hell is paved with good intentions, in times of triumphant Reason as in the times of God or of the Gods or of the Fatherland.
Contemporary political elites consider themselves to be far above the people. They do not proclaim it too loudly, publicly, but they think it very loudly within their reserved cenacles.
This is not a new idea in the history of humanity. "Aristocracy" is defined etymologically from the Greek aristos, better, excellent, and kratos, power.
The novelty is not therefore in this belief in the political superiority of a few, but in the conceptions of the basis of the legitimacy of the power that these elites hold and exercise over peoples.
It is no longer the force of weapons, nor birth. Because these elites claim to be civilian, peaceful authorities, exercising effective control over the military and democrats, popularists.
This is no longer the divine election, because contemporary government elites are politically atheistic and proclaim themselves secular. Even in countries where religion has retained a certain social influence, such as the United States.
Likewise, wealth has been partly delegitimized. Money is in fact an ever more active actor of power over men, but the wealth is no longer so ostensible, it claims less, and is hidden more. You have to be rich to be powerful, but you shouldn't look so much anymore, unlike the old aristocracies. It is a wealth of merchants and bankers who are well established at the top of society, but who prefer relative discretion. It is no longer a wealth of aristocrats and nobles who display and proclaim their difference. But on this point, since the collapse of communist societies, developments are underway towards greater legitimacy of money.
3) Political and social consequences of the new pathology: The Initiation.
The public, official discourse bases the political legitimacy of the rulers on the election by the governed. This is the correct public doctrine. Political legitimacy through popular designation, a people more or less widely understood, is also not a novelty in human history. Neolithic societies, classical Greece, have experienced this type of legitimation of power. The people have always been most often a trompe l'oeil, an alibi, nothing new from this point of view either.
But in the 18th century, a political doctrine emerged in Europe that developed the idea of the coexistence of two totally contradictory political legitimacies: the peoples and the enlightened ones. The trick was to pretend to reconcile them. With a little intuition it is possible to guess for whose benefit.
18th century Europe proclaimed itself "the Enlightenment". The "lights" for Europe of course, but also for the whole world, because the West tends to claim to think for all other civilizations.
This appellation of "Age of Enlightenment" is charged with significance, like that of "Middle Ages" or "Renaissance". It expresses a vision of history that is infinitely more ideological propaganda than historical reality. Since the "Enlightenment" the legitimacy of political elites throughout the West has in fact been based on a new, fundamental, essential doctrinal affirmation, which remains discreetly in the background compared to the publicly reaffirmed principle of legitimacy through popular election. The political and ideological elites are legitimate because they are enlightened, enlightened, educated, initiated into the mysteries of the lights of a higher Reason. "Enlightenment" whose peoples are, by nature, in the most total ignorance, but which they can possibly acquire through appropriate education, an initiation. Education is for everyone, but Initiation is the obligatory passage for the entry into the world of ideological and political elites.
Initiation to a Higher Intelligence has become, in a little over two centuries, the cornerstone of the organization of the entire social and political system of the West. It is no longer only the business of a few groups, claiming marginal influence, but it is the whole of Western society that is politically governed, entirely, on the basis of Initiation. The peoples have seen nothing, and continue to see nothing. They still believe they are in an elective and pluralistic democracy. They have an excuse: everything has been done to hide this evolution from them.
It is essential to understand which Initiation is involved here. It is a worldly initiation, whose exclusive goal is success in society. It is an initiation with a view to global action on all men, a materialistic, prosaic, direct and exclusively social and political initiation.
It is not in any way a spiritual, intellectual or moral initiation whose necessary, unavoidable and primary purpose is the personal learning of discipline about oneself, the acquisition of individual wisdom through the mastery of one's desires, and a distance from the vanities of daily life. With, secondarily only, possible, indirect political and social effects, through the exemplarity of the individual behaviour or of a small group of wise men and disciples.
It is by no means initiation as it has been understood for millennia in all the great religions and philosophies. The initiation of Brahmanist, yogic, sannyāsin, Confucianist, Buddhist, or Socratic, Stoic, Epicurean (not confuse epicureanism and hedonism), scholastic, Augustinian, Benedictine, Aquinian, Dominican, Franciscan, etc. This is not here either the initiation, as it is understood on Mount Athos.
