How The Pink Panther Painted The Mona Lisa’s Smile: Watch the 1975 Animation, “Pink Da Vinci”

Just a lit­tle fun to send you into the sum­mer week­end. Above, we present the 1975 ani­mat­ed short, “Pink Da Vin­ci,” which IMDB frames as fol­lows:

Anoth­er bat­tle of the paint­brush between the Pink Pan­ther and a diminu­tive painter, who this time is Leonar­do Da Vin­ci, paint­ing his mas­ter­piece, the Mona Lisa. The lit­tle Da Vin­ci paints a pout­ing mouth on the Mona Lisa, but the Pink Pan­ther decides to covert­ly replace the pout with a smile. When the smile wins the appre­ci­a­tion of an art patron, Da Vin­ci is enraged and repaints the pout. The Pink Pan­ther repeat­ed­ly changes the pout to a smile while the lit­tle painter is not look­ing, and ulti­mate­ly it is the Pink Pan­ther’s ver­sion of the Mona Lisa that hangs in the Lou­vre.

If this whets your appetite, watch 15 hours of Pink Pan­ther ani­ma­tions here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Orig­i­nal 1940s Super­man Car­toon: Watch 17 Clas­sic Episodes Free Online

Watch 15 Hours of The Pink Pan­ther for Free

Watch La Lin­ea, the Pop­u­lar 1970s Ital­ian Ani­ma­tions Drawn with a Sin­gle Line

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Oldest-Known Work of Literature in World History

You’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with The Epic of Gil­gamesh, the sto­ry of an over­bear­ing Sumer­ian king and demi-god who meets his match in wild man Enkidu. Gil­gamesh is hum­bled, the two become best friends, kill the for­est guardian Hum­ba­ba, and face down spurned god­dess Ishtar’s Bull of Heav­en. When Enkidu dies, Gil­gamesh goes look­ing for the only man to live for­ev­er, a sur­vivor of a leg­endary pre-Bib­li­cal flood. The great king then tries, and fails, to gain eter­nal life him­self. The sto­ry is packed with episodes of sex and vio­lence, like the mod­ern-day comics that are mod­eled on ancient mythol­o­gy. It is also, as you may know, the old­est-known work of lit­er­a­ture on Earth, writ­ten in cuneiform, the old­est-known form of writ­ing.

This is one ver­sion of the sto­ry. But Gil­gamesh beaks out of the tidy frame usu­al­ly put around it. It is a “poem that exists in a pile of bro­ken pieces,” Joan Aco­cel­la writes at The New York­er, “in an extreme­ly dead lan­guage.”

If Gil­gamesh were based on a real king of Ur, he would have lived around 2700 BC. The first sto­ries writ­ten about him come from some 800 years after that time, dur­ing the Old Baby­lon­ian peri­od, after the last of the Sumer­ian dynas­ties had already end­ed. The ver­sion we tend to read in world lit­er­a­ture and mythol­o­gy cours­es comes from sev­er­al hun­dred years lat­er, notes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s Ira Spar:

Some time in the twelfth cen­tu­ry B.C., Sin-leqi-unnin­ni, a Baby­lon­ian schol­ar, record­ed what was to become a clas­sic ver­sion of the Gil­gamesh tale. Not con­tent to mere­ly copy an old ver­sion of the tale, this schol­ar most like­ly assem­bled var­i­ous ver­sions of the sto­ry from both oral and writ­ten sources and updat­ed them in light of the lit­er­ary con­cerns of his day, which includ­ed ques­tions about human mor­tal­i­ty and the nature of wis­dom…. Sin-leqi-unnin­ni recast Enkidu as Gilgamesh’s com­pan­ion and brought to the fore con­cerns about unbri­dled hero­ism, the respon­si­bil­i­ties of good gov­er­nance, and the pur­pose of life. 

This so-called “Stan­dard Baby­lon­ian Ver­sion,” as you’ll learn in the TED-Ed video at the top by Soraya Field Fio­rio, was itself only dis­cov­ered in 1849 — very recent by com­par­i­son with oth­er ancient texts we reg­u­lar­ly read and study. The first archae­ol­o­gists to dis­cov­er it were search­ing not for Sumer­ian lit­er­a­ture but for evi­dence that proved the Bib­li­cal sto­ries. They thought they’d found it in Nin­eveh, in the exca­vat­ed library of King Ashur­ba­n­i­pal, the old­est library in the world. Instead, they dis­cov­ered the bro­ken, incom­plete tablets con­tain­ing the sto­ry of Gil­gamesh and Utnapish­tim, who, like Noah from the Hebrew Bible, built an enor­mous boat in advance of a divine­ly ordered flood. The first per­son to trans­late the pas­sages was so excit­ed, he stripped off his clothes.

