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This is one of the Latest MOCs created by myself and my girlfriend. We were watching Zoolander one day that the idea popped into our heads to make a movie scale replica. It was unveiled at Brickworld 2017!!
BELGIO RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA: Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi”. Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020), THE NYT (27/01/2020) & THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
1). Museo delle Belle Arti di Gand - Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi.” Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
Usa parole piuttosto pesanti la storica dell’arte Hélène Dubois, a capo del progetto di restauro del Polittico dell’Agnello mistico di Hubert (? - Gent, 1426) e Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, 1390 circa - Bruges, 1441), dipinto nel 1432 e conservato nella Cattedrale di San Bavone a Gent (Belgio), al momento in restauro (tornerà visibile al pubblico nella primavera 2020). Dubois se la prende con tanti di coloro che hanno commentato sui social gli esiti dell’intervento: oggetto del dibattito è stato il muso dell’agnello, che a seguito della rimozione delle ridipinture cinquecentesche è stato riportato al suo stato attuale. Il punto della questione sta nel fatto che l’anonimo pittore che coprì l’originale nel Cinquecento diede un aspetto molto più naturale all’agnello, coprendo quello realizzato da Jan van Eyck, che aveva un’apparenza più umana, o secondo altri simile a quella di un cartone animato. E sulla rete si sono diffusi meme in cui l’agnello veniva paragonato a Derek Zoolander, il celebre personaggio di Ben Stiller, un modello famoso perché solito posare facendo la duckface, assumendo dunque una posa che ricorda vagamente il muso del vero agnello di van Eyck.
Ma, al di là delle battute di spirito, in tanti si sono allarmati, perché abituati a un agnello che era sì più realistico, ma non era quello dipinto da van Eyck, ed era, come detto, frutto di interventi successivi (a questi aspetti avevamo dedicato un articolo in cui spiegavamo perché van Eyck aveva dipinto l’agnello in quel modo e provavamo anche a darci una risposta riguardo al perché, nel Cinquecento, si decise di donargli un muso più naturalistico. Di conseguenza, l’allarme ha prodotto giudizi negativi sul restauro, soprattutto da parte degli utenti dei social network, contro i quali adesso Dubois se la prende.
In un articolo pubblicato oggi sul New York Times, Dubois, parlando con la giornalista Nina Siegal, commenta la vicenda affermando che “sono stati diffusi molti equivoci per colpa di tweet assolutamente stupidi e fuori contesto”. Quello che vediamo, ha spiegato la studiosa, “è l’originale agnello di van Eyck, che fu ridipinto da qualcun altro in modo da farlo sembrare più simile a un animale, più anatomicamente corretto”. E l’ovino scoperto con il restauro “è quello dipinto secondo le intenzioni di van Eyck. Non è niente di strano: semplicemente, non è quello che le persone erano abituate a vedere e dunque non è quello che si aspettavano”.
Il lavoro eseguito per riportare l’agnello alla luce è durato due settimane. E il risultato finale, per gli studiosi, non è stato per niente sorprendente. “Van Eyck non è stato il primo pittore a dipingere un agnello in quel modo”, sostiene Dubois. “Abbiamo moltissimi esempi dall’alto Medioevo e dalla tarda antichità, inclusi anche mosaici romani, dove gli agnelli sono rappresentati con questi grandi occhi inseriti frontalmente, che guardano l’osservatore affinché sia chiaro che quello che stiamo vedendo è l’agnello di Dio”. Ovviamente, continua Dubois, “l’agnello è molto più intenso di come me l’aspettavo, e mi ha davvero impressionata. Ma è perché prima eri abituato a questo agnello contenuto e passivo e adesso devi confrontarlo con questa fortissima visione del simbolo religioso di Cristo sacrificato sull’altare. Qui, Cristo è consapevole del suo sacrificio”.
Dubois ha poi aggiunto che non fu soltanto l’agnello a essere ridipinto nel Cinquecento: gli interventi riguardarono anche “i panneggi, la porzione sommitale del paesaggio, il cielo, e la veduta della città. Inoltre, sul retro degli scomparti laterali, fu ridipinto quasi il 70% della superficie”. Le ridipinture del retro, peraltro, si contraddistinguono per il fatto che si trattò di un lavoro, afferma ancora la studiosa, “condotto in maniera estremamente attenta, fatto in modo tale che tutti i contorni delle figure sono stati rispettati e la maggior parte dei colori riprodotta con pigmenti di altissima qualità”.
Nell’immagine: a sinistra il muso dell’agnello con le ridipinture del 1550, a destra quello dipinto dai van Eyck, scoperto a seguito del restauro.
Fonte / source:
-- Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
www.finestresullarte.info/flash-news/5729n_agnello-mistic...
2). Up Close, There’s More to the Ghent Altarpiece Than the Lamb - After causing a stir on social media, the unveiling of a restored panel kicks off a year celebrating the late-medieval master Jan van Eyck. THE NYT (27/01/2020).
GHENT, Belgium — Hélène Dubois was frustrated.
It was Friday morning, just hours before she was set to reveal the $2.4 million, multiyear restoration she had led on panels of one of the world’s great artistic treasures: “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the Ghent Altarpiece.
But the lamb’s “new” face had already been seen by thousands, online. In the previous 48 hours, a side-by-side of the panel before and after restoration had gone viral on Twitter, with Smithsonian Magazine calling the new lamb “alarmingly humanoid” and users comparing it to the pouting fashionista Derek Zoolander.
“A lot of misunderstandings have been propagated by absolutely stupid tweets taken completely out of context,” Ms. Dubois said as she opened the secure chamber at St. Bavo’s Cathedral that held the altarpiece.
Inside, displayed in a huge glass vitrine, was the nearly 600-year-old masterpiece by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, its details defined and its colors vibrant and joyful, as they must have been when it was painted. The massive work, created from 20 paintings on the front and back of 12 panels, is an astounding work of art. The lamb’s face, at the center of the largest panel on the front, is no bigger than a walnut.
“You see how small it is?” Ms. Dubois said. The changes to the lamb's face were indeed quite substantial, she added.
“This is the original sheep of van Eyck, which was painted over by someone else to make it look like a passive animal, and more anatomically correct,” she said. “But this is what van Eyck’s intention was. It’s nothing bizarre; it’s just not what people are used to looking at and perhaps do not expect.”
The unveiling of the lamb panel was the first event in what is being called here “The Year of Van Eyck,” and the return of the newly restored central panel to the cathedral is accompanied by a landmark exhibition at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts called “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution,” which opens Feb. 1 and runs through April 30. The show features 13 original van Eyck paintings — more than half of the 22 extant known works — shown alongside 100 artworks by contemporaries from the late Middle Ages.
The restored exterior panels, including ones portraying Adam and Eve, will be separated into pairs and presented in the museum, next to similar or contrasting works by other artists of the period, like Fra Angelico and Masaccio. Most of the altarpiece’s front, including the “Mystic Lamb” panel and the unrestored top panels, will remain in the cathedral. (One of the original lower panels, known as the “Righteous Judges” panel, was stolen and continues to be missing; it is represented by a copy.)
“The last time two panels of the altarpiece, Adam and Eve, were shown in a museum was in 1902,” Frederica van Dam, a co-curator of the exhibition, said. “When they depart back to the cathedral, you’ll have this distance again. To have an exhibition where you can see them so close is so extraordinary, to be able to see all the wonderful details.”