Certainly the Gnostic, Kabbalistic, magical, satanic drifts, whose purpose is not self-discipline and exemplary behaviour, but the acquisition of power over others, a public or occult power, have always existed. These abuses were very particular, individual, or the result of small groups whose influences remained marginal, without significant consequences at the level of societies, on the government of all men.
It is this Initiation, materialistic and non-spiritual, political and non-personal, initiation for action in the world and not for meditation on the world, initiation greedy for power over other men and not seeking wisdom through self-control, which has become, behind the mask of elective and liberal democracy, the system of government, unofficial, secret, but real and effective, of the whole West.
The government of the Shade was born thanks to the "Enlightenment". This was to be expected.
As a direct result of this evolution in conceptions of political legitimacy, in about 250 years, Europe and the West have gone from a transparent, public, obvious, nation-specific system of government to an opaque, secret, clandestine, unique system of government for the whole West. To take the example of France, and without going back to the medieval period, to the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, to the times of Francis I, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, all the French knew their governors. Not only at the local and regional level (the lord, baron, count, bishop or abbot), but also at the level of the entire kingdom. When the King allowed a minister to govern, as in the case of Louis XIII and Richelieu, all the people were informed. The same was true in all European nations, in the England of Elizabeth I, or in the German empire of Charles V or Ferdinand I, or in the Russia of Peter the Great and Catherine II. The exercise of political power was, everywhere in Europe, nominal, exoteric, ostensible, public. The peoples knew who ruled them. And the rulers knew that the peoples knew how to name those who ruled them. It was a political system based on personal and public responsibility. Even if the accountability could be pushed back into the distance. A distant, very distant one, often in the afterlife. But in this era of active and shared beliefs from the bottom up in the social hierarchy, this very distant beyond could be constraining down here.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the political system of the entire West has gradually come to be at the opposite end of this model: it is increasingly unified by a totalitarian, profane and no longer religious ideology, that of the Enlightenment and its latest avatar: Globalism. The system is totally secular, profan, atheistic and materialistic. But he also changed totally in his mode of exercise. Real political power has become secret, hidden, clandestine, cabalistic.
It is Plato's "Republic" that has thus been implemented, but a republic in which the Wise Men, at the top of the pyramid, are totally unknown to the general public. Only their creatures, their servants, the Guardians of the Compliant Order, appear officially, on the front of the stage. The official rulers, appointed after totally controlled elections, are all very brilliant puppets of an opaque, underground, secret system of influence, totally ignored or unknown by the populations.
These Influences act through sectarian organizations, with the most diverse names, hidden from the general public, totally opaque to the outside world, but all linked to each other at the top of the pyramid. In France the last leader who was not under the control of these illuminated Influences was General de Gaulle. The "1968 Revolution", an agitprop masterpiece organized by the enlightened, had no other purpose than to drive him out of power. The 1968 revolution, like its predecessors of 1789 or 1917 and many others, was nothing more than a coup d'état organized by masked elites, using peoples to establish their domination.
It is to these connected esoteric organizations that the apparent, official leaders are accountable, not to the peoples. And it is this underground organization, this Power of the Shadow, which, under the mask of institutions of democratic appearance, more or less elected, directs Western society. Exactly as it imposes Contemporary Art, without ever being accountable to the governed.
These sectarian organizations are structured on the model of progressive materialistic Initiation. This model operates exclusively by co-option and imposes rites of access and passage from the first grades to the higher grades. A whole hierarchy and a whole solemn, falsely symbolic and mysterious ritualism are instituted, with a single purpose: to give an impression of spirituality charged with a high conceptual and moral significance. But in reality effectively sorting the increasingly senior executives in the group hierarchy, and ensuring the total power of the "insiders" of the top (the Wise Men of the Plato Republic) over the "insiders" of the middle (the Guardians of the Plato Republic). And through these agents of control, transmission and execution of instructions, throughout society, on all those who are not part of these networks: the peoples.
Secrecy is a determining means of action in the politics of these networks of influence.
Secrecy commands the prohibition to reveal outside the group the belonging to the sect and its organization. This is the main oath, the first, founder, when entering the organization.
The secret imposes of course to deny the very existence of the secret vis-à-vis the outsiders. The secret publicly confessed is no longer a secret. The secret is never acknowledged, it is always denied.