The flood sto­ry wasn’t the knock-down proof Chris­t­ian schol­ars hoped for, but the dis­cov­ery of the Gil­gamesh epic was even more impor­tant for our under­stand­ing of the ancient world. What we know of the sto­ry, how­ev­er, was already edit­ed and redact­ed to suit a mil­len­nia-old agen­da. The Epic of Gil­gamesh “explains that Gil­gamesh, although he is king of Uruk, acts as an arro­gant, impul­sive, and irre­spon­si­ble ruler,” Spar writes. “Only after a frus­trat­ing and vain attempt to find eter­nal life does he emerge from imma­tu­ri­ty to real­ize that one’s achieve­ments, rather than immor­tal­i­ty, serve as an endur­ing lega­cy.”

Oth­er, much old­er ver­sions of his sto­ry show the myth­i­cal king and his exploits in a dif­fer­ent light. So how should we read Gil­gamesh in the 21st cen­tu­ry, a few thou­sand years after his first sto­ries were com­posed? You can begin here with the TED-Ed sum­ma­ry and Crash Course in World Mythol­o­gy video fur­ther up. Dig much deep­er with the lec­ture above from Andrew George, Pro­fes­sor of Baby­lon­ian at the Uni­ver­si­ty of London’s School of Ori­en­tal and African Stud­ies (SOAS).

George has pro­duced one of the most high­ly respect­ed trans­la­tions of Gil­gamesh, Aco­cel­la writes, one that “gives what remains of Sin-leqi-unnin­ni’s text” and appends oth­er frag­men­tary tablets dis­cov­ered in Bagh­dad, show­ing how the mean­ing of the cuneiform sym­bols changed over the course of the mil­len­nia between the Old Baby­lon­ian sto­ries and the “New Baby­lon­ian Ver­sion” of the Epic of Gil­gamesh we think we know. Hear a full read­ing of Gil­gamesh above, as trans­lat­ed by N.K. Sanders.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

20 New Lines from The Epic of Gil­gamesh Dis­cov­ered in Iraq, Adding New Details to the Sto­ry

World Lit­er­a­ture in 13 Parts: From Gil­gamesh to Gar­cía Márquez

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Discover The Grammar of Ornament, One of the Great Color Books & Design Masterpieces of the 19th Century

In the mid-17th cen­tu­ry, young Eng­lish­men of means began to mark their com­ing of age with a “Grand Tour” across the Con­ti­nent and even beyond. This allowed them to take in the ele­ments of their civ­i­liza­tion­al her­itage first-hand, espe­cial­ly the arti­facts of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty and the Renais­sance. After com­plet­ing his archi­tec­tur­al stud­ies, a Lon­don­er named Owen Jones embarked upon his own Grand Tour in 1832, rather late in the his­to­ry of the tra­di­tion, but ide­al tim­ing for the research that inspired the project that would become his lega­cy.

Accord­ing to the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Jones vis­it­ed “Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey before arriv­ing in Grana­da, in Spain to car­ry out stud­ies of the Alham­bra Palace that were to cement his rep­u­ta­tion.”

He and French archi­tect Jules Goury, “the first to study the Alham­bra as a mas­ter­piece of Islam­ic design,” pro­duced “hun­dreds of draw­ings and plas­ter casts” of the his­tor­i­cal, cul­tur­al, and aes­thet­ic palimpsest of a build­ing com­plex. The fruit of their labors was the book Plans, Ele­va­tions, Sec­tions and Details of the Alham­bra, “one of the most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions on Islam­ic archi­tec­ture of all time.”

Pub­lished in the 1840s, the book pushed the print­ing tech­nolo­gies of the day to their lim­its. In search of a way to do jus­tice to “the intri­cate and bright­ly col­ored dec­o­ra­tion of the Alham­bra Palace,” Jones had to put in more work research­ing “the then new tech­nique of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy — a method of pro­duc­ing mul­ti-col­or prints using chem­i­cals.” In the fol­low­ing decade, he would make even more ambi­tious use of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy — and draw from a much wider swath of world cul­ture — to cre­ate his print­ed mag­num opus, The Gram­mar of Orna­ment.