It’s the details that may stir the most discussion, as shown already by the recent social media excitement. The restoration of the altarpiece, which began with a study of the painting by a consortium of international experts in 2012, has revealed that a substantial amount of it was reworked in the 16th century, about 120 years after it was originally painted.
“Basically, we have been looking at a masterpiece by someone else,” Ms. van Dam said in an interview at the museum.
The Ghent altarpiece was commissioned for a private chapel in St. Bavo’s Cathedral around 1420. Although there is still debate among scholars as to its precise origins, the current consensus is that it was conceived and designed by Hubert van Eyck, who died in 1426, and completed by his younger brother, Jan van Eyck, by 1432. Both painters worked in a studio with students, and so support probably came from other painters, too.
Ms. Dubois, the restorer, said that at some point in the 1500s another painter, or perhaps a group of painters, decided that it needed a reworking. They may have wanted to change the painting for theological reasons — this was, after all, the middle of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church was rewriting its doctrines at the Council of Trent — or because painting styles had changed.
The whole painting was redone, she said, “not only the lamb but all the draperies, the top part of the landscape, the sky and the city view, and on the reverse of the wings, about 70 percent was overpainted.”
She added: “What is peculiar about this one is that it was extremely carefully done so that all the contours of the figures were respected and most of the colors were reproduced with very high-quality pigments. It was not a botched job.”
But luckily, restorers discovered that there was also a very thick layer of varnish between the original painting and the newer version, which made it relatively easy for them to remove that layer to get back to van Eyck’s work, Ms. Dubois said. The original head of the lamb, for example, was “in very good condition,” she said. “We only had to do a tiny restoration of tiny paint losses.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Dubois said that she and her team had spent about two weeks removing the overpaint from the lamb alone, using a painstakingly meticulous process to remove the pigment.
“He is not the first one who painted the lamb in that way,” Ms. Dubois said. “We have many, many examples from the early Middle Ages and late antiquity, including Roman mosaics, which show the lamb with these very large frontal eyes, gazing at us to make it very identifiable as the Lamb of God.”
Because she could see the original image of the lamb emerging over a span of time, rather than in the instant way people look at side-by-side comparisons on Twitter, she said, she didn’t find it shocking to realize that the eyes were facing forward, and the lamb was far more alert than in the overpainted version.
“Of course, it’s more intense than I expected,” Ms. Dubois said. “It actually moved me. You’re just used to this demure, passive lamb and then you’re confronted with this very strong vision of the religious symbol of Christ being sacrificed on the altar. Here, Christ is aware of his sacrifice.”
Fonte / foto / source:
-- THE NYT (27/01/2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/arts/design/mystic-lamb-ghent-...
3). A godlike, pounding power': Van Eyck and the Ghent Altarpiece Restored – review. THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
Ghent, Belgium - The stupendous restoration of the altarpiece, and the magnificent exhibition nearby, confirm Van Eyck as a painting colossus. Get yourself to Ghent!
According to the Italian art critic Giorgio Vasari, writing hundreds of miles away and more than a century later, the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck “delighted in alchemy”. As he mixed up compounds by candlelight in a workshop by a canal in Bruges, he hit on the secret of oil painting. There’s no proof of any of this – but as you look at his uncannily perfect paintings in the epochal new survey of his genius at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, it’s easy to believe he dabbled in magic.
The proof twinkles between the thumb and index finger of Jan de Leeuw, in Van Eyck’s 1436 portrait of this fellow craftsman. De Leeuw was a leading Bruges goldsmith and, as he fixes a sharp, clear gaze straight at you, he holds a ring he has made. It’s as much rivalry as homage. The jeweller’s art is intricate, but painting is something else. The ring glints in dazzles of yellow, catching a beam of light. The goldsmith made a reflective object, but Van Eyck has made the light itself.
Making gold from base metal was the alchemist’s dream. Here – in this show at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, which accompanies the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece at nearby St Bavo’s Cathedral – Van Eyck makes it from pigments, a trick he performs in ever more spectacular ways like a magician impressing the Duke of Burgundy, for whom he worked as court artist, or doing tricks in the market squares of Bruges and Ghent.
It’s not just gold he can magic into being. In his Annunciation, lent by Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, the angel Gabriel is bedecked in pearls, rubies and sapphires that are hypnotically solid. The words Gabriel speaks are written in gold in the air. Behind Mary, bottle-glass windows shimmer with light. It’s impossible to resist bending forward to look deeper into the painting’s space. But wait a moment. This is a flat piece of wood with paint on it – not a real room. One thing isn’t really further away than another, it’s all just an illusion.
Van Eyck is a magician all right, and he’s no easier to fathom today than when medieval folk gathered to gawp at his latest impossible creation. One of his favourite feats is to depict stone sculpture, stiller and colder than stone itself – as in his Annunciation Diptych, lent by the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. It works because Van Eyck simulates light hitting the surface of pure white marble and convincingly makes the statues seem three-dimensional, even catching reflections of their far sides in a polished background – and yet, these statues also appear alive. The dove of the holy spirit flies above Mary – but it, too, is stone. Van Eyck is truly showing off his sorcery.
This might all seem like random brilliance, with no guiding beliefs about art and its purpose – except that he left a manifesto for his vision. Van Eyck is thought to have trained as a miniaturist, painting tiny, precise pictures in handwritten manuscripts. You can see, in his portrait of the courtier Baudouin de Lannoy, with his mossy silver stubble over a creased hunk of a face, how he transferred that close eye to portraiture. He was sent on a mission with De Lannoy to portray Isabella of Portugal, so Philip of Burgundy could see his prospective bride – which suggests the court valued him as a kind of photographer before photography. But Van Eyck had grander ideas. You can’t read them in a book. Instead you have to go to St Bavo’s Cathedral to see the Ghent altarpiece.
This mesmerising exhibition celebrates a crucial step in the restoration of the altarpiece, which Van Eyck completed in 1432, six years after his initial collaborator, his brother Hubert, died. Since 2012, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts has been restoring it, carefully and scientifically, stage by stage. Now the most famous section, the Adoration of the Lamb, has gone back on view after being returned to its original colours and details.
Later re-paintings and mustard-coloured varnish are gone. The acid-blue intensity of the sky and emerald green of the landscape have been set free. Everything is so clear and sharp, now we see it as Van Eyck painted it. The fabulous buildings of his imagined Jerusalem display their geometries, while African and Middle Eastern trees reveal prickles and spikes. Holy processions and angelic hosts gather to revere the Lamb, their faces as wrinkled and characterful as any of his portraits. It’s a painting that pounds with life.
And this is just one part. Meanwhile, other panels have been moved to the exhibition – and these are the true reason to get yourself to Ghent. It can be frustrating to see a “destination” artwork. You book your timed ticket to get a jostled experience of a remote icon. But the Museum of Fine Arts has opened up Ghent’s treasure for a proper look. Adam and Eve, two near life-sized nudes from the altarpiece, are in the show to ogle up close. And they’re stunning. Both have wiry tangles of pubic hair overflowing their fig leaves. These thin, dark filaments float over butter-gold flesh with 3D reality.
