What Made Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus a Revolutionary Painting

in Art, History | February 21st, 2022

The Birth of Venus, we often hear, depicts the ideal woman. Yet half a millennium after Sandro Botticelli painted it, how many of us whose tastes run to the female form really see it that way? “I’ve always been struck by how Venus is strangely asexual, and her nudity is clinical,” says gallerist James Payne, creator of the Youtube channel Great Art Explained. “Maybe that’s because she represents sex as a necessary function: sex for procreation, the ultimate goal in a dynastic marriage.” This, safe to say, isn’t the sort of thing that gets most of us going in the 21st century. But this famous painting does something more important than to show us a naked woman: it reveals, as Payne puts it in a new video essay, “a dramatic shift in western art.”

If you accept the definition of the Renaissance that has it start in the 15th century, The Birth of Venus’ completion in the 1480s makes it quite an early Renaissance artwork indeed. In that period, “a renewed interest in ancient Greco-Roman culture led to an intellectual and artistic rebirth, a rise in humanist philosophy, and radical changes in ideas about religion, politics, and science.”

In art, Botticelli bridged “the gap between medieval Gothic art and the emerging humanism.” In the Middle Ages, Christianity’s dominance had been total, but “the Renaissance gave artists like Botticelli freedom to explore new subject matter, albeit within a Christian framework.” At the time, “the idea that art could be for pleasure, and not just to serve God, was new and radical.”

Botticelli’s “inclusion of a near-life-sized female nude was unprecedented in Western art,” and underscored her origin in not Christian scripture but Greek myth. With her “statue-like pose” and alabaster skin, Venus “is unreal, an idealized figure not bound by actual laws,” but her shy self-covering “makes voyeurs of us all.” Botticelli, in his religiousness, could have been “depicting Venus as an emblem of sacred or divine love,” but his genius lay in his ability “to take a pagan story, a nude female, and make them acceptable to contemporary Christian thinking.” Chaste and untouchable though the goddess may look in his rendering, knowledge of the painting’s daring, almost subversive conception makes it more exciting to behold. A bit of context, as Payne well knows, always gives art a charge.

Terry Gilliam Explains His Never-Ending Fascination with Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

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Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More

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.

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How Quentin Tarantino Remixes History: A Brief Study of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

in Film, History | February 18th, 2022

For more than two hours, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood builds up to the Manson murders. Or rather, it seems to be building up to the Manson murders, but then takes a sharp turn on Cielo Drive; when the credits roll, the real-life killers are dead and the real-life victims alive. Such revisionist revenge is of a piece with other recent Tarantino pictures like Inglourious Basterds, which ends with the massacre of Hitler and Goebbels, among other Nazis, and Django Unchained, wherein the titular slave lays waste to the house of the master. Long well known for borrowing from other movies, Tarantino seems to have found just as rich a source of material in history books.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood “creates a new story using existing characters and situations, and many of them just happen to be real.” So says Kirby Ferguson in the video essay above, “Tarantino’s Copying: Then Vs. Now.” The film’s large cast of secondary characters includes such 1960s celebrities as Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee, as well as countless other figures recognizable mainly to the director’s fellow pop-culture obsessives.

Also portrayed is Charles Manson and the ragged young members of the “Manson Family” recruited to do his bidding, as well as are their intended victims of the night of August 8, 1969, most prominently the actress Sharon Tate. It is she, Ferguson argues, who ties together Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’s various threads of fact and fiction.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s washed-up actor Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt’s blacklisted stuntman Cliff Booth, the film’s main characters, are wholly Tarantinian creations. 26 years old and pregnant with the child of her husband Roman Polanski (a version of whom also shows up in one scene), the rising Tate shares a métier with Dalton, and when the Manson family come for her in the film, they end up face-to-face with Booth (much to their misfortune), “but unlike both of them, she is a real person, and what is depicted of her is, broadly speaking, true.” Using these characters real and imagined, Tarantino “takes a dark, frightening, and just crushingly sad reality and gives it a happy ending with brutal retribution.” For all the postmodern borrowing and shuffled storytelling that launched him into Hollywood, the man knows how to give audiences just what they want — and somehow to surprise them even as he does it.