With this book, Jones “set out to reac­quaint his col­leagues with the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples that made art beau­ti­ful,” write Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor Femke Speel­berg and librar­i­an Robyn Flem­ing. “Instead of writ­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic trea­tise on the sub­ject, he chose to assem­ble a book of one hun­dred plates illus­trat­ing objects and pat­terns from around the world and across time, from which these prin­ci­ples could be dis­tilled.” To accom­plish this he drew on his own trav­el expe­ri­ences as well as resources clos­er at hand, includ­ing “the muse­o­log­i­cal and pri­vate col­lec­tions that were avail­able to him in Eng­land, and the objects that had been on dis­play dur­ing the Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tions held in Lon­don in 1851 and 1855.”

The Gram­mar of Orna­ment was pub­lished in 1856, emerg­ing into a Britain “dom­i­nat­ed by his­tor­i­cal revivals such as Neo­clas­si­cism and the Goth­ic Revival,” says the V&A. “These design move­ments were rid­dled with reli­gious and social con­no­ta­tions. Instead, Owen Jones sought a mod­ern style with none of this cul­tur­al bag­gage. Set­ting out to iden­ti­fy the com­mon prin­ci­ples behind the best exam­ples of his­tor­i­cal orna­ment, he for­mu­lat­ed a design lan­guage that was suit­able for the mod­ern world, one which could be applied equal­ly to wall­pa­pers, tex­tiles, fur­ni­ture, met­al­work and inte­ri­ors.”

Indeed, the pat­terns so lav­ish­ly repro­duced in the book soon became trends in real-world design. They weren’t always employed with the intel­lec­tu­al under­stand­ing Jones sought to instill, but since The Gram­mar of Orna­ment has nev­er gone out of print (and can even be down­loaded free from the Inter­net Archive), his prin­ci­ples remain avail­able for all to learn — and his painstak­ing­ly artis­tic print­ing work remains avail­able for all to admire — even in the cor­ners of the world that lay beyond his imag­i­na­tion.

You can pur­chase a com­plete and unabridged col­or edi­tion of The Gram­mar of Orna­ment online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Explore the Beau­ti­ful Pages of the 1902 Japan­ese Design Mag­a­zine Shin-Bijut­sukai: Euro­pean Mod­ernism Meets Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Design

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

Every Page of Depero Futur­ista, the 1927 Futur­ist Mas­ter­piece of Graph­ic Design & Book­mak­ing, Is Now Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When David Bowie Played Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Film, Basquiat

Many actors have played Andy Warhol over the years, but not as many as you might think. Crispin Glover played him in The Doors, Jared Har­ris played him in I Shot Andy Warhol, Guy Pearce played him in Fac­to­ry Girl, and Bill Had­er played him in Men in Black III, but with a twist: he is actu­al­ly an agent who is so bad as his cov­er role as an artist, he’s “paint­ing soup cans and bananas, for Christ sakes!” On tele­vi­sion John Cameron Mitchell has act­ed the Warhol role in Vinyl, and Evan Peters briefly por­trayed him in Amer­i­can Hor­ror Sto­ry: Cult.

But you might sus­pect our favorite Warhol would be the one act­ed by David Bowie in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 Basquiat, the biopic of the Black street artist who was tak­en into the art world fold by Warhol, and wound up col­lab­o­rat­ing with him in last works by both artists. Jef­frey Wright plays Basquiat in one of his ear­li­est roles.

Now, you might watch this scene from Basquiat above (and anoth­er below) and say, well, that’s just most­ly Bowie. But I would say, yes, that’s kind of the point. Andy Warhol is an enig­mat­ic fig­ure, a leg­end to many, a man who hid behind a con­struct­ed per­sona; David Bowie is too. When one plays the oth­er, a weird sort of mag­ic hap­pens. Fame leaks into fame. Many actors might do bet­ter with the man­ner­isms or the voice, but the charisma…that is all Bowie. After singing about the painter back in 1972, Bowie final­ly col­lapsed their visions togeth­er in the art of film, where real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy meet and meld.