It might be a confession. The truth of the human body matters just as much to him as a mystic lamb. The real meaning of the Ghent altarpiece, for its creator, is not religious. It’s about art. Michelangelo would be accused, much later, of glorifying his own art in the Sistine Chapel, instead of God. What Van Eyck does, too, is to declare the freedom of art – and the godlike power of painting. He shows on a stupendous scale that painting can remake worlds. In one panel, a window is open on to a blue, bird-filled sky above a medieval street, where people are chatting as they did 600 years ago. Jan van Eyck has preserved this moment by an act of wizardry.
Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, from 1 February until 30 April.
Fonte / source:
-- THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/29/van-eyck-ghe...
I could'nt resist ! :o)
"Moisture is the essence of wetness, and wetness is the essence of beauty."
Derek Zoolander
for FGR and ridiculously good looking.
I thought that this was a very clever and well-executed triple mash-up which is something I've very rarely seen.
You've got elements of Zoolander (a Ben Stiller movie about "ridiculously, ridiculously good looking" models), Zootopia (Disney animated movie with Officer Judy Hopps) plus adding in the "Bunny Hutch" is the third part of the mashup.
The Bunny Hutch are cosplayers who give cosplay characters a Playboy Bunny/Hugh Hefner spin. Sometimes, it works fantastically. Other times, you want to spork your eyes out. *lol*
The Dragon Con TV sign/logo was a nice touch in the vein of the DCTV's "bumpers" (funny advertisements for made-up shows). Random female cosplayer: I do not know who you are but I salute your creativity and acting.
hi all! i wanted to share this with all of you out there that have four legged friends like me. i came across a super cool woman right here on flickr that makes these. she faved a pic of these two. when people do that i usually check them out to see if they have dobies too, because that's usually the case. well boy was i in for a treat when i clicked on her page! i saw the coolest bunch of doggy sweaters ever (worn by her gorgeous dobes).
if you click on any of her shots, they will link you to her site on etsy where you can order. I had sent her exact measurements to get the perfect fits for my two and boy are the PERFECT!
these are the softest and cutest things ever and the workmanship is top notch.
i highly recommend these!!
check out the two shots below to see how much the babies love them (and they really do)
**hey celeste, will you make me matching sweaters...i want to be as cozy as they are**
:))
Download Zoolander 2 Cast Poster HD Wallpaper & Wide Desktop Hollywood Movies Wallpapers In high Quality Definitions 1080p, 720p, Free Widescreen Background, 3D Pictures, Computer Desktops, Mobile Wallpapers and Photos Images.
Find the Perfect Resolutions Like (1280×720, 1366×768,...
stylishhdwallpapers.com/zoolander-2-cast-poster-hd-wallpa...
Alternate shot for Weekly Theme Challenge topic "Pet/s"
He's a nine-year-old 50/50 Schnauzer/Dachshund mix and he barks at everything. People who see him playing think he's a puppy.
I spotted these models taking the last puffs on their cigarettes in NYC, right before walking Marc by Marc Jacobs fashion show, blogged here.
Find more fashion photos + style stories at www.stylespotting.com
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Jennifer Aniston Will Reportedly Not Appear In A Cameo In Zoolander 2 She Has Decided To Stay Away From The Project After A Conflict Between Her And Fiance
My son was getting ready for "Awards Night" for his soccer club late this afternoon, so it was photo time. Here we are channeling our inner Derek Zoolander, with a little "Blue Steel". We're not quite ready for "Magnum"... but someday.
Strobist: AB800 at 1/16 power, through medium PBuff octabox (slightly camera right), and EX600RT at 1/128 power directly at subjects (from their right). Fired with PW's.
This is one of the Latest MOCs created by myself and my girlfriend. We were watching Zoolander one day that the idea popped into our heads to make a movie scale replica. It was unveiled at Brickworld 2017!!
BELGIO RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA: Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi”. Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020), THE NYT (27/01/2020) & THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
1). Museo delle Belle Arti di Gand - Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi.” Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
Usa parole piuttosto pesanti la storica dell’arte Hélène Dubois, a capo del progetto di restauro del Polittico dell’Agnello mistico di Hubert (? - Gent, 1426) e Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, 1390 circa - Bruges, 1441), dipinto nel 1432 e conservato nella Cattedrale di San Bavone a Gent (Belgio), al momento in restauro (tornerà visibile al pubblico nella primavera 2020). Dubois se la prende con tanti di coloro che hanno commentato sui social gli esiti dell’intervento: oggetto del dibattito è stato il muso dell’agnello, che a seguito della rimozione delle ridipinture cinquecentesche è stato riportato al suo stato attuale. Il punto della questione sta nel fatto che l’anonimo pittore che coprì l’originale nel Cinquecento diede un aspetto molto più naturale all’agnello, coprendo quello realizzato da Jan van Eyck, che aveva un’apparenza più umana, o secondo altri simile a quella di un cartone animato. E sulla rete si sono diffusi meme in cui l’agnello veniva paragonato a Derek Zoolander, il celebre personaggio di Ben Stiller, un modello famoso perché solito posare facendo la duckface, assumendo dunque una posa che ricorda vagamente il muso del vero agnello di van Eyck.
Ma, al di là delle battute di spirito, in tanti si sono allarmati, perché abituati a un agnello che era sì più realistico, ma non era quello dipinto da van Eyck, ed era, come detto, frutto di interventi successivi (a questi aspetti avevamo dedicato un articolo in cui spiegavamo perché van Eyck aveva dipinto l’agnello in quel modo e provavamo anche a darci una risposta riguardo al perché, nel Cinquecento, si decise di donargli un muso più naturalistico. Di conseguenza, l’allarme ha prodotto giudizi negativi sul restauro, soprattutto da parte degli utenti dei social network, contro i quali adesso Dubois se la prende.
In un articolo pubblicato oggi sul New York Times, Dubois, parlando con la giornalista Nina Siegal, commenta la vicenda affermando che “sono stati diffusi molti equivoci per colpa di tweet assolutamente stupidi e fuori contesto”. Quello che vediamo, ha spiegato la studiosa, “è l’originale agnello di van Eyck, che fu ridipinto da qualcun altro in modo da farlo sembrare più simile a un animale, più anatomicamente corretto”. E l’ovino scoperto con il restauro “è quello dipinto secondo le intenzioni di van Eyck. Non è niente di strano: semplicemente, non è quello che le persone erano abituate a vedere e dunque non è quello che si aspettavano”.
Il lavoro eseguito per riportare l’agnello alla luce è durato due settimane. E il risultato finale, per gli studiosi, non è stato per niente sorprendente. “Van Eyck non è stato il primo pittore a dipingere un agnello in quel modo”, sostiene Dubois. “Abbiamo moltissimi esempi dall’alto Medioevo e dalla tarda antichità, inclusi anche mosaici romani, dove gli agnelli sono rappresentati con questi grandi occhi inseriti frontalmente, che guardano l’osservatore affinché sia chiaro che quello che stiamo vedendo è l’agnello di Dio”. Ovviamente, continua Dubois, “l’agnello è molto più intenso di come me l’aspettavo, e mi ha davvero impressionata. Ma è perché prima eri abituato a questo agnello contenuto e passivo e adesso devi confrontarlo con questa fortissima visione del simbolo religioso di Cristo sacrificato sull’altare. Qui, Cristo è consapevole del suo sacrificio”.
