The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art
With the savage cuts in arts funding, perhaps we’ll return to a system of noblesse oblige familiar to students of The Gilded Age, when artists needed independent wealth or patronage, and wealthy industrialists often decided what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, however, haute cuisine has always relied on the patronage of wealthy donors—or diners. It can be marketed in premade pieces, sold in cookbooks, and made to look easy on TV, but for reasons both cultural and practical, given the nature of food, an exquisitely-prepared dish can only be made accessible to a select few.
Still, we would be mistaken, suggested Futurist poet and theorist F.T. Marinetti (1876–1944), should we neglect to see cooking as an art form akin to all the others in its moral and intellectual influence on us. While hardly the first or the last artist to publish a cookbook, Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook seems at first glance deadly, even aggressively, serious, lacking the whimsy, impractical weirdness, and surrealist art of Salvador Dali’s Les Diners de Gala, for example, or the eclectic wistfulness of the MoMA’s Artist’s Cookbook.
Just as he had sought with his earlier Futurist Manifesto to revolutionize art, Marinetti intended his cookbook to foment a “revolution of cuisine,” as Alex Revelli Sorini and Susanna Cutini point out. You might even call it an act of war when it came to certain staples of Italian eating, like pasta, which he thought responsible for “sluggishness, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity, and neutralism” (anticipating scads of low and no-carb diets to come).
Believing that people “think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink,” Marinetti formulated strict rules not only for the preparation of food, but also the serving and eating of it, going so far as to call for abolishing the knife and fork. A short excerpt from his introduction shows him applying to food the techno-romanticism of his Futurist theory—an ethos taken up by Benito Mussolini, whom Marinetti supported:
The Futurist culinary revolution … has the lofty, noble and universally expedient aim of changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.
In hindsight, the fascist overtones in Marinetti’s language seem glaring. In 1932, when the Futurist Cookbook was published, his Futurism seemed like a much-needed “jolt to all the practical and intellectual activities,” note Sorini and Cutini. “The subject [of cooking] needed a good shake to reawaken its spirit.” And that’s just what it got. The Futurist Cookbook acted as “a preview of Italian-style Nouvelle Cuisine,” with such innovations as “additives and preservatives added to food, or using technological tools in the kitchen to mince, pulverize, and emulsify.”
Yet, for all the high seriousness with which Marinetti seems to treat his subject, “what the media missed” at the time, writes Maria Popova, “was that the cookbook was arguably the greatest artistic prank of the twentieth century.” In an introduction to the 1989 edition, British journalist and historian Lesley Chamberlain called the Futurist Cookbook “a serious joke, revolutionary in the first instance because it overturned with ribald laughter everything ‘food’ and ‘cookbooks’ held sacred.” Marinetti first swept away tradition in favor of creative dining events the Futurists called “aerobanquets,” such as one in Bologna in 1931 with a table shaped like an airplane and dishes called “spicy airport” (Olivier salad) and “rising thunder” (orange risotto). Lambrusco wine was served in gas cans.
It’s performance art worthy of Dali’s bizarre costumed dinner parties, but fueled by a genuine desire to revolutionize food, if not the actual eating of it, by “bringing together elements separated by biases that have no true foundation.” So remarked French chef Jules Maincave, a 1914 convert to Futurism and inspiration for what Marinetti calls “flexible flavorful combinations.” See several such recipes excerpted from the Futurist Cookbook at Brain Pickings, read the full book in Italian here, and, just below, see Marinetti’s rules for the perfect meal, first published in 1930 as the “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine.”
Futurist cuisine and rules for the perfect lunch
1. An original harmony of the table (crystal ware, crockery and glassware, decoration) with the flavors and colors of the dishes.
2. Utter originality in the dishes.
3. The invention of flexible flavorful combinations (edible plastic complex), whose original harmony of form and color feeds the eyes and awakens the imagination before tempting the lips.
4. The abolition of knife and fork in favor of flexible combinations that can deliver prelabial tactile enjoyment.
5. The use of the art of perfumery to enhance taste. Each dish must be preceded by a perfume that will be removed from the table using fans.
6. A limited use of music in the intervals between one dish and the next, so as not to distract the sensitivity of the tongue and the palate and serves to eliminate the flavor enjoyed, restoring a clean slate for tasting.
7. Abolition of oratory and politics at the table.
8. Measured use of poetry and music as unexpected ingredients to awaken the flavors of a given dish with their sensual intensity.