Around this time in the mid 1990s, Bowie was very much a part of the New York/London art scene. He was on the edi­to­r­i­al board of Mod­ern Painters mag­a­zine and inter­viewed Basquiat direc­tor (and artist) Julian Schn­abel, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and Balthus. A con­cep­tu­al artist-slash-ser­i­al killer became one of the main char­ac­ters of his over­looked 1995 Eno col­lab­o­ra­tion Out­side. He was both a col­lec­tor and an artist, which we’ve focused on before. And he was think­ing about the new world open­ing up because of the inter­net. Bowie’s artist brain saw the pos­si­bil­i­ties and the dan­gers, and also the raw cap­i­tal­ist poten­tial. He offered shares in him­self as an IPO in 1997 and released a sin­gle as Tao Jones Index, three puns in one. Bowie nev­er pre­dict­ed the idio­cy of the NFT, but he cer­tain­ly would have laughed wry­ly at it.

In this Char­lie Rose inter­view to pro­mote Basquiat, Bowie and Schn­abel dis­cuss the role of Warhol, the role of art, and the real­i­ty of the art world.

“It was more of an imper­son­ation, real­ly,” says Bowie about his Warhol. “That’s how I approach any­thing.” Of note, how­ev­er, is how quick­ly Bowie moves away from dis­cussing him­self or the film to talk about larg­er issues of art and com­merce. Bowie does admit that he and Schn­abel dis­agree on a lot of things, and you can see it in their body lan­guage. But there’s also a huge respect. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view, go watch the whole thing.

Bonus: Below watch Bowie meet­ing Warhol back dur­ing the day…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

96 Draw­ings of David Bowie by the “World’s Best Com­ic Artists”: Michel Gondry, Kate Beat­on & More

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by Taschen

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

What’s the Role of a Director in Constructing Comedy? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #100

What makes for a good com­e­dy film or show? Fun­ny peo­ple read­ing (or impro­vis­ing) fun­ny lines is not enough; an good direc­tor needs to cap­ture (or recre­ate in the edit­ing room) com­ic tim­ing, con­struct shots so that the humor comes through and coach the actors to make sure that the tone of the work is con­sis­tent.

Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Heather Fink to dis­cuss the role of the direc­tor in mak­ing a com­e­dy (or any­thing else) actu­al­ly good. Heather has direct­ed for TV, film, and com­mer­cials and spent a lot of time doing sound (a boom oper­a­tor or sound util­i­ty) for pro­duc­tions like Sat­ur­day Night Live, Get Out, The Morn­ing Show, and Mar­vel’s Dare­dev­il.

We talk about main­tain­ing com­e­dy through the tedious process of film­ing, putting actors through sex scenes and oth­er hard­ships, not telling them how to say their lines, come­di­ans in dra­mas, direct­ing improv/prank shows, and more. We touch on include Bad Trip, Bar­ry, and Ted Las­so, and more.

Watch some of Heather’s work:

  • Alleged, a short about dra­ma­tiz­ing accu­sa­tions against Steven Segal
  • Inside You, a film she wrote, direct­ed, and (reluc­tant­ly) starred in
  • The Focus Group, a short Heather direct­ed writ­ten by and star­ring Sara Ben­in­casa

We used some arti­cles to bring var­i­ous direc­tors and tech­niques to mind:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

The Aesthetic of Evil: A Video Essay Explores Evil in the Films of Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese & Beyond

Movies have heroes and vil­lains. Or at least chil­dren’s movies do; the more sophis­ti­cat­ed the audi­ence, the hazier the line between good and evil becomes, until it final­ly seems to van­ish alto­geth­er. Not that cin­e­ma direct­ed toward gen­uine­ly mature audi­ences dis­pens­es with those con­cepts entire­ly: rather, it makes art out of the ambi­gu­i­ty and inter­pen­e­tra­tion between them. This is true, to an extent, even in some of the recent wave of big-bud­get super­hero movies, in the main exer­cis­es in rolling an “adult” tex­ture onto sto­ries essen­tial­ly geared toward ado­les­cents. Hence the appear­ance of the Jok­er, Bat­man’s grin­ning arch-neme­sis, in “The Aes­thet­ic of Evil,” the Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy video essay above.

In the Jok­er of Christo­pher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, “we see an evil that’s relent­less, pri­mar­i­ly because the core func­tion is com­plete and total anar­chy. What­ev­er order is estab­lished, who­ev­er it’s under ‚must be destroyed. As a result, an epoch is cre­at­ed where any rules or codes of con­duct are bro­ken. Any­thing that you antic­i­pate will hap­pen, will result in the oppo­site.”

This Jok­er made an out­sized cul­tur­al impact with not just the explic­it­ness of his dis­or­der-ori­ent­ed moral­i­ty, but also a mate­r­i­al-tran­scend­ing per­for­mance by Heath Ledger. In that same era, Jamie Hec­tor took a com­par­a­tive­ly min­i­mal­ist but equal­ly mem­o­rable turn in David Simon’s series The Wire as Mar­lo Stan­field, a drug king­pin “too vil­lain­ous for the vil­lains.” Like the Jok­er, Mar­lo is a law unto him­self, “will­ing to destroy the equi­lib­ri­um of any facet of the world there is, on a whim.”

These two rep­re­sent just one of the forms evil has tak­en in recent decades. The essay’s oth­er exam­ples range from Psy­cho’s Nor­man Bates and 2001’s HAL 9000 to The King of Com­e­dy’s Rupert Pup­kin and Fan­ny and Alexan­der’s step­fa­ther Edvard — or rather, the unwel­come trans­for­ma­tion of the fam­i­ly Edvard rep­re­sents. The most dia­bol­i­cal evil does not con­fine itself with­in the per­son of the antag­o­nist, espe­cial­ly not in the work of Michael Haneke, which twice appears in “The Aes­thet­ic of Evil.” Ben­ny’s Video is on one lev­el about a mur­der­ous ado­les­cent; on anoth­er, it’s about the “eva­sion of the real” that seduces us all. The White Rib­bon is on one lev­el about ran­dom acts of vio­lence in a small vil­lage; on anoth­er, it’s about how evil reflects “the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of a soci­ety.” Haneke’s films have often been described as dif­fi­cult to watch, and that may well have less to do with what they show than what they know: even if we aren’t all vil­lains, we’re cer­tain­ly not heroes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles on the Art of Act­ing: ‘There is a Vil­lain in Each of Us’

Rare Video: Georges Bataille Talks About Lit­er­a­ture & Evil in His Only TV Inter­view (1958)

“The only thing nec­es­sary for the tri­umph of evil is for good men to do noth­ing,” a Quote False­ly Attrib­uted to Edmund Burke

Why Do Tech Bil­lion­aires Make for Good TV Vil­lains? Pret­ty Much Pop #93 Con­sid­ers “Made for Love,” et al.

The Aes­thet­ic of Ani­me: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tra­di­tion of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Explore Divine Comedy Digital, a New Digital Database That Collects Seven Centuries of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy

The num­ber of art­works inspired by Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy in the sev­en hun­dred years since the poet com­plet­ed his epic, ver­nac­u­lar mas­ter­work is so vast that refer­ring to the poem inevitably means refer­ring to its illus­tra­tions. These began appear­ing decades after the poet­’s death, and they have not stopped appear­ing since. Indeed, it might be fair to say that the title Divine Com­e­dy (sim­ply called Com­e­dy before 1555) names not only an epic poem but also its many con­stel­la­tions of art­works and inter­pre­ta­tions, which would have filled a mod­est-sized set of Dante ency­clo­pe­dias before the inter­net.

Luck­i­ly for art his­to­ri­ans and Dante schol­ars work­ing today, there is now Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal, a beau­ti­ful­ly designed data­base which brings these art­works — spread out all over the world — togeth­er in one vir­tu­al place.

The inter­face requires no spe­cial Dante knowl­edge to nav­i­gate, though it helps to be famil­iar with the poem and/or have a ref­er­ence copy near­by when look­ing through the menus. Divid­ing neat­ly into the poem’s three books (or can­tiche), the menu at the left fur­ther breaks down into cir­cles (Infer­no), ter­races (Pur­ga­to­rio), and Can­tos (all three books).

Tog­gling between options in a menu on the right allows vis­i­tors to see the num­ber of illus­trat­ed vers­es in each Can­to or the num­ber of art­works. With­in a mat­ter of min­utes, you’ll be dis­cov­er­ing Dante illus­tra­tions you nev­er knew exist­ed, from Sal­vador Dali’s The Delight­ful Mount (1950, above) to Alessan­dro Vel­lutel­lo’s Dante and St. Bernard, Mary and the Trin­i­ty (1544) and hun­dreds of oth­ers in the years in-between.

Call­ing itself a “slow surf­ing site,” Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal con­tains a handy tuto­r­i­al if you do get lost and allows users “not only to nav­i­gate through the col­lec­tion, but also to sug­gest miss­ing art­works.” So far, the 17th and 18th cen­turies are huge­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed, though not for a lack of Dante-inspired art­work made in that two-hun­dred year peri­od. The gaps mean there is much more Dante art to come.