Dubois ha poi aggiunto che non fu soltanto l’agnello a essere ridipinto nel Cinquecento: gli interventi riguardarono anche “i panneggi, la porzione sommitale del paesaggio, il cielo, e la veduta della città. Inoltre, sul retro degli scomparti laterali, fu ridipinto quasi il 70% della superficie”. Le ridipinture del retro, peraltro, si contraddistinguono per il fatto che si trattò di un lavoro, afferma ancora la studiosa, “condotto in maniera estremamente attenta, fatto in modo tale che tutti i contorni delle figure sono stati rispettati e la maggior parte dei colori riprodotta con pigmenti di altissima qualità”.
Nell’immagine: a sinistra il muso dell’agnello con le ridipinture del 1550, a destra quello dipinto dai van Eyck, scoperto a seguito del restauro.
Fonte / source:
-- Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
www.finestresullarte.info/flash-news/5729n_agnello-mistic...
2). Up Close, There’s More to the Ghent Altarpiece Than the Lamb - After causing a stir on social media, the unveiling of a restored panel kicks off a year celebrating the late-medieval master Jan van Eyck. THE NYT (27/01/2020).
GHENT, Belgium — Hélène Dubois was frustrated.
It was Friday morning, just hours before she was set to reveal the $2.4 million, multiyear restoration she had led on panels of one of the world’s great artistic treasures: “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the Ghent Altarpiece.
But the lamb’s “new” face had already been seen by thousands, online. In the previous 48 hours, a side-by-side of the panel before and after restoration had gone viral on Twitter, with Smithsonian Magazine calling the new lamb “alarmingly humanoid” and users comparing it to the pouting fashionista Derek Zoolander.
“A lot of misunderstandings have been propagated by absolutely stupid tweets taken completely out of context,” Ms. Dubois said as she opened the secure chamber at St. Bavo’s Cathedral that held the altarpiece.
Inside, displayed in a huge glass vitrine, was the nearly 600-year-old masterpiece by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, its details defined and its colors vibrant and joyful, as they must have been when it was painted. The massive work, created from 20 paintings on the front and back of 12 panels, is an astounding work of art. The lamb’s face, at the center of the largest panel on the front, is no bigger than a walnut.
“You see how small it is?” Ms. Dubois said. The changes to the lamb's face were indeed quite substantial, she added.
“This is the original sheep of van Eyck, which was painted over by someone else to make it look like a passive animal, and more anatomically correct,” she said. “But this is what van Eyck’s intention was. It’s nothing bizarre; it’s just not what people are used to looking at and perhaps do not expect.”
The unveiling of the lamb panel was the first event in what is being called here “The Year of Van Eyck,” and the return of the newly restored central panel to the cathedral is accompanied by a landmark exhibition at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts called “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution,” which opens Feb. 1 and runs through April 30. The show features 13 original van Eyck paintings — more than half of the 22 extant known works — shown alongside 100 artworks by contemporaries from the late Middle Ages.
The restored exterior panels, including ones portraying Adam and Eve, will be separated into pairs and presented in the museum, next to similar or contrasting works by other artists of the period, like Fra Angelico and Masaccio. Most of the altarpiece’s front, including the “Mystic Lamb” panel and the unrestored top panels, will remain in the cathedral. (One of the original lower panels, known as the “Righteous Judges” panel, was stolen and continues to be missing; it is represented by a copy.)
“The last time two panels of the altarpiece, Adam and Eve, were shown in a museum was in 1902,” Frederica van Dam, a co-curator of the exhibition, said. “When they depart back to the cathedral, you’ll have this distance again. To have an exhibition where you can see them so close is so extraordinary, to be able to see all the wonderful details.”
It’s the details that may stir the most discussion, as shown already by the recent social media excitement. The restoration of the altarpiece, which began with a study of the painting by a consortium of international experts in 2012, has revealed that a substantial amount of it was reworked in the 16th century, about 120 years after it was originally painted.
“Basically, we have been looking at a masterpiece by someone else,” Ms. van Dam said in an interview at the museum.
The Ghent altarpiece was commissioned for a private chapel in St. Bavo’s Cathedral around 1420. Although there is still debate among scholars as to its precise origins, the current consensus is that it was conceived and designed by Hubert van Eyck, who died in 1426, and completed by his younger brother, Jan van Eyck, by 1432. Both painters worked in a studio with students, and so support probably came from other painters, too.
Ms. Dubois, the restorer, said that at some point in the 1500s another painter, or perhaps a group of painters, decided that it needed a reworking. They may have wanted to change the painting for theological reasons — this was, after all, the middle of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church was rewriting its doctrines at the Council of Trent — or because painting styles had changed.
The whole painting was redone, she said, “not only the lamb but all the draperies, the top part of the landscape, the sky and the city view, and on the reverse of the wings, about 70 percent was overpainted.”
She added: “What is peculiar about this one is that it was extremely carefully done so that all the contours of the figures were respected and most of the colors were reproduced with very high-quality pigments. It was not a botched job.”
But luckily, restorers discovered that there was also a very thick layer of varnish between the original painting and the newer version, which made it relatively easy for them to remove that layer to get back to van Eyck’s work, Ms. Dubois said. The original head of the lamb, for example, was “in very good condition,” she said. “We only had to do a tiny restoration of tiny paint losses.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Dubois said that she and her team had spent about two weeks removing the overpaint from the lamb alone, using a painstakingly meticulous process to remove the pigment.
“He is not the first one who painted the lamb in that way,” Ms. Dubois said. “We have many, many examples from the early Middle Ages and late antiquity, including Roman mosaics, which show the lamb with these very large frontal eyes, gazing at us to make it very identifiable as the Lamb of God.”
Because she could see the original image of the lamb emerging over a span of time, rather than in the instant way people look at side-by-side comparisons on Twitter, she said, she didn’t find it shocking to realize that the eyes were facing forward, and the lamb was far more alert than in the overpainted version.
“Of course, it’s more intense than I expected,” Ms. Dubois said. “It actually moved me. You’re just used to this demure, passive lamb and then you’re confronted with this very strong vision of the religious symbol of Christ being sacrificed on the altar. Here, Christ is aware of his sacrifice.”
Fonte / foto / source:
-- THE NYT (27/01/2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/arts/design/mystic-lamb-ghent-...
3). A godlike, pounding power': Van Eyck and the Ghent Altarpiece Restored – review. THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
Ghent, Belgium - The stupendous restoration of the altarpiece, and the magnificent exhibition nearby, confirm Van Eyck as a painting colossus. Get yourself to Ghent!
According to the Italian art critic Giorgio Vasari, writing hundreds of miles away and more than a century later, the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck “delighted in alchemy”. As he mixed up compounds by candlelight in a workshop by a canal in Bruges, he hit on the secret of oil painting. There’s no proof of any of this – but as you look at his uncannily perfect paintings in the epochal new survey of his genius at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, it’s easy to believe he dabbled in magic.
The proof twinkles between the thumb and index finger of Jan de Leeuw, in Van Eyck’s 1436 portrait of this fellow craftsman. De Leeuw was a leading Bruges goldsmith and, as he fixes a sharp, clear gaze straight at you, he holds a ring he has made. It’s as much rivalry as homage. The jeweller’s art is intricate, but painting is something else. The ring glints in dazzles of yellow, catching a beam of light. The goldsmith made a reflective object, but Van Eyck has made the light itself.
