The new beautiful cold pressed A3 paper I ordered came today !! I could only afford 10 sheets…but I can finally have real room to draw *u*
St Helena, 1429-64
Desiderio da Settignamo, Attributed
Italian (Florence)
Dark gray sandstone
Toledo Museum of Art
Image and Description via Bob/Mr History on Flickr: “In the 1800’s this was considered a masterpiece by the Donatello, but by the mid-20th century had been demoted to a late 19th-century forgery. Recent scholarship has stated the sculpture as a work of art from the Renaissance.
The subject of the relief sculpture, has too been wrongly identified. Once thought to represent the Virgin Mary, Saint Catherine, or Saint Cecilia, the figure, crowned with both a diadem and a halo, is now identified as Saint Helena, the mother of Roman Emperor Constantine, who was an influential early convert to Christianity.” Bob/Mr History on Flickr
Gold pin with lynx head and garnets
Hellenistic, 1st century BC
Made in Greece (?) and found in present-day Parutino, southern Ukraine (the Greek colony of Olbia). 7 ½ in. long (19 cm)
Source: The Walters Art Museum
In the esoteric doctrine which regarded the present life as Death, and the living body as the soul’s tomb, we have the necessary background for adequate elucidation of the matter. The body was mummified to serve as a powerful moving symbol of the Death of the soul in matter, and the various features of the meaning of this mundane life. Nothing more. But this far transcended in graphic impressiveness and cathartic virtue any theoretic dramatization of the philosophy of life made by any people since the days of Egypt’s glory. The mummy was designed to point the whole moral of human life in a form of overwhelming psychological power. To a deeply philosophical people the lifeless body became at once the most impressive symbol of the entire import of life itself. The preserved corpse became the mute but grandiloquent reminder of life and Death, mortality and immortality, in one mighty emblem.
Tommaso Cuccioni (1790 - 1864) Photograph of “Amalthea and Jupiter’s Goat” sculpture by Pierre Julien (1731 – 1804)