Released in June of this year, the project is the work of The Visu­al Agency, “an infor­ma­tion design agency spe­cial­ized in data-visu­al­iza­tion based in Milan and Dubai” and was cre­at­ed to cel­e­brate the 700th anniver­sary of Dante’s death. As he con­tin­ues to inspire artists for the next few hun­dred years, per­haps the work based on his epic poem will trend more dig­i­tal than medieval, cre­at­ing inter­pre­ta­tions the poet nev­er could have dreamt. Enter the Divine Com­e­dy Dig­i­tal project here.

You can also see some of the ear­li­est illus­trat­ed edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568), cour­tesy of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Rarely-Seen Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Are Now Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Uffizi Gallery

Mœbius Illus­trates Dante’s Par­adiso

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Ear­li­est Illus­trat­ed Edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Artist

Fri­da Kahlo has been a mar­tyr to art his­to­ry. Her twinned self-por­trait The Two Fridas sits at num­ber 87 on a list of the 100 most pop­u­lar paint­ings (behind Diego Rivera’s The Flower Car­ri­er and Cas­sius Coolidge’s Dogs Play­ing Pok­er series). She is “one of the most icon­ic and con­tra­dic­to­ry cul­tur­al fig­ures around,” Judy Cox writes: “a card-car­ry­ing Com­mu­nist whose image adorned a bracelet worn by There­sa May, a fem­i­nist who has her own bar­bie doll.”

Her cul­tur­al cre­den­tials sell. Her work is acclaimed as a lead­ing exam­ple of indi­genis­mo, as Den­ver art muse­um senior cura­to­r­i­al assis­tant Jesse Laird Orte­ga writes, “a polit­i­cal, intel­lec­tu­al, and artis­tic move­ment that cel­e­brat­ed indige­nous peo­ples in Mex­i­co.” Kahlo her­self is laud­ed as “a pas­sion­ate nation­al­ist who advo­cat­ed for the rev­o­lu­tion… and sup­port­ed farm­ers and work­ers.”

This praise sounds sus­pi­cious to oth­er crit­ics. “Miss­ing from the pub­lic dis­course about the artist are dis­cus­sions about how the ‘nation­al­ism’ that Kahlo pro­mot­ed,” Joan­na Gar­cia Cher­an argues, “both in her art and per­son­al style per­pet­u­at­ed the con­struc­tion of a mythol­o­gized Indi­an­ness at the expense of Indige­nous peo­ple.” Kahlo only began wear­ing the rebo­zos and oth­er indige­nous fash­ions she made famous when she mar­ried Diego Rivera (for the first time) in 1929.

Does Paul Priest­ly, the host of the Art His­to­ry School video les­son above, help smooth out the con­tra­dic­tions of Kahlo’s life and art? No, but to be fair, he makes no pre­tense to high­er crit­i­cism. The les­son is a basic intro­duc­tion (with a con­tent warn­ing for younger view­ers) to the well-known facts of Frida’s life, those amply cov­ered in doc­u­men­taries like Ken Madel’s Fri­da Kahlo: A Rib­bon Around a Bomb and (with plen­ty of dra­mat­ic license, of course) the Salma Hayek-star­ring biopic Fri­da.

Priest­ley’s video is a sound intro­duc­tion to Kahlo’s life, how­ev­er, pre­cise­ly because it shies away from hagiog­ra­phy or the­o­ry. He walks us through the facts of the artist’s life in brief, with clips of a woman read­ing Frida’s own words and images of her work along­side pho­to­graph­ic por­traits of her­self at every stage of life, allow­ing view­ers to see the side-by-side devel­op­ment of Kahlo’s art and her pub­lic per­sona.

In the midst of Kahlo wor­ship and icon­o­clasm, what seems too often neglect­ed is Kahlo’s com­plex human­i­ty. She was not one thing or anoth­er — nei­ther whol­ly Marx­ist saint, nor a bour­geois appro­pri­a­tor; nei­ther whol­ly fem­i­nist hero, nor trag­ic vic­tim of patri­ar­chal male hero wor­ship: she was both and nei­ther, at many times, a fig­ure twinned in her imag­i­na­tion and split in half by cul­tur­al log­ics that want to claim and pos­sess art and artists for their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Fri­da Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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