Making gold from base metal was the alchemist’s dream. Here – in this show at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, which accompanies the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece at nearby St Bavo’s Cathedral – Van Eyck makes it from pigments, a trick he performs in ever more spectacular ways like a magician impressing the Duke of Burgundy, for whom he worked as court artist, or doing tricks in the market squares of Bruges and Ghent.
It’s not just gold he can magic into being. In his Annunciation, lent by Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, the angel Gabriel is bedecked in pearls, rubies and sapphires that are hypnotically solid. The words Gabriel speaks are written in gold in the air. Behind Mary, bottle-glass windows shimmer with light. It’s impossible to resist bending forward to look deeper into the painting’s space. But wait a moment. This is a flat piece of wood with paint on it – not a real room. One thing isn’t really further away than another, it’s all just an illusion.
Van Eyck is a magician all right, and he’s no easier to fathom today than when medieval folk gathered to gawp at his latest impossible creation. One of his favourite feats is to depict stone sculpture, stiller and colder than stone itself – as in his Annunciation Diptych, lent by the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. It works because Van Eyck simulates light hitting the surface of pure white marble and convincingly makes the statues seem three-dimensional, even catching reflections of their far sides in a polished background – and yet, these statues also appear alive. The dove of the holy spirit flies above Mary – but it, too, is stone. Van Eyck is truly showing off his sorcery.
This might all seem like random brilliance, with no guiding beliefs about art and its purpose – except that he left a manifesto for his vision. Van Eyck is thought to have trained as a miniaturist, painting tiny, precise pictures in handwritten manuscripts. You can see, in his portrait of the courtier Baudouin de Lannoy, with his mossy silver stubble over a creased hunk of a face, how he transferred that close eye to portraiture. He was sent on a mission with De Lannoy to portray Isabella of Portugal, so Philip of Burgundy could see his prospective bride – which suggests the court valued him as a kind of photographer before photography. But Van Eyck had grander ideas. You can’t read them in a book. Instead you have to go to St Bavo’s Cathedral to see the Ghent altarpiece.
This mesmerising exhibition celebrates a crucial step in the restoration of the altarpiece, which Van Eyck completed in 1432, six years after his initial collaborator, his brother Hubert, died. Since 2012, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts has been restoring it, carefully and scientifically, stage by stage. Now the most famous section, the Adoration of the Lamb, has gone back on view after being returned to its original colours and details.
Later re-paintings and mustard-coloured varnish are gone. The acid-blue intensity of the sky and emerald green of the landscape have been set free. Everything is so clear and sharp, now we see it as Van Eyck painted it. The fabulous buildings of his imagined Jerusalem display their geometries, while African and Middle Eastern trees reveal prickles and spikes. Holy processions and angelic hosts gather to revere the Lamb, their faces as wrinkled and characterful as any of his portraits. It’s a painting that pounds with life.
And this is just one part. Meanwhile, other panels have been moved to the exhibition – and these are the true reason to get yourself to Ghent. It can be frustrating to see a “destination” artwork. You book your timed ticket to get a jostled experience of a remote icon. But the Museum of Fine Arts has opened up Ghent’s treasure for a proper look. Adam and Eve, two near life-sized nudes from the altarpiece, are in the show to ogle up close. And they’re stunning. Both have wiry tangles of pubic hair overflowing their fig leaves. These thin, dark filaments float over butter-gold flesh with 3D reality.
It might be a confession. The truth of the human body matters just as much to him as a mystic lamb. The real meaning of the Ghent altarpiece, for its creator, is not religious. It’s about art. Michelangelo would be accused, much later, of glorifying his own art in the Sistine Chapel, instead of God. What Van Eyck does, too, is to declare the freedom of art – and the godlike power of painting. He shows on a stupendous scale that painting can remake worlds. In one panel, a window is open on to a blue, bird-filled sky above a medieval street, where people are chatting as they did 600 years ago. Jan van Eyck has preserved this moment by an act of wizardry.
Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, from 1 February until 30 April.
Fonte / source:
-- THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/29/van-eyck-ghe...
BELGIO RESTAURO ARCHITETTURA: Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi”. Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020), THE NYT (27/01/2020) & THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
1). Museo delle Belle Arti di Gand - Agnello mistico di van Eyck, la restauratrice: “sono sorti equivoci sul restauro per colpa dei tweet stupidi.” Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
Usa parole piuttosto pesanti la storica dell’arte Hélène Dubois, a capo del progetto di restauro del Polittico dell’Agnello mistico di Hubert (? - Gent, 1426) e Jan van Eyck (Maaseik, 1390 circa - Bruges, 1441), dipinto nel 1432 e conservato nella Cattedrale di San Bavone a Gent (Belgio), al momento in restauro (tornerà visibile al pubblico nella primavera 2020). Dubois se la prende con tanti di coloro che hanno commentato sui social gli esiti dell’intervento: oggetto del dibattito è stato il muso dell’agnello, che a seguito della rimozione delle ridipinture cinquecentesche è stato riportato al suo stato attuale. Il punto della questione sta nel fatto che l’anonimo pittore che coprì l’originale nel Cinquecento diede un aspetto molto più naturale all’agnello, coprendo quello realizzato da Jan van Eyck, che aveva un’apparenza più umana, o secondo altri simile a quella di un cartone animato. E sulla rete si sono diffusi meme in cui l’agnello veniva paragonato a Derek Zoolander, il celebre personaggio di Ben Stiller, un modello famoso perché solito posare facendo la duckface, assumendo dunque una posa che ricorda vagamente il muso del vero agnello di van Eyck.
Ma, al di là delle battute di spirito, in tanti si sono allarmati, perché abituati a un agnello che era sì più realistico, ma non era quello dipinto da van Eyck, ed era, come detto, frutto di interventi successivi (a questi aspetti avevamo dedicato un articolo in cui spiegavamo perché van Eyck aveva dipinto l’agnello in quel modo e provavamo anche a darci una risposta riguardo al perché, nel Cinquecento, si decise di donargli un muso più naturalistico. Di conseguenza, l’allarme ha prodotto giudizi negativi sul restauro, soprattutto da parte degli utenti dei social network, contro i quali adesso Dubois se la prende.
In un articolo pubblicato oggi sul New York Times, Dubois, parlando con la giornalista Nina Siegal, commenta la vicenda affermando che “sono stati diffusi molti equivoci per colpa di tweet assolutamente stupidi e fuori contesto”. Quello che vediamo, ha spiegato la studiosa, “è l’originale agnello di van Eyck, che fu ridipinto da qualcun altro in modo da farlo sembrare più simile a un animale, più anatomicamente corretto”. E l’ovino scoperto con il restauro “è quello dipinto secondo le intenzioni di van Eyck. Non è niente di strano: semplicemente, non è quello che le persone erano abituate a vedere e dunque non è quello che si aspettavano”.