9. Rapid presentation between one dish and the next, before the nostrils and the eyes of the dinner guests, of the few dishes that they will eat, and others that they will not, to facilitate curiosity, surprise, and imagination.
10. The creation of simultaneous and changing morsels that contain ten, twenty flavors to be tasted in a few moments. These morsels will also serve the analog function […] of summarizing an entire area of life, the course of a love affair, or an entire voyage to the Far East.
11. A supply of scientific tools in the kitchen: ozone machines that will impart the scent of ozone to liquids and dishes; lamps to emit ultraviolet rays; electrolyzers to decompose extracted juices etc. in order to use a known product to achieve a new product with new properties; colloidal mills that can be used to pulverize flours, dried fruit and nuts, spices, etc.; distilling devices using ordinary pressure or a vacuum, centrifuge autoclaves, dialysis machines.
The use of this equipment must be scientific, avoiding the error of allowing dishes to cook in steam pressure cookers, which leads to the destruction of active substances (vitamins, etc.) due to the high temperatures. Chemical indicators will check if the sauce is acidic or basic and will serve to correct any errors that may occur: lack of salt, too much vinegar, too much pepper, too sweet.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...AI Figures Out the Rules of a Mysterious 2,000-Year-Old Board Game from Ancient Rome
Image by Walter Crist
As far as enthusiasm for board games goes, no continent has yet outdone Europe. Its advantage could lie in the highly developed culture of low-cost leisure evident in quite a few of its societies; it could also owe to the fact that board games seem to have been played there continuously since antiquity. We’ve long had evidence of examples like the “Roman mill game,” better known today as nine men’s morris, which Ovid appears to mention in his Ars Amatoria of the very early first century. Not that modern knowledge of Roman tabletop gaming is complete. In one puzzling case, the stone board above was unearthed in a former Roman town in the Netherlands, but how a game was played on it remained a mystery — until machine learning came along.
“To examine whether the object may have been used as a game board, we performed use-wear analysis to identify evidence for gameplay and we simulated play using artificial intelligence (AI),” write the team of researchers who recently published a paper on the subject in the journal Antiquity. They used a system called Ludii, engineered to analyze board-game rules.
“This software allows for AI-driven playout simulation, where two AI agents play a game against one another, which can generate quantitative data on gameplay. In this instance, we explored whether the rules of a game would produce the wear pattern seen on the stone.” The idea, in other words, was to let the computer play against itself using different rules until it came upon a game that would continue to abrade away the surface of the board in the same fashion as it already was.
This process narrowed it down to games “in which the goal is to block the opponent from moving, and those in which the goal is to place three pieces in a row.” These have a fairly long documented history, from Scandinavia’s haretavl, to Italy’s gioco dell’orso to Spain’s liebre perseguida, to Greece’s kinégi tou lagoú. You can download what the research suggests is the most plausible rule set for this particular Roman board game here, board design included. One player takes the side of the “hunter,” with four pieces, and the other the side of the “prey,” with two. The former tries to trap the latter’s pieces, moving only along the board’s lines; in the next round, the roles reverse. The hunter who does the job in the fewest moves wins. Why not invite friends over to spend an evening playing like a Roman? For a thoroughly ancient good time, first reconstruct as best you can the ambience of the thermopolium at home.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Inside the Automats Where Coin-Operated Machines Created a Modern, Democratic Dining Experience
“Good evening,” said Alfred Hitchcock to the television viewers of America on March 25, 1959. “Tonight I’m dining at my favorite club. There are many advantages here. As you can see, informality is the rule. There is also the stimulation of intellectual companionship without the deafening quiet that pervades most clubs. Best of all, I like its privacy: only four persons are allowed at a table, and, of course, no one pays any attention to you.” This was an example of the deadpan irony with which the filmmaker introduced each broadcast of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for the “club” of which he spoke was clearly an automat. Today, many readers under about 50 will never have heard the word, but at the time, it referred to a seemingly permanent institution in American life.
Or rather, an institution of urban American life, and above all in two cities, Philadelphia and New York. There, no one could think of automats without thinking of Horn & Hardart, in its heyday the largest restaurant chain in the world. The concept, which co-founder Joseph Horn imported over from Berlin in the early nineteen-tens, was of a restaurant with no waiters: rather, you could choose your dish à la carte from a wall of coin-operated compartments, paying the nickel or two that would allow you to take the food inside.