But the secret is also the basic principle of the internal organization of these networks: The secret works only in one sense, as in the mafias, or in the "secret services" of the states: from the bottom to the top. But not from the top down. This secret is achieved by appropriate methods of compartmentalization, hence the lodges, circles, clubs, and other cells, reduced in number of participants who try out beyond a certain number of participants. From where also the diverse and multiple obediences, the related organizations, allied, separated at the base, but connected by their summits. This compartmentalization imposes the progressive signs of recognition which allow the certain identification, the proof of the belongings and the ranks, and ensure the transmission of the orders. This apparent dispersion and proliferation is one of the ways to keep the secret by blurring the tracks.
This sectarian system is based on an organization that has absolutely nothing to do with that of the armies and more generally of state administrations or private companies, in which the hierarchy, the chain of command, is apparent, publicly and clearly defined. In the organigram of organizations of this type, secrecy has replaced the transparency that is the rule in daily action.
This is the argument of the Initiation to "Higher Lights" that justifies this secret organization, partitioned, opaque not only with respect to foreigners to the sect, but even within the network, between its frames and its subordinate members. The Eye at the top of the pyramid sees everything. The middle and bottom floors see nothing, or only false pretense, appearances
At the end of the road to this materialistic, worldly, political Initiation, there is no true light, no discipline on oneself, no wisdom, no spirituality, no superior morality, but only the materiality of power over others, and that of money. This power is exerted first on the members of the network themselves, who are only instruments of the supreme power, the tentacles of the octopus, and through them extends its effects on the whole society.
This system of organizing total political power over humanity is very sophisticatedly hidden and organized very effectively:
1) This system is disguised as to the doctrinal principles behind generous philosophical proclamations such as "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", the well-known Masonic motto, which is also that of the French Republic. The Progress of Humanity as a whole, because the project is globalist, towards more light is of course the ultimate goal.
The true, materialistic, worldly and political goals of social success and control are hidden behind the systematically contrary discourse, the proclamation of a highly spiritual ambition, the alibi for philosophical, moral, social research, and a "selfless philanthropic and cultural action. This is the application of the well-known principle: the bigger the lie, the more often it is repeated, and the more it will appear to be true. This lie is effective both outside the group and inside, at least in the lower ranks and especially in all blue masonry. Man loves to deceive himself almost as much as he loves to deceive others.
2) To maintain secrecy, and to fit within the framework of the democratic appearance that is part of the official discourse, this system hides behind an exoteric, public apparatus. A legal facade, an associative institutional framework, a head office, dressed in a whole ceremonial apparatus intended to "communicate" publicly and to seduce and impress the members themselves, and the crowd remained outside. This institutional framework is used to recruit new members, train future executives, and hide the real underground organization. The iceberg has an apparent summit, but its depths are invisible to the common people, and also to the vast majority of its members.
3) This system of Shadow government in the name of Enlightenment has created and organized a basic motivation, universally effective, acting from the bottom to the top of its pyramid of ranks.
At the very bottom, from the very first ranks, and all along the hierarchy, the single engine, real despite public discourse, has nothing to do with the acquisition of wisdom, spirituality, an effort on oneself. It is not a yoga, certainly not an asceticism even less a distance from the realities of the world. On the contrary, it is a dive into the world. Motivation is eminently prosaic: it is ambition and social success. Social success by belonging to a small closed environment of effective relationships, the possession of an essential address book to promote private action, family, professional, and public action, political. The career and advancement, the power that is at the end, are with money the main engines of life in society. And these engines have been very smartly used and distributed from the bottom up the network pyramid. Belonging immediately provides material benefits, advancement in the rank hierarchy provides others, for which reason, it is necessary to know how to obey, without trying to unlock the secrets of unkwowns at higher ranks.
At the top is wealth and power over all men, in the most absolute concealment and, except the settling of scores, which can be deadly, "Death to traitors", the most total political impunity. Total irresponsibility, before God of course, because these ideological and political elites no longer believe in it, but also before the governed, because these real rulers are totally hidden from them.
The liberal capitalist West has learned the lessons from its confrontation with its communist rival. This rivalry was a family affair, a confrontation between "enlightened" people of different tendencies. To sum it up simply: The Bankers' Society versus the Apparatchiks' Society. The West of the Bankers triumphed, first and foremost on the economic field, because it did not ignore the engine of profit. But the triumph of the capitalist West is also due to the fact that it has gradually developed a very effective political system, also based on the Single Party of the enlightened, but a secret single party, not apparent, elusive, against which no revolt can succeed since it is a power that does not exist. Associations, lodges, circles, cells, brotherhoods, clubs, cenacles, unofficial and discreet committees, hidden in the fabric of society, connected in a discreet, effective but not very visible way, like the spider's web, are much more effective than the single public party, institutionalized, displayed, of the communist world. The political model of the official single party continues to work in China.