Il lavoro eseguito per riportare l’agnello alla luce è durato due settimane. E il risultato finale, per gli studiosi, non è stato per niente sorprendente. “Van Eyck non è stato il primo pittore a dipingere un agnello in quel modo”, sostiene Dubois. “Abbiamo moltissimi esempi dall’alto Medioevo e dalla tarda antichità, inclusi anche mosaici romani, dove gli agnelli sono rappresentati con questi grandi occhi inseriti frontalmente, che guardano l’osservatore affinché sia chiaro che quello che stiamo vedendo è l’agnello di Dio”. Ovviamente, continua Dubois, “l’agnello è molto più intenso di come me l’aspettavo, e mi ha davvero impressionata. Ma è perché prima eri abituato a questo agnello contenuto e passivo e adesso devi confrontarlo con questa fortissima visione del simbolo religioso di Cristo sacrificato sull’altare. Qui, Cristo è consapevole del suo sacrificio”.
Dubois ha poi aggiunto che non fu soltanto l’agnello a essere ridipinto nel Cinquecento: gli interventi riguardarono anche “i panneggi, la porzione sommitale del paesaggio, il cielo, e la veduta della città. Inoltre, sul retro degli scomparti laterali, fu ridipinto quasi il 70% della superficie”. Le ridipinture del retro, peraltro, si contraddistinguono per il fatto che si trattò di un lavoro, afferma ancora la studiosa, “condotto in maniera estremamente attenta, fatto in modo tale che tutti i contorni delle figure sono stati rispettati e la maggior parte dei colori riprodotta con pigmenti di altissima qualità”.
Nell’immagine: a sinistra il muso dell’agnello con le ridipinture del 1550, a destra quello dipinto dai van Eyck, scoperto a seguito del restauro.
Fonte / source:
-- Finestre sull'Arte (28/01/2020).
www.finestresullarte.info/flash-news/5729n_agnello-mistic...
2). Up Close, There’s More to the Ghent Altarpiece Than the Lamb - After causing a stir on social media, the unveiling of a restored panel kicks off a year celebrating the late-medieval master Jan van Eyck. THE NYT (27/01/2020).
GHENT, Belgium — Hélène Dubois was frustrated.
It was Friday morning, just hours before she was set to reveal the $2.4 million, multiyear restoration she had led on panels of one of the world’s great artistic treasures: “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” also known as the Ghent Altarpiece.
But the lamb’s “new” face had already been seen by thousands, online. In the previous 48 hours, a side-by-side of the panel before and after restoration had gone viral on Twitter, with Smithsonian Magazine calling the new lamb “alarmingly humanoid” and users comparing it to the pouting fashionista Derek Zoolander.
“A lot of misunderstandings have been propagated by absolutely stupid tweets taken completely out of context,” Ms. Dubois said as she opened the secure chamber at St. Bavo’s Cathedral that held the altarpiece.
Inside, displayed in a huge glass vitrine, was the nearly 600-year-old masterpiece by the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, its details defined and its colors vibrant and joyful, as they must have been when it was painted. The massive work, created from 20 paintings on the front and back of 12 panels, is an astounding work of art. The lamb’s face, at the center of the largest panel on the front, is no bigger than a walnut.
“You see how small it is?” Ms. Dubois said. The changes to the lamb's face were indeed quite substantial, she added.
“This is the original sheep of van Eyck, which was painted over by someone else to make it look like a passive animal, and more anatomically correct,” she said. “But this is what van Eyck’s intention was. It’s nothing bizarre; it’s just not what people are used to looking at and perhaps do not expect.”
The unveiling of the lamb panel was the first event in what is being called here “The Year of Van Eyck,” and the return of the newly restored central panel to the cathedral is accompanied by a landmark exhibition at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts called “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution,” which opens Feb. 1 and runs through April 30. The show features 13 original van Eyck paintings — more than half of the 22 extant known works — shown alongside 100 artworks by contemporaries from the late Middle Ages.
The restored exterior panels, including ones portraying Adam and Eve, will be separated into pairs and presented in the museum, next to similar or contrasting works by other artists of the period, like Fra Angelico and Masaccio. Most of the altarpiece’s front, including the “Mystic Lamb” panel and the unrestored top panels, will remain in the cathedral. (One of the original lower panels, known as the “Righteous Judges” panel, was stolen and continues to be missing; it is represented by a copy.)
“The last time two panels of the altarpiece, Adam and Eve, were shown in a museum was in 1902,” Frederica van Dam, a co-curator of the exhibition, said. “When they depart back to the cathedral, you’ll have this distance again. To have an exhibition where you can see them so close is so extraordinary, to be able to see all the wonderful details.”
It’s the details that may stir the most discussion, as shown already by the recent social media excitement. The restoration of the altarpiece, which began with a study of the painting by a consortium of international experts in 2012, has revealed that a substantial amount of it was reworked in the 16th century, about 120 years after it was originally painted.
“Basically, we have been looking at a masterpiece by someone else,” Ms. van Dam said in an interview at the museum.
The Ghent altarpiece was commissioned for a private chapel in St. Bavo’s Cathedral around 1420. Although there is still debate among scholars as to its precise origins, the current consensus is that it was conceived and designed by Hubert van Eyck, who died in 1426, and completed by his younger brother, Jan van Eyck, by 1432. Both painters worked in a studio with students, and so support probably came from other painters, too.
Ms. Dubois, the restorer, said that at some point in the 1500s another painter, or perhaps a group of painters, decided that it needed a reworking. They may have wanted to change the painting for theological reasons — this was, after all, the middle of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church was rewriting its doctrines at the Council of Trent — or because painting styles had changed.
The whole painting was redone, she said, “not only the lamb but all the draperies, the top part of the landscape, the sky and the city view, and on the reverse of the wings, about 70 percent was overpainted.”
She added: “What is peculiar about this one is that it was extremely carefully done so that all the contours of the figures were respected and most of the colors were reproduced with very high-quality pigments. It was not a botched job.”
But luckily, restorers discovered that there was also a very thick layer of varnish between the original painting and the newer version, which made it relatively easy for them to remove that layer to get back to van Eyck’s work, Ms. Dubois said. The original head of the lamb, for example, was “in very good condition,” she said. “We only had to do a tiny restoration of tiny paint losses.”
Nevertheless, Ms. Dubois said that she and her team had spent about two weeks removing the overpaint from the lamb alone, using a painstakingly meticulous process to remove the pigment.
“He is not the first one who painted the lamb in that way,” Ms. Dubois said. “We have many, many examples from the early Middle Ages and late antiquity, including Roman mosaics, which show the lamb with these very large frontal eyes, gazing at us to make it very identifiable as the Lamb of God.”
Because she could see the original image of the lamb emerging over a span of time, rather than in the instant way people look at side-by-side comparisons on Twitter, she said, she didn’t find it shocking to realize that the eyes were facing forward, and the lamb was far more alert than in the overpainted version.
“Of course, it’s more intense than I expected,” Ms. Dubois said. “It actually moved me. You’re just used to this demure, passive lamb and then you’re confronted with this very strong vision of the religious symbol of Christ being sacrificed on the altar. Here, Christ is aware of his sacrifice.”
Fonte / foto / source:
-- THE NYT (27/01/2020).
www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/arts/design/mystic-lamb-ghent-...
3). A godlike, pounding power': Van Eyck and the Ghent Altarpiece Restored – review. THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
Ghent, Belgium - The stupendous restoration of the altarpiece, and the magnificent exhibition nearby, confirm Van Eyck as a painting colossus. Get yourself to Ghent!
According to the Italian art critic Giorgio Vasari, writing hundreds of miles away and more than a century later, the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck “delighted in alchemy”. As he mixed up compounds by candlelight in a workshop by a canal in Bruges, he hit on the secret of oil painting. There’s no proof of any of this – but as you look at his uncannily perfect paintings in the epochal new survey of his genius at Ghent’s Museum of Fine Arts, it’s easy to believe he dabbled in magic.
The proof twinkles between the thumb and index finger of Jan de Leeuw, in Van Eyck’s 1436 portrait of this fellow craftsman. De Leeuw was a leading Bruges goldsmith and, as he fixes a sharp, clear gaze straight at you, he holds a ring he has made. It’s as much rivalry as homage. The jeweller’s art is intricate, but painting is something else. The ring glints in dazzles of yellow, catching a beam of light. The goldsmith made a reflective object, but Van Eyck has made the light itself.
Making gold from base metal was the alchemist’s dream. Here – in this show at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, which accompanies the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece at nearby St Bavo’s Cathedral – Van Eyck makes it from pigments, a trick he performs in ever more spectacular ways like a magician impressing the Duke of Burgundy, for whom he worked as court artist, or doing tricks in the market squares of Bruges and Ghent.
It’s not just gold he can magic into being. In his Annunciation, lent by Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art, the angel Gabriel is bedecked in pearls, rubies and sapphires that are hypnotically solid. The words Gabriel speaks are written in gold in the air. Behind Mary, bottle-glass windows shimmer with light. It’s impossible to resist bending forward to look deeper into the painting’s space. But wait a moment. This is a flat piece of wood with paint on it – not a real room. One thing isn’t really further away than another, it’s all just an illusion.
Van Eyck is a magician all right, and he’s no easier to fathom today than when medieval folk gathered to gawp at his latest impossible creation. One of his favourite feats is to depict stone sculpture, stiller and colder than stone itself – as in his Annunciation Diptych, lent by the Thyssen Museum in Madrid. It works because Van Eyck simulates light hitting the surface of pure white marble and convincingly makes the statues seem three-dimensional, even catching reflections of their far sides in a polished background – and yet, these statues also appear alive. The dove of the holy spirit flies above Mary – but it, too, is stone. Van Eyck is truly showing off his sorcery.
This might all seem like random brilliance, with no guiding beliefs about art and its purpose – except that he left a manifesto for his vision. Van Eyck is thought to have trained as a miniaturist, painting tiny, precise pictures in handwritten manuscripts. You can see, in his portrait of the courtier Baudouin de Lannoy, with his mossy silver stubble over a creased hunk of a face, how he transferred that close eye to portraiture. He was sent on a mission with De Lannoy to portray Isabella of Portugal, so Philip of Burgundy could see his prospective bride – which suggests the court valued him as a kind of photographer before photography. But Van Eyck had grander ideas. You can’t read them in a book. Instead you have to go to St Bavo’s Cathedral to see the Ghent altarpiece.
This mesmerising exhibition celebrates a crucial step in the restoration of the altarpiece, which Van Eyck completed in 1432, six years after his initial collaborator, his brother Hubert, died. Since 2012, the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts has been restoring it, carefully and scientifically, stage by stage. Now the most famous section, the Adoration of the Lamb, has gone back on view after being returned to its original colours and details.
Later re-paintings and mustard-coloured varnish are gone. The acid-blue intensity of the sky and emerald green of the landscape have been set free. Everything is so clear and sharp, now we see it as Van Eyck painted it. The fabulous buildings of his imagined Jerusalem display their geometries, while African and Middle Eastern trees reveal prickles and spikes. Holy processions and angelic hosts gather to revere the Lamb, their faces as wrinkled and characterful as any of his portraits. It’s a painting that pounds with life.
And this is just one part. Meanwhile, other panels have been moved to the exhibition – and these are the true reason to get yourself to Ghent. It can be frustrating to see a “destination” artwork. You book your timed ticket to get a jostled experience of a remote icon. But the Museum of Fine Arts has opened up Ghent’s treasure for a proper look. Adam and Eve, two near life-sized nudes from the altarpiece, are in the show to ogle up close. And they’re stunning. Both have wiry tangles of pubic hair overflowing their fig leaves. These thin, dark filaments float over butter-gold flesh with 3D reality.
It might be a confession. The truth of the human body matters just as much to him as a mystic lamb. The real meaning of the Ghent altarpiece, for its creator, is not religious. It’s about art. Michelangelo would be accused, much later, of glorifying his own art in the Sistine Chapel, instead of God. What Van Eyck does, too, is to declare the freedom of art – and the godlike power of painting. He shows on a stupendous scale that painting can remake worlds. In one panel, a window is open on to a blue, bird-filled sky above a medieval street, where people are chatting as they did 600 years ago. Jan van Eyck has preserved this moment by an act of wizardry.
Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, from 1 February until 30 April.
Fonte / source:
-- THE GUARDIAN U.K., (29/01/2020).
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/29/van-eyck-ghe...
Ok, a cheap reference from the movie Zoolander.
Ellen's Stardust Diner in Times Square is a favorite of my family when we head in to the city for a play.
"Times Square, Midtown Manhattan, New York City, the home to Broadways theatres and the biggest New Years Eve party in the world, is also home to the future stars of stage and screen at Ellens Stardust Diner THE home of the singing waiters and some of the best Diner food in the country. Serving Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner for tour groups and locals alike since 1987!" source: www.ellenstardustdiner.com
Please enjoy Gary's shot from the same day we took a peek inside of the diner.
This is an edited talk I presented at Trampoline 2 [0] in Melbourne [1], Australia, Saturday 24th of October, 2009 entitled: "Hacking People, Hacking Bullies".
Several months later
It has now been several months since I presented the talk at Trampoline. The idea, a simple hypothesis, "is there a better way to identify and disrupt Cyber Bullies?".
I know for example the current best detection and prevention systems we have, the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) [2] by Dan Olweus [3], manually identify bullies by peer association in their social networks. [4] Could this technique be extended to on-line social networks? I wanted to explore the idea of using network science techniques using maths and computers to identify hidden bully clusters in social networks.
The talk was divided into three parts: a) "Know your Enemy, Hacking humans"; b) "In the field: real life examples" and c) "Hacking Bullies". [5] I tend to write about these ideas to look for new insights into problems I see. [6] Bullying is a problem. I've experienced it first hand. It is the prime motivation for exploring these ideas. Bullying on-line is an even bigger problem and in an age of "social software" worth exploring further.
Preamble
My name is Peter. I'm a programmer. One of those gen-X slackers you hear about. My second computer was an Apple 2e clone shipped from Singapore in parts and hand assembled.
I'll be as lo-tech as you can get and read from sheets of paper. Occasionally I'll digress from the script. I tried to Kevin Bacon to stand in but he was busy and suggested Derek Zoolander and as soon as I mentioned to Derek there would be lots of big words and no cat-walk - Derek bailed, so you're stuck with me.
My talk is on bullies and what happens when they discover computers. If you want to use twitter and hash tags try #hackbully [7] I'll probably read the comments later. I'm not a psychologist, I'm a technologist with crap social skills. I'm interested in how bullies are adapting to computers and network, how to identify and neutralise them.