How Quentin Tarantino Steals from Other Movies: A Video Essay

Quentin Tarantino’s Copycat Cinema: How the Postmodern Filmmaker Perfected the Art of the Steal

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood Examined on Pretty Much Pop #12

Quentin Tarantino Releases His First Novel: A Pulpy Novelization of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

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.

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

3,200-Year-Old Egyptian Tablet Records Excuses for Why People Missed Work: “The Scorpion Bit Him,” “Brewing Beer” & More

in History, Museums | February 17th, 2022

Image via The British Museum

We marvel today at what we consider the wonders of ancient Egypt, but at some point, they all had to have been built by people more or less like ourselves. (This presumes, of course, that you’ve ruled out all the myriad theories involving supernatural beings or aliens from outer space.) Safe to say that, whenever in human history work has been done, work has been skipped, especially when that work is performed by large groups. It would’ve taken great numbers indeed to build the pyramids, but even less colossally scaled tombs couldn’t have been built alone. And when a tomb-builder took the day off, he needed an excuse suitable to be written in stone — on at any rate, on stone.

“Ancient Egyptian employers kept track of employee days off in registers written on tablets,” writes Madeleine Muzdakis at My Modern Met. One such artifact “held by the British Museum and dating to 1250 BCE is an incredible window into ancient work-life balance.” Called ostraca, these tablets were made of “flakes of limestone that were used as ‘notepads’ for private letters, laundry lists, records of purchases, and copies of literary works,” according to Egyptologist Jennifer Babcock.

Discovered along with thousands of others in the tomb builder’s village of Deir el-Medina, this particular ostracon, on view at the British Museum’s web site, offers a rich glimpse into the lives of that trade’s practitioners. Over the 280-day period covered by this 3,200-year-old ostracon, common excuses for absence include “brewing beer” and “his wife was bleeding.”

Beer, Muzdakis explains, “was a daily fortifying drink in Egypt and was even associated with gods such as Hathor. As such, brewing beer was a very important activity.” And alarming though that “bleeding” may sound, the reference is to menstruation: “Clearly men were needed on the home front to pick up some slack during this time. While one’s wife menstruating is not an excuse one hears nowadays, certainly the ancients seem to have had a similar work-life juggling act to perform.” Most of us today presumably have it easier than did the average ancient Egyptian laborer, or even artisan. Depending on where you live, maybe you, too, could call in sick to work with the excuse of having been bitten by a scorpion. But how well would it fly if you were to plead the need to feast, to embalm your brother, or to make an offering to a god?

via My Modern Met

Try the Oldest Known Recipe For Toothpaste: From Ancient Egypt, Circa the 4th Century BC

An Ancient Egyptian Homework Assignment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Truly Timeless

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It

The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality (Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

Wonders of Ancient Egypt: A Free Online Course from the University of Pennsylvania

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

in Books, History | February 15th, 2022

Image by via Wikimedia Commons

Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the Socialist Worker, pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.”

Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (an “excellent start on Black history”) to Samuel Yellen’s American Labor Struggles (which “brings to life the great labor conflicts of American history”).

His suggested books cover not just the 20th century but eras like the Civil War, and even, extensively, the time of Christopher Columbus. For those who take their analyses of the past in comically illustrated form, Zinn also highlights Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the United States as “funny and remarkably rich in its content.”

Certain Zinn picks stand out as being of special interest to Open Culture readers. These include Noam Chomsky’s Year 501, in which “the nation’s most distinguished intellectual rebel gives us huge amounts of information about recent American foreign policy”; Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, with its “iconoclastic view of American political leaders, including Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson and the two Roosevelts, suggesting more consensus than difference at the top of the political hierarchy”; and W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, “a direct counter to the traditional racist accounts of Reconstruction, presenting the narrative from the Black point of view.” Zinn also praises The Sixties, “a vivid history, well-written, thoughtful, by one of the activists of that era”: Todd Gitlin, who died earlier this month.

Despite its understandable inclination toward nonfiction, Zinn’s list also has room for several classic American novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. You may remember some of these books from your own high-school and university days, but whatever you got out of them back then, you’ll experience them more richly by revisiting them now, deeper into your own intellectual journey. As Zinn’s own life and work demonstrated, you can always find more angles from which to view the political, social, and cultural history of your county — the farther removed from those you were shown in school, the better.

via Radical Reads

African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle (A Free Course from Stanford)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire”: An Illustrated Video Narrated by Viggo Mortensen

American Literature, From the Beginnings to the Civil War: A Free Online Course from NYU

Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person

Adorn Your Garden with Howard the Zinn Monk

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.

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

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

in Architecture, History, Technology | February 11th, 2022

When we think of a “midcentury modern” home, we think of glass walls. In part, this has to do with the post-World War II decades’ promotion of the southern California-style indoor-outdoor suburban lifestyle. But business and culture are downstream of technology, and, in this specific case, the technology known as insulated glass. Its development solved the problem of glass windows that had dogged architecture since at least the second century: they let in light, but even more so cold and heat. Only in the 1930s did a refrigeration engineer figure out how to make windows with not one but two panes of glass and an insulating layer of air between them. Its trade name: Thermopane.

First manufactured by the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, “Thermopane changed the possibilities for architects,” says Vox’s Phil Edwards in the video above, “How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture.” In it he speaks with architectural historian Thomas Leslie, who says that “by the 1960s, if you’re putting a big window into any residential or office building” in all but the most temperate climates, you were using insulated glass “almost by default.”

Competing glass manufacturers introduced a host of variations on and innovations in not just the technology but the marketing as well: “No home is truly modern without TWINDOW,” declared one brand’s magazine advertisement.

The associated imagery, says Leslie, was “always a sliding glass door looking out onto a very verdant landscape,” which promised “a way of connecting your inside world and your outside world” (as well as “being able to see all of your stuff”). But the new possibility of “walls of glass” made for an even more visible change in commercial architecture, being the sine qua non of the smoothly reflective skyscrapers that rise from every American downtown. Today, of course, we can see 80, 900, 100 floors of sheer glass stacked up in cities all over the world, shimmering declarations of membership among the developed nations. Those sliding glass doors, by the same token, once announced an American family’s arrival into the prosperous middle class — and now, more than half a century later, still look like the height of modernity.

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Tony Hawk & Architectural Historian Iain Borden Tell the Story of How Skateboarding Found a New Use for Cities & Architecture

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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.

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

That Time When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up & Disappeared: Animations Show How It Happened

in History, Science | February 10th, 2022

We hear a great deal today about the potential causes of rising sea levels. At a certain point, natural curiosity brings out the opposite question: what causes sea levels to fall? And for that matter, can a body of water so large simply vanish entirely? Such a thing did happen once, according to the PBS Eons video above. The story begins, from our perspective, with the discovery about a decade ago of a giant rabbit — or rather of the bones of a giant rabbit, one “up to six times heavier than your average cottontail” that “almost certainly couldn’t hop.” This odd, long-gone specimen was dubbed Nuralagus rex: “the rabbit king of Minorca,” the modern-day island it ruled from about five million to three million years ago.

After living for long periods of time on islands without natural predators, certain species take on unusual proportions. “But how did the normal-size ancestor of Nuralagus make it onto a Mediterranean island in the first place?” The answer is that Minorca wasn’t always an island. In fact, “mega-deposits” of salt under the floor of the Mediterranean suggest that, “at one point in history, the Mediterranean Sea must have evaporated.” As often in our investigation of the natural world, one strange big question leads to another even stranger and bigger one. Geologists’ long and complex project of addressing it has led them to posit a forbidding-sounding event called the Messinian Salinity Crisis, or MSC.