4) Back to art. The Contemporary Conceptual Art or the Art of the Top Eye
Contrary to appearances, we have not moved away from the Official Contemporary Art as it is exhibited in the Temples of Conceptual Art: the Museums of Official Contemporary Art.
Contemporary Conceptual Art (ConCon Art in short) is explained like all previous arts by the ideologies, good or bad, more or less good and bad, both good and bad, neuroses, more or less well controlled or not controlled at all that structure the minds of elites, and that they impose on their obedient or constrained sheeps.
Official contemporary art can therefore help to understand current political and ideological developments. The Contemporary Conceptual Art, ugly, absurd, provocative, botched, is a hermetic art, reserved for an elite of initiates to so-called higher lights. It's the Art of the Top Eye. Contemporary Art, devoid of any cultural roots, bears witness to a desire to erase the differences and murder the nations on the grounds of promoting a hypothetical universal man, the globalist homo. Subject and not citizen of a Universal Republic, the new ideological mirage at the fashion. The new mega-neurosis of the "enlightened".
The Conceptual Art, the Art of the Top Eye, is the echo of this collective pathology of election, common to many ethnic groups, cultures and human groups for millennia. A pathology that has adapted to the rationalism and materialism of our times, and which, in the last fifty years of the 20th century, has succeeded in structuring an entire effective political system that extends throughout the West and that intends to perpetuate its power, and develop its action on a global scale.
The Contemporary Conceptual Art ("ConCon Art"), the Art of the Top Eye is the application in the aesthetic field of the doctrines of the "Enlightenment", it is the expression of the neurosis of the election by the Reason, the result of the materialist Initiation. It is the policy of the "Enlightenment" in art which, after three centuries of implementation, can flourish without complex, without control, with impunity, richly, alongside the beautiful, significant and shared art of previous millennia.
A period in the history of European art has escaped this direct determinism of the neuroses and pathologies of election: the period of modern art, from 1850 to 1950 in approximate dates. For this reason alone that the diversity of ideologies, the competition between them has left during a century, the field open to artistic creation of popular origin not directly conditioned by the elites. The ideological and political elites were in conflict. The eye at the very top of the Pyramid was still only a project in progress, but it was not yet omnipotent. European artists were thus able to express themselves freely through multiple ancient and modern aesthetics.
The peoples were summoned by their elites to a first hyper massacre that claimed the lives of some artists. The ideological confrontation continued between the two wars. Another moment of possible freedom for artists, but only in a smaller part of Europe. Indeed, since 1917 in Russia, then since 1930 in Germany totalitarian regimes have imposed themselves which have exterminated men and the arts. It was at this time that the Official Contemporary Art, the Conceptual Art, the Art of the Top Eye, was set up in New York. The Top Eye that appears on every dollar bill.
New convocation of the peoples for a second great massacre. This period of appalling clashes between ideologies ended with the triumph of the Enlightenment in 1945.
It is this triumph of the Highest Eye that is expresses itself in Contemporary Conceptual Art.
Art is indeed a very reliable revealer of ideological and political predominances throughout human history. Long-term or temporary dominances. Aton didn't last long against Amon. Hellenism has totally disappeared in the Middle East under the blows of Islamic swords, but only after a millennium of domination. Mithra had to quickly give way to Christ etc.
In our time, there are still traces of the diversified freedom that Europe of Art experienced between 1850 and 1950. But it is necessary to look elsewhere than in the Art of the Top Eye for spontaneous and sincere artistic expression: photography, street art, private, local and regional commercial painting. Conceptual Art, the massacre of beauty and meaning, the refusal to share a common aesthetic between elites and peoples, could be the harbinger of a new great massacre of the Innocents by decision of their political and ideological elites.
Hysterectomy specimen with abnormal placentation. Residual placental tissue is seen adherant to the uterine wall. Chorionic villi are in direct contact with smooth muscle, without an intervening layer of decidua. Placenta accreta is a common cause for post partum hysterectomy.
Indiana Medical History Museum, Indianapolis. Formerly the pathology building for the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane.
Psedoperonospora cubensis - Downy mildew of cucurbits. Dichotomously branched sporangiophore with pointed tip is where the sporangium is born.