Hacking Bullies
The Internet is a big network. Bullies now have a much bigger playground and audience to choose from. So lets look at some real world examples. Some people collect stamps, others prefer spore, moulds and fungus mine is on-line behaviour.
Here's a few examples of cyber-bullying I've found. Gretel was on live national television and Will Anderson (ATTACKER) decided that Gretel Kileen was good TARGET and posted live insults on twitter taunting OUTSIDERS to join in on the fun. Gordon Ramsey, a known ATTACKER gets lots of attention these day when OUTSIDERs look for images of "fat Gordon Ramsey", for fun. Is this a case of OUTSIDERs fighting back? Erin Andrews, a news sports reporter in the US was ATTACKED by having video footage of her walking around after coming out of a shower posted on Youtube. Then had trouble convincing police she was TARGET.
Bullies have discovered computers and networks. Even Mika uses the power of song writing to asymmetrically attack bullies from his childhood. I think it's time to use our powers for good. What can we do?
Network science 101
Now we are almost up to the fun bit, where we use out knowledge of network science to hack bullies. But first a short diversion into Network science theory. Understanding networks allows us to understand markets, societies, species, corporations. Networks can be biological man made or social.
If we understand the rules of networks it give us the theory to create tools to hack bullies. There are four ideas that make hacking bullies possible: Small world networks, hubs, how information spreads and mapping networks.
1) Small world networks
Steven Strogatz and Duncan Watts are both mathematicians who succeeded in understanding the properties and structures of small worlds. Strogatz/Watts started asking basic questions about connections and relatedness of nodes in networks and realised understanding the "relatedness" of nodes and how each node is connected to another node is an important problem.
Strogatz/Watts, first tested their ideas on a network model of Hollywood actors and their relationship to "Kevin Bacon". They had a theory but no confirmation. The problem to solve? If an actor plays a part in a film, what is the chain of actors to reach Kevin Bacon. How many links is there in the chain? Lets try an example. How is Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) related to Kevin Bacon?
"Ben Stiller" was in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny" (2006) with "John C. Reilly" who was in "The Wild River" (1994) with "Kevin Bacon"
Strogatz/Watts discovered two structural properties of what we now call "small world systems". The first, there are relatively few related nodes in a small world. The second, small world systems tend to cluster together closely. The cluster close enough to find another node in a distant small world via minimal hops.
2) Hubs
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi looked over the results of Watts/Strogartz data and made an interesting discovery, networks are not connected randomly. Barabasi found the mechanism that lets small world link together. The idea he observed is that some nodes in a network have many more links to them than other nodes. We call these super nodes, hubs. The two most important insights Barabasi has made: a) Networks are robust. If individual nodes are knocked out, the network survives. b) The hub is the weak spot. Knock a hub out, the network is severely interrupted.
3) Spread of information
Alessandro Vespignani is a physicist who specialised in understanding how disease spreads in biological systems. By reading Barabasi work on networks, Vespignani observed transmission of disease in a network is not random. Diseases moves quickly and spreads far via hubs. Conclusions: Small changes in the network have an effect on the whole system because the network is inter-related. But a virus, disease or information will not be eradicated in a network unless you take into account hubs. Understanding Hubs is the key.
4) Marc Vidal and genetic maps
Marc Vidal is a geneticist interested in looking at the inter-connectedness of cells. After reading the research by Barabasi decided to look at disease as a network. Instead of looking at the connected cells one by one Barabasi suggested to Vidal to look at the connections of disease and genes to create a map. A map of related diseases and genes. This idea is significant. It means you can now see how diseases are related. An idea made possible because it was redefined as a network science problem.
Now we come to our ultimate aim. Can we hack bullies who inhabit our electronic networks? Can we use network science for example in the same way terrorist cells are identified and disrupted?
Predicting behaviour
Could we use network science to predict where bullies might be operating? If so, how might we go about this? Lets think about what we know about bullies.
- bullies inhabit small world social networks online and offline
- bullies have identifiable negative behavioural characteristics
- bullies attract followers who attack,defend or remain neutral
- bullies exhibit hub like behaviour
- bullies have victims
What would happen if on a social network service we looked at reported behaviour and people at the same time. Just like Marc Vidal and genetic maps. What if we mapped the behaviour of social networks to look for related behaviour and hubs? What we would be looking for is the hubs of bad behaviour. Could we identify bullies by their associations to HENCHMEN, OUTSIDERs who observe an ATTACK? We know from Barabasi that if we ignore the hubs the problem remains.
A network of bad behaviour is stable because the hub remains intact. Can we knock out hubs and interrupt bad behaviour? There is nothing to stop any of the big social software site doing this. We now have enough theory to create the tools to disrupt bullies in networks. We know from Vespignani that small changes in the network make a difference and that if we redefine the problem and think of bullying and bad behaviour as a network science problem, we can tackle it successfully with maths instead of ignoring it.
Reference
[0] Trampoline 2, "my images of Trampoline 2 taken on the day on flickr"
www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/collections/72157622546767...
[1] Melbourne, "my flickr set of Melbourne"
www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157608350016296/
[2] olweus.org, "Olweus Bullying Prevention Program"
www.olweus.org/public/bullying_prevention_program.page?me...
[3] Dan Olweus, "History of Dan Olweus"
www.clemson.edu/olweus/history.htm
[4] Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, "The Olweus Bullying Prevention Program Overview: (Research_OBPP_Effective.pdf) Black, S. A., & Jackson, E. (2007). Using bullying incident density to evaluate the Olweus Bullying Prevention Programme. School Psychology International, 28, 623-638."
www.olweus.org/public/document/obpp_effective_research
[5] Paul Graham, "What you can't say"
[6] seldomlogical.com, "Don't read this: Don't think I write for anything, other than for my own selfish reasons. So stop reading, right now. Stop!"
seldomlogical.com/2009/08/27/don-t-read-this
[7] #hackbully, "a twitter hashtag for responses on the talk. I was interested to see what kinds of responses I would get on the back channel"
twitter.com/#search?q=#hackbully
Credit: Thanks to Trace and the attendees at Trampoline 2 for corrections and listening.
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"We’re Here!" Is remembering Zoolander today by bringing you Blue Steel poses. Oh dear – I’m going to hate myself tomorrow morning.
"Do you ever think there's more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking?
David and I went camping for the weekend, at a very beautiful campground in Wiscasset.
Friday was a bit rainy (as per usual here in Maine, as of late), but Saturday was absolutely beautiful.
I tried ... I put on a leather jacket, I pouted my lips & I swished my hair ... but I didn't quite get it.
A day late ... sigh*
Well, it has been FOREVER since I have submitted anything to flickr, and I have about 40 or so pieces yet to photograph/upload. This piece in particular was a blast to make, done in prismacolor on 12x16 black bristol. It has a little texture to it, which I think really adds to the piece. My fundamentals teacher suggested that I add the Van Gogh-esque swirls to the background, as it matches Mugatu's hair.
I have been wanting to make an art piece based on Mugatu for a very long time, as I love Zoolander and Will Ferrell. Funny thing--I used the exact same color scheme for a larger scaled Prismacolor piece in my senior year of high school. Only issue is--I have yet to upload that, too.
I also made a smaller scale version of this piece on white bristol, and although I was not so thrilled about color on white (thanks Ro) it turned out pretty cool, and it was interesting to see how the colors reacted differently on white. I like black more.
Well, enjoy!