MSC-explaining theories include a “global cooling event” six million years ago whose creation of glaciers would have reduced the flow of water into the Mediterranean, and “tectonic events” that could have blocked off what we now know as the Strait of Gibraltar. But the cause now best supported by evidence involves a combination of shifts in the Earth’s crust and changes in its climate — sixteen full cycles of them. “During periods of decreasing sea level, the position and angle of the Earth changed with respect to the Sun, so there were periods of lower solar energy, and others of higher solar energy, which increased evaporation rates in the Mediterranean. At the same time, an actively folding and uplifting tectonic belt caused water input to decrease.”

The MSC seems to have lasted for over 600,000 years. At its driest point, 5.6 million years ago, “external water sources were completely cut off, and most of the water left behind in the Mediterranean basin was evaporating.” For sea creatures, the Mediterranean became uninhabitable, but those that lived on dry land had a bit of a field day. These relatively dry conditions “allowed hippos, elephants, and other megafauna from Africa to walk and swim across the Mediterranean,” constituting a great migration that would have included the ancestor of Nuralagus rex. But when the sea later filled back up — possibly due to a flood, as animated above — the rabbit king of Minorca learned that, even on a geological timescale, you can’t go home again.

A Map Shows What Happens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Colorado River Dries Up, Antarctica Urbanizes, Polynesia Vanishes

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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.

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

The Code of Charles Dickens’ Shorthand Has Been Cracked by Computer Programmers, Solving a 160-Year-Old Mystery

in History, Literature, Writing | February 9th, 2022

We can describe the writing of Charles Dickens in many ways, but never as impenetrable. The most popular novelist of his day, he wrote for the broadest possible audience, serializing his stories in newspapers before putting them between covers. This hardly prevented him from demonstrating a mastery of the English language whose mark remains detectable in our own rhetoric and literary prose more than 150 years after his death. But Dickens wrote both publicly and privately, and in the case of the latter he could write quite privately indeed: in documents for his own eyes only, he made use of a shorthand that he called it “the devil’s handwriting,” and which has long been devilishly impenetrable to scholars.

Dickens “learned a difficult shorthand system called Brachygraphy and wrote about the experience in his semi-autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, calling it a ‘savage stenographic mystery,’ ” says The Dickens Code, a web site dedicated to solving that mystery.

A former court reporter, “Dickens used shorthand throughout his life but while he was using the system, he was also changing it. So the hooks, lines, circles and squiggles on the page are very hard to decipher.” The Dickens Code project thus offered up t0 anyone who could transcribe his shorthand a sum of 300 British pounds — which might not sound like much, but imagine how grand a sum it would have been in Dickens’ day.

Besides, the internet’s cryptography enthusiasts hardly require much of an incentive to get to work on such a long-uncracked code as this. “The winner of the competition, Shane Baggs, a computer technical support specialist from San Jose, Calif., had never read a Dickens novel before,” writes the New York Times’ Jenny Gross. “Mr. Baggs, who spent about six months working on the text, mostly after work, said that he first heard about the competition through a group on Reddit dedicated to cracking codes and finding hidden messages.”

The document being decoded is a copy of a letter from 1859, the year Dickens was serializing A Tale of Two Cities. Writing to Times of London editor John Thaddeus Delane, “Dickens says that a clerk at the newspaper was wrong to reject an advertisement he wanted in the paper, promoting a new literary publication, and asks again for it to run,” report Gross. This seemingly trivial incident inspires the kind of “strong, direct language in the 19th century that showed the writer was angry.” Though 70 percent of this decorously bad-tempered letter has now been deciphered, The Dickens Code still has work to do and continues to enlist help from volunteers to do it, albeit without the prize money that is now presumably in Baggs’ possession. Let’s hope he uses it on the handsomest possible set of Dickens’ collected works.

The Writing System of the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript Explained: British Researcher May Have Finally Cracked the Code

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Charles Dickens (Channeling Jorge Luis Borges) Created a Fake Library, with 37 Witty Invented Book Titles

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

John Locke’s Personal Pancake Recipe: “This Is the Right Way” to Make the Classic Breakfast Treat

in Food & Drink, History, Philosophy | February 4th, 2022

No student of Western political philosophy can ignore John Locke, whose work defined the concepts of governance we now know as liberalism. By the same token, no student of Western cuisine can ignore pancakes, a canonical element of what we now know as breakfast. The oldest pancake recipe we’ve featured here on Open Culture dates to 1585. Ernest Hemingway had his own preferred pancake-making method; so do Simon and Garfunkel, though theirs are of the potato variety.

Locke, as you might imagine, opted for a more traditionally English recipe. Three centuries on, how well his vision of liberalism has held up remains a matter of active debate. As for his pancakes, Marissa Nicosia at Cooking in the Archives put them to the test just last year. “When David Armitage posted this recipe for pancakes in the Bodleian collection on Twitter, I knew that I wanted to try it,” Nicosia writes. Her transcription is as follows:

pancakes
Take sweet cream 3/4 + pint. Flower a
quarter of a pound. Eggs ~~four~~ 7 leave out ~~two~~ 4 of
the whites. Beat the Eggs very well. Then put in
the flower, beat it a quarter of an hower. Then
put in six spoonfulls of the Cream, beat it a litle
Take new sweet butter half a pound. Melt it to oyle, &
take off the skum, power in all the clear by degrees
beating it all the time. Then put in the rest of
your cream. beat it well. Half a grated nutmeg
& litle orangeflower water. Frie it without butter.
This is the right way

“From the start, I was intrigued by the cross-outs and other notes in the recipe. It appears that it was first drafted (or prepared) using significantly fewer eggs.” As meticulous in his cooking as in his philosophy, Locke clearly paid close attention to “the details of separating and whisking eggs as well as adding just the right amount of orange blossom water (‘litle’) and nutmeg (‘Half a grated nutmeg’) — an exceptional, expensive amount.”

Drawing on her significant experience with early modern pancakes, Nicosia describes Locke’s version as “a bit fluffier and fattier than a classic French crêpe,” though with “far less rise than my favorite American breakfast version”; her husband places them “somewhere between a classic English pancake and a Scotch pancake.” Perhaps that somewhat northerly taste and texture stands to reason, in light of the considerable influence Locke’s non-pancake-related work would later have on the Scottish Enlightenment.

The final line of Locke’s recipe, “This is the right way,” may sound a bit stern in context today. But whether you work straight from his original or from the updated version Nicosia provides in her post, you should end up with “pancakes made for a decadent breakfast.” Locke’s inclusion of an extravagant amount of nutmeg and splash of orange-blossom water “elevates this specific pancake recipe to a special treat.” Nicosia includes a picture of her own honey-drizzled Lockean breakfast with the a copy of Two Treatises of Government and a cup of coffee — the latter being an especially ideal accompaniment to pancakes, and one that also comes thoroughly philosopher-endorsed.

via Rare Cooking

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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 ( 2 ) |

What Made Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus a Revolutionary Painting

How Quentin Tarantino Remixes History: A Brief Study of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood

3,200-Year-Old Egyptian Tablet Records Excuses for Why People Missed Work: “The Scorpion Bit Him,” “Brewing Beer” & More

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

How Insulated Glass Changed Architecture: An Introduction to the Technological Breakthrough That Changed How We Live and How Our Buildings Work

That Time When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up & Disappeared: Animations Show How It Happened

The Code of Charles Dickens’ Shorthand Has Been Cracked by Computer Programmers, Solving a 160-Year-Old Mystery

John Locke’s Personal Pancake Recipe: “This Is the Right Way” to Make the Classic Breakfast Treat

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