People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

in Biology, History | January 17th, 2022

The importance of a good night’s sleep has been featured now and again here on Open Culture. But were a medieval European to visit our time, he’d probably ask — among other questions — if we didn’t mean a good night’s sleeps, plural. The evidence suggests that the people of the Middle Ages slept not straight through the night but in two distinct stretches. This practice has come back to light in recent years thanks to the research of historian Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. “Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time,” he writes in that book, “with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest.”

But “not everyone, of course, slept according to the same timetable. The later at night that persons went to bed, the later they stirred after their initial sleep; or, if they retired past midnight, they might not awaken at all until dawn. Thus, in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales, Canacee slept ‘soon after evening fell’ and subsequently awakened in the early morning following ‘her first sleep’; in turn, her companions, staying up much later, ‘lay asleep till it was fully prime’ (daylight).” Proof widespread “biphasic sleep” exists not just in Chaucer, but — for those who know where to look — all over the surviving documents from medieval Europe.

“In France, the initial sleep was the premier somme,” writes BBC.com’s Zaria Gorvett. “In Italy, it was primo sonno. In fact, Eckirch found evidence of the habit in locations as distant as Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America and the Middle East”; the earliest reference he turned up comes from Homer’s Odyssey. Whatever their era of history, biphasic sleepers seem to have made good use of their intervals of wakefulness, known in English as “the watch.” During it, peasants worked, Christians prayed, and thieves thieved, “but most of all, the watch was useful for socializing – and for sex.” After a long day’s work, “the first sleep took the edge off their exhaustion and the period afterwards was thought to be an excellent time to conceive copious numbers of children.”

Biphasic sleep and its attendant habits didn’t survive the 19th century. The reasons, as Ekirch explains in the interview above, have to do with the Industrial Revolution, that great disruption of traditions followed since time immemorial. Along with “the increasing prevalence of artificial illumination both within homes and outside,” he says, “bedtimes were pushed back, even though people still awakened at the same time in the morning.” Apart from introducing new technologies, the Industrial Revolution “also changed peoples’ attitudes toward work,” making humanity “increasingly time-conscious: productivity, efficiency were the hallmarks of the 19th century.” We continue to set store by them today, though we also handle the disruption of sleep in our own, distinctively 21st-century ways. Would anyone care to explain to our medieval time-traveler the practice of midnight Twitter-scrolling?

via BBC/Medievalists

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Discover Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writing System Made Entirely of Knots

in Design, History, Language, Life, Museums | January 17th, 2022

Khipus, the portable information archives created by the Inca, may stir up memories of 1970s macrame with their long strands of intricately knotted, earth-toned fibers, but their function more closely resembled that of a densely plotted computerized spreadsheet.

As Cecilia Pardo-Grau, lead curator of the British Museum’s current exhibition Peru: a journey in time explains in the above Curators Corner episode, khipus were used to keep track of everything from inventories and census to historical narratives, using a system that assigned meaning to the type and position of knot, spaces between knots, cord length, fiber color, etc.

Much of the information preserved within khipus has yet to be deciphered by modern scholars, though the Open Khipu Repository — computational anthropologist Jon Clindaniel’s open-source database — makes it possible to compare the patterns of hundreds of khipus residing in museum and university collections.

Even in the Incan Empire, few were equipped to make sense of a khipu. This task fell to quipucamayocs, high born administrative officials trained since childhood in the creation and interpretation of these organic spreadsheets.

Fleet messengers known as chaskis transported khipus on foot between administrative centers, creating an information superhighway that predates the Internet by some five centuries. Khipus’ sturdy organic cotton or native camelid fibers were well suited to withstanding both the rigors of time and the road.

A 500-year-old composite khipu that found its way to British Museum organics conservator Nicole Rode prior to the exhibition was intact, but severely tangled, with a brittleness that betrayed its age. Below, she describes falling under the khipu’s spell, during the painstaking process of restoring it to a condition whereby researchers could attempt to glean some of its secrets.

Visit Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino’s website to learn more about khipu in a series of fascinating short articles that accompanied their groundbreaking 2003 exhibit QUIPU: counting with knots in the Inka Empire.

via Aeon.

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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why the U.S. Photographed Its Own World War II Concentration Camps (and Commissioned Photographs by Dorothea Lange)

in History, Photography | January 13th, 2022

During World War II, the United States put thousands and thousands of its own citizens into concentration camps. The wartime internment of Japanese Americans is a well-known historical event, and also an unusually well-documented one — not just in the sense of having been documented copiously, but also with exceptional power and artistry. Much of that owes to the astute photographic observer of early 20th-century America Dorothea Lange, who had already won acclaim for her Great Depression-symbolizing Migrant Mother.

Published in 1936, Migrant Mother was taken under the auspices of the U.S. Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. In 1941, Lange abandoned a Guggenheim Fellowship to throw in with another government organization, the War Relocation Authority, and turn her lens on the interned. “After Japan’s bombing of the U.S. navy base at Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack that left over 2,000 Americans dead, Japanese Americans became targets of violence and increased suspicion,” says the narrator of the Vox Darkroom video above. Fearing the emergence of a “fifth column,” the government arranged the relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been living on the west coast into remote camps.

“The Roosevelt administration wanted to frame the removal as orderly, humane, and above all, necessary.” Hence the creation of the WRA, a department charged with handling the removal, “and more importantly, documenting it, through propaganda films, pamphlets and news photographs.” The project could hardly have made a more prestigious hire than Lange, who proceeded to photograph “the rapid changes happening in Japanese American communities, including Japanese-owned farms and businesses shutting down.” Her work (see various examples here) captured the final days, even hours, of an established multi-generational society about to be dismantled by the mass evacuation.

The Army disapproved of the narrative created by Lange’s candid photos, many of which were seized and impounded. The offending images depicted armed U.S. soldiers overseeing the removal process, “temporary prisons used while the concentration camps were built,” food lines at the assembly centers, and Japanese Americans in U.S. military uniform. Releasing Lange from the program after just four months, the WRA kept most of her photos out of the public eye. They stayed out of it until a series of exhibitions in the 1970s, which revealed the true nature of the concentration camps. That term is most associated with the Holocaust, to whose sheer destruction of humanity the Japanese American internment cannot, of course, be compared. But as Lange’s photographs show, just having the moral high ground over Nazi Germany is nothing to brag about.

478 Dorothea Lange Photographs Poignantly Document the Internment of the Japanese During WWII

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Francis Stewart’s Censored Photographs of a WWII Japanese Internment Camp

How Dorothea Lange Shot Migrant Mother, Perhaps the Most Iconic Photo in American History

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who!

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)

in History, Literature, Politics | January 12th, 2022

Note: Toni Morrison’s speech begins around the 38:30 mark.
The term fascism gets thrown around a great deal these days, not always with high regard to consistency of meaning. Much like Orwellian, it now seems often to function primarily as a label for whichever political developments the speaker doesn’t like. Even back in the 1940s, Orwell himself took to the Tribune in an attempt to pin down what had already become a “much-abused word.” Half a century later, the question of what fascism actually is and how exactly it works was addressed by another novelist, and one of a seemingly quite different sensibility: Toni Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye and Beloved.

Fascism tends to come along with evocation of Nazi Germany. In her 1995 Charter Day address at Howard University, Morrison, too, brought out the specter of Hitler and his “final solution.” But “let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.” She proceeded to lay out a haunting hypothetical series of such steps as follows:

Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.
Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy-especially its males and absolutely its children.
Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
Maintain, at all costs, silence.

Like any good storyteller, Morrison stokes our imagination while turning us toward an examination of our own condition. Over the past quarter-century, many of the tendencies she describes have arguably become more pronounced in political and media environments around the world. A 21st-century reader may be given particular pause by step number nine. Since the 1990s, and especially in Morrison’s homeland of the United States of America, most entertainments have only grown more monumental, and most pleasures have only shrunk.

Later in her speech, Morrison foresees a time ahead “when our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas ‘market-placed,’ our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete.” Few of us here in 2022, whatever our political persuasion, could argue that her predictions were entirely unfounded. Fewer still have a clear answer to the question what to do when we “find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.”

via Kottke

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Century

Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of Fascism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Victimhood and More

Hear Toni Morrison (RIP) Present Her Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on the Radical Power of Language (1993)

Why Should You Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved? An Animated Video Makes the Case

George Orwell Tries to Identify Who Is Really a “Fascist” and Define the Meaning of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold Medieval Snowball Fights: A Timeless Way of Having Fun

in Art, History | January 11th, 2022

You can’t get too much winter in the winter

– Robert Frost, “Snow”

Snowy winter then responded with a voice severe:
May the cuckoo not come, let it sleep in dark hollows.
He is accustomed to bring hunger with him.

– Anonymous poem in Medieval Latin, translated by Heather Williams

Winter may starve and freeze, but in each place where snow accumulates, we also find depictions of informal holidays — snow days — and one of their most exuberant pursuits. “Few seasonal activities are as universal — across time, place, or culture — as the snowball fight,” writes Public Domain Review. Some have even made it “into the annals of history.… According to what might be more fable than history, the teenage Napoleon Bonaparte famously organized a ten day snowball fight at his military school, complete with trenches, regimens, and rules of engagement.”

Snowball fights weren’t “confined to children either,” Arendse Lund writes. In the pages of illuminated Medieval manuscripts, “people of all ages, men and women, can be seen hefting an icy ball.” Such images defy a “conventional topos” — “the threat of winter” found in Old English poetry.

In one calendar poem, The Menologium, for example, “winter comes in like an invading warrior,” notes A Clerk of Oxford, “and puts autumn in chains, and the green fields which decorate the earth are permitted to stay with us no longer.… There are many, many examples of winter as danger and sorrow” in Medieval poetry.

The tradition of winter as a martial invader continues in modern verse. In Robert Frost, snow forms “soft bombs.” Even when one is safe and warm at home, snow banked high around the walls outside, winter threatens: the house is “frozen, brittle, all except this room you sit in.” But alongside these literary scenes of unbearable cold, we have the playfulness and sublimity of winter, its ability to elevate the ordinary, break up monotony, put a temporary end to daily drudgery. Winter brings its own form of beauty, and its own fun: the soft bomb of the snow ball.

In one Middle English poem by Nicolas Bacon, titled “Of a Snow balle,” spring has nothing on winter even when it comes to love; the snowball fight becomes a pretext for a romantic encounter:

A wanton wenche vppon a colde daye
With Snowe balles prouoked me to playe:
But theis snowe balles soe hette my desyer
That I maye calle them balles of wylde fyer.

In the delightful images here, culled from a number of illuminated manuscripts (and one fresco, at the top), see Medieval Europeans play, flirt, and scoff at winter’s warning in lighthearted snowball fights of yore.

via Public Domain Review

Medieval Scribes Discouraged Theft of Manuscripts by Adding Curses Threatening Death & Damnation to Their Pages

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

An Introduction to the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism & the Sublime

in Art, History, Philosophy | January 11th, 2022

When Denis Villeneuve was announced as the director of the latest cinematic adaptation of Dune, few could have objected on aesthetic grounds. The blasted sand planet of Arrakis, with its storms and worms, demands a sense of the sublime; to a unique degree among filmmakers working today, the auteur behind Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 seemed to possess it. Though long since vulgarized to mean little more than “highly enjoyable,” sublime has historically denoted a richer, more complex set of qualities. The sublime can be beautiful, but it must also be in some way fearsome, possessed of “a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.”

That quote comes straight from the Wikipedia page on “Sublime (philosophy),” which also prominently features Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, or Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Completed around 1818, it has become a familiar image even to those who know nothing of Friedrich’s work — work to which they can receive an introduction from the new video above by Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter.

Friedrich, he explains, was “associated with German Romanticism, a rising intellectual and artistic movement” of the late 18th and early 19th centuries “that sought to reconnect humanity with feeling and spirituality” after the Enlightenment so destabilized humanity’s Weltanschauung.

Friedrich’s landscapes, realistically painted if not necessarily faithful to real places, “represent the pinnacle of this movement.” They do this by conveying “the feeling he has in the presence of the landscape, the staggering encounter with the divinity he sees in it. This is the essence of the sublime,” which took on special urgency in an era “when secularism was threatening the core of Christianity.” More than religion, the Romantics thus began to regard nature as awesome (in the original sense), humbling themselves before the greatness of landscapes real and imagined. The wanderer looming above the sea of fog is actually an exception in Friedrich’s work, most of whose human figures are small enough to emphasize “the vastness of the terrain” — a sublime-evoking technique that we can still feel working two centuries later, Puschak points out, in Villeneuve’s Dune.

You can pre-order Nerdwriter’s upcoming book Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions here.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

in Animation, Art, Education, History | January 7th, 2022

Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished, five century-old portrait of a Florentine silk merchant’s wife, Lisa del Giocondo (née Gherardini), is, quite possibly, the most famous painting in the world.

And its subject possesses the world’s most captivating smile, inspiring rhapsodies and parodies in seeming equal measure. (Its Italian title, La Gioconda, is a nod to the sitter’s married name, and depending on whom you ask, translates as “joyous,” “light hearted,” or “merry.”)

The Louvre, where the painting has resided since 1804 (following stints in Fontainebleau, the Grand Palace of Versailles, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s bedroom), reserves a special mailbox for paeans from Mona Lisa fans.

Ask a random person on the street how this comparatively dinky oil on wood came to be so universally celebrated, and they’ll logically conclude it’s got something to do with that smile.

Those with a background in visual art may also cite Renaissance innovations in painting technique — atmospheric perspective and sfumato, both of which Leonardo employed to memorable effect.

Those are good guesses, but the real reason for the Mona Lisa’s enduring global renown?

The public’s love of a good crime story.

As art historian Noah Charney, author of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting, recounts in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, La Giocanda owes her blockbuster reputation to a sticky-fingered Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia.

In 1911, Peruggia, a painter whose day job involved building crates for works in the Louvre’s collection, hid in a cupboard for hours after closing, then escaped via a back door, the unframed canvas tucked beneath his arm.

The police papered the streets of Paris with the Mona Lisa’s likeness on missing flyers, and the press fanned interest in both the crime and the painting. Readers devoured updates that identified poet Guillaume Apollinaire and painter Pablo Picasso as suspects, and steamy theories regarding the nature of the relationship between Leonardo and the lady in the portrait.

As art critic Laura Cumming writes in The Guardian, “Millions of people who might not have seen it, might never even have heard of it, soon became experts on Leonardo’s stolen painting.”

For two years, its whereabouts remained unknown:

(Peruggia) kept her in a cupboard, then under a stove in the kitchen, and finally in (a) false-bottomed trunk. For a while, he rather cockily propped her postcard on the mantelpiece… But fairly soon he seems to have found her hard to look at, impossible to live with; there is evidence of repeated attempts to sell her.

The thief eventually arranged to repatriate the purloined painting to Italy, striking a deal with Florentine art dealer Alfred Geri, who summoned the police as soon as he verified the work’s authenticity.

The Mona Lisa was restored to the Louvre, where eager crowds clamored for a look at a newly minted household name they could all recognize by sight, as “newspapers took the story for a victory lap.”

Find a quiz and customizable lesson plan on the reasons behind the Mona Lisa’s fame here.

Hats off to animator Avi Ofer for his puckish suggestion that Leonardo might have taken some flattering liberties with Lisa del Giocondo’s appearance.

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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Explore the New 717-Gigapixel Scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Most Detailed Photo Ever Taken of a Work of Art

in Art, History, Technology | January 5th, 2022

Filmmaker and serious Rembrandt enthusiast Peter Greenaway once called The Night Watch the most famous painting in the Western world, behind the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But if the resources devoted to its scrutiny are anything to go by, the Dutch masterwork has been gaining on those other three in recent years. Can any work of Leonardo or Michelangelo, for example, boast of having been digitized at a resolution of 717 gigapixels, as the Rijksmuseum has just done with The Night Watch?

In fact, no other work of art in existence has ever been the subject of such a large and detailed photograph. Each of its 717,000,000,000 pixels, says the Rijksmuseum’s site, “is smaller than a human red blood cell.”

This necessitated the use of “a 00-megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS-camera to make 8439 individual photos measuring 5.5cm x 4.1cm. Artificial intelligence was used to stitch these smaller photographs together to form the final large image, with a total file size of 5.6 terabytes.” You may remember artificial intelligence also having played a role in the reconstruction of the painting’s missing sections, previously featured here on Open Culture.

The result far surpasses the digital version of The Night Watch made available by the Rijksmuseum in 2020, itself high-resolution enough to allow viewers to zoom in to see the painting’s every individual brush stroke. (It even outdoes last year’s 10-billion-pixel scan of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the best-known work by Rembrandt’s fellow Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.) Now, writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert, you can see all the way down to “the cracked texture of the paint, brushstrokes, and slight pigment variations that wouldn’t be visible even if you were standing in front of the work itself.”

380 years after Rembrandt painted it, The Night Watch remains almost uniquely striking in its employment of contrasting shadow and light, all in service of a large-scale composition at once lifelike and somehow more vivid than reality. This digitization and the AI-assisted completion are both arts of “Operation Night Watch,” the thoroughgoing restoration project now underway at the Rijksmuseum, which will make all the elements of that composition more immediately visible than they’ve been in generations.

But the question of how, exactly, Rembrandt achieved such powerful effects can be answered only through rigorous examination of each and every detail, an activity open to all on the 717-gigapixel scan at the Rijksmuseum’s site.

via Colossal

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The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

The Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstaking Process On-Site and Online

Late Rembrandts Come to Life: Watch Animations of Paintings Now on Display at the Rijksmuseum

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

Discover Khipu, the Ancient Incan Record & Writing System Made Entirely of Knots

Why the U.S. Photographed Its Own World War II Concentration Camps (and Commissioned Photographs by Dorothea Lange)

Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)

Behold Medieval Snowball Fights: A Timeless Way of Having Fun

An Introduction to the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism & the Sublime

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

Explore the New 717-Gigapixel Scan of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the Most Detailed Photo Ever Taken of a Work of Art

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