Salisbury steak, creamed spinach, baked beans, a ham-and-cheese sandwich, macaroni and cheese, chocolate pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie: whatever it was, the behind-the-scenes staff would replace it just as soon as you put the last one on your tray.
Smack of modernity though it once did (and in a way, still does), the term automat is somewhat misleading. We might describe the experience of visiting one as dining inside a giant vending machine, but the actual running of the operation was quite labor-intensive. Most of the work was performed out of the customer’s sight, as far away as in the large central commissaries that prepared many of the dishes to be transported daily to Horn & Hardart’s 88 locations. This sheer scale of operation allowed the chain to offer some of the cheapest meals commercially available, with the result that its automats boomed even — indeed, especially — during the Great Depression. Their economic barrier was low, and of sex and race, nonexistent; those who remember them describe them becoming some of the most democratic institutions in postwar America.
You can hear such memories recalled in the recent documentary The Automat by figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and Mel Brooks, who rhapsodizes about Horn & Hardart’s coffee, dispensed for just a nickel from elaborate dolphin-headed spigots. That degree of detail was standard in the interiors, whose marble, chrome, and glass look palatial by the standards of the fast-food joints that ultimately replaced the automat. That glory was one casualty of postwar suburbanization and hollowing-out of central cities that resulted. What with the American urban renaissance of the past few decades, attempts have been made to revive the automat concept, but perhaps, as Brooks puts it, “the logistics and the economics of today won’t allow anything that simple, naïve, and eloquent and beautiful to flourish again.” Ordering a meal brought straight to your door may be more convenient, but even delivery-app addicts have to admit that it will never have the same romance.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors
The idea of the classical period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an elegantly unified collection of superior aesthetic and philosophical cultural traits has its own history, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neoclassical. The rediscovery of antiquity took some time to reach the pitch it would during the 18th century, when references to Greek and Latin rhetoric, architecture, and sculpture were inescapable. But from the Renaissance onward, the classical achieved the status of cultural dogma.
One tenet of classical idealism is the idea that Roman and Greek statuary embodied an ideal of pure whiteness—a misconception modern sculptors perpetuated for hundreds of years by making busts and statues in polished white marble. But the truth is that both Greek statues and their Roman counterparts—as you’ll learn in the Vox video above—were originally brightly painted in riotous color.
This includes the 1st century A.D. Augustus of Prima Porta, the famous figure of the Emperor standing triumphantly with one hand raised. Rather than left as blank white marble, the statue would have had bronzed skin, brown hair, and a fire-engine red toga. “Ancient Greece and Rome were really colorful,” we learn. So how did everyone come to believe otherwise?
It’s partly an honest mistake. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculptures were buried or left out in the open air for hundreds of years. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, their paint had faded away. As a result, the artists unearthing, and copying ancient art didn’t realize how colorful it was supposed to be.
But white marble couldn’t have become the norm without some willful ignorance. Even though there was a bunch of evidence that ancient sculpture was painted, artists, art historians and the general public chose to disregard it. Western culture seemed to collectively accept that white marble was simply prettier.
White statuary symbolized a classical ideal that “depends highly on the greatest possible decontextualization,” writes James I. Porter, professor of Rhetoric and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Only so can the values it cherishes be isolated: simplicity, tranquility, balanced proportions, restraint, purity of form… all of these are features that underscore the timeless quality of the highest possible expression of art, like a breath held indefinitely.” These ideals became inseparable from the development of racial theory.
Learning to see the past as it was requires us to put aside historically acquired blinders. This can be exceedingly difficult when our ideas about the past come from hundreds of years of inherited tradition, from every period of art history since the time of Michelangelo. But we must acknowledge this tradition as fabricated. Influential art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for example, extolled the value of classical sculpture because, in his opinion, “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is.”
Winckelmann also, Vox notes, “went out of his way to ignore obvious evidence of colored marble, and there was a lot of it.” He dismissed frescoes of colored statuary found in Pompeii and judged one painted sculpture discovered there as “too primitive” to have been made by ancient Romans. “Evidence wasn’t just ignored, some of it may have been destroyed” to enforce an ideal of whiteness. While many statues were denuded by the elements over hundreds of years, the first archaeologists to discover the Augustus of Prima Porta in the 1860s described its color scheme in detail.
Critiques of classical idealism don’t originate in a politically correct present. As Porter shows at length in his article “What Is ‘Classical’ About Classical Antiquity?,” they date back at least to 19th century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who called Winckelmann’s ideas about Roman statues “an empty figment of the imagination.” But these ideas are “for the most part taken for granted rather than questioned,” Porter argues, “or else clung to for fear of losing a powerful cachet that, even in the beleaguered present, continues to translate into cultural prestige, authority, elitist satisfactions, and economic power.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Interests Gradually Wider and More Impersonal”
Image by National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons
Advice on how to grow old frequently comes from such banal or bloodless sources that we can be forgiven for ignoring it. Public health officials who dispense wisdom may have good intentions; pharmaceutical companies who do the same may not. In either case, the messages arrive in a form that can bring on the despair they seek to avert. Elderly people in well-lit photographs stroll down garden paths, ballroom dance, do yoga. Bulleted lists punctuated by dry citations issue gently-worded guidelines for sensible living. Inoffensive blandness as a prescription for living well.
At the other extreme are profiles of exceptional cases—relatively spry individuals who have passed the century mark. Rarely do their stories conform to the model of abstemiousness enjoined upon us by professionals. But we know that growing old with dignity entails so much more than diet and exercise or making it to a hundred-and-two. It entails facing death as squarely as we face life. We need writers with depth, sensitivity, and eloquence to deliver this message. Bertrand Russell does just that in his essay “How to Grow Old,” written when the philosopher was 81 (sixteen years before he eventually passed away, at age 97).
Russell does not flatter his readers’ rationalist conceits by citing the latest science. “As regards health,” he writes, “I have nothing useful to say…. I eat and drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake.” (We are inclined, perhaps, to trust him on these grounds alone.) He opens with a drily humorous paragraph in which he recommends, “choose your ancestors well,” then he issues advice on the order of not dwelling on the past or becoming a burden to your children.
But the true kernel of his short essay, “the proper recipe for remaining young,” he says, came to him from the example of a maternal grandmother, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was growing old.” “If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective,” Russell writes. “you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.”
Such interests, he argues, should be “impersonal,” and it is this quality that loosens our grip. As Maria Popova puts it, “Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger.” The idea is familiar; in Russell’s hands it becomes a meditation on mortality as ever-timely as the so-often-quoted passages from Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” Philosopher and writer John G. Messerly calls Russell’s concluding passage “one of the most beautiful reflections on death I have found in all of world literature.”
The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.
Read Russell’s “How to Grow Old” in full here. And see many more eloquent meditations on aging and death—from Henry Miller, André Gide, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Grace Paley—at The Marginalian.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Download 60,000 Works of Art from the National Gallery, Including Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rembrandt & More
As a young amateur painter and future art school dropout, I frequently found myself haunted by the faces of two artists, that famously odd couple from my favorite art history novelization—and Kirk Douglas role and Iggy Pop song—Lust for Life. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, above and below respectively, the tormented Dutch fanatic and burly French bully—how, I still wonder, could such a pair have ever co-existed, however briefly? How could such beautifully skewed visions of life have existed at all?
Van Gogh and Gauguin’s several self-portraits still inspire wonder. My younger self had the luxury of seeing these particular two up close and in person at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC: Van Gogh’s gaunt and piercing visage, Gauguin’s sneering self-parody.
Now, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, my older self, and yours, can view and download high-resolution photos of both paintings, and over 60,000 more from the museum’s vast holdings, through NGA Images, “a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art.”
There you’ll find works by another obsessive Dutch self-portraitist, Rembrandt van Rijn, such as the lush 1659 painting below. You’ll find paintings from the heroes of the various Renaissances and French Impressionism, from movements modern and colonial, pastoral and urban. The collection is dizzying, and a lover of art could easily lose hours sorting through it, saving “open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each […] available free of charge for download and use.” The purpose of NGA Images is “to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration,” and there’s no doubt that it satisfies all of those goals and then some.
Browse the various collections, including one devoted to self-portraits. Conduct advanced searches, if you have more knowledge of the Gallery’s many treasures. You are the curator! And the lucky beneficiary of the National Gallery’s beneficence. While I can tell you from experience that it’s nothing like standing face to face with these paintings in their in-real-life dimensions, textures, lines, and colors—despite the throngs of disinterested tourists—it’s at least a close second. And for students and educators of the visual arts, NGA Images offers an opportunity like no other to view and share great works of art often hidden away from even the museum’s visitors. Enter the collection here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the Oldest Surviving Animated Feature Film, Is Now in the Public Domain (1926)
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, or The Adventures of Prince Achmed, lays fair claim to being the earliest animated feature film in existence. If we do grant it that title, it beats the next contender by more than a decade. While Prince Achmed came out a century ago, in 1926, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose production was presided over by a certain Walt Disney, didn’t reach theaters until 1937. The latter picture holds great distinction in the history of cinema, of course, not least that of being the first feature made with cel animation: the dominant technique throughout most of the twentieth century, and one whose digital replacement has been lamented by classic animation enthusiasts. But the quivering silhouettes of Prince Achmed show an alternative.
The making of Snow White was, by the standards of the day, a vast undertaking, requiring Disney to marshal artistic and industrial resources at a scale then unknown in animation. Prince Achmed, by contrast, owes its existence mostly to the work of one woman: Lotte Reiniger, who first learned the craft of scherenschnitte silhouette-making as a little girl in Berlin.
Scherenschnitte was inspired by what was thought to be ancient Chinese arts of paper-cutting and puppetry, but when watched today, Prince Achmed or the other animations Reiniger created bring more readily to mind traditional Javanese wayang kulit shadow puppet theater: an aesthetic that, in a sense, suits the source material ideally.
The episodes that constitute Prince Achmed’s narrative are drawn in large part from One Thousand and One Nights, a text whose centuries-long evolution bears the marks of not just many distinct cultures across Asia and the Middle East, but also those of more dramatic transformation through its folktales’ cultural transposition into French, then other European languages. What Reiniger brings to enchanting handmade life isn’t any particular place at any particular time, but rather an elegant, mysterious, quite literally arabesque realm that never really existed. In other words, Prince Achmed takes place in what can only be called the Orient — which, now that the film has fallen into the public domain, we can all visit whenever we like. And if such visits happen to inspire a new generation of Lotte Reinigers in this world of market-researched mega-budget animation, so much the better.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Rome in 1890 Captured in Color Photographs: The Colosseum, Forum, Trevi Fountain & More
For almost two hundred years, English gentlemen could not consider their education complete until they had taken the “Grand Tour” of Europe, usually culminating in Naples, “ragamuffin capital of the Italian south,” writes Ian Thomson at The Spectator. Italy was usually the primary focus, such that Samuel Johnson remarked in 1776, perhaps with some irony, “a man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.” The Romantic poets famously wrote of their European sojourns: Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth… each has his own “Grand Tour” story.
Shelley, who traveled with his wife Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, did not go to Italy, however. And Byron sailed the Mediterranean on his Grand Tour, forced away from most of Europe by the Napoleonic wars. But in 1817, he journeyed to Rome, where he wrote the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! And control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
For the traveling artist and philosopher, “Italy,” Thomson writes, “presented a civilization in ruins,” and we can see in all Romantic writing the tremendous influence visions of Rome and Pompeii had on gentlemen poets like Byron. The Grand Tour, and journeys like it, persisted until the 1840s, when railroads “spelled the end of solitary aristocratic travel.”
But even decades afterward, we can see Rome (and Venice) the way Byron might have seen it—and almost, even, in full color. As we step into the vistas of these postcards from 1890, we are far closer to Byron than we are to the Rome of our day, before Mussolini’s monuments, notorious snarls of Roman traffic, and throngs of tourists.
“These postcards of the ancient landmarks of Rome,” writes Mashable, “were produced… using the Photochrom process, which adds precise gradations of artificial color to black and white photos.” Invented by Swiss printer Orell Gessner Fussli, the process involved creating lithographic stone from the negatives—“Up to 15 different tinted stones could be involved in the production of a single picture, but the result was remarkably lifelike color at a time when true color photography was still in its infancy.”
The Library of Congress hosts forty eight of these images in their online catalog, all downloadable as high quality jpegs or tiffs, and many, like the stunning image of the Colosseum at the top (see the interior here), featuring a pre-Photocrom black and white print as well.
Aside from a rare street scene, with an urban milieu looking very much from the 1890s, the photographs are void of crowds. In the foreground of the Triumphal Arch further up we see a solitary woman with a basket of produce on her head. In the image of San Lorenzo, above, a tiny figure walks away from the camera.
In most of these images—with their dreamlike coloration—we can imagine Rome the way it looked not only in 1890, but also how it might have looked to bored aristocrats in the 17th and 18th centuries—and to passionate Romantic poets in the early 19th, a place of raw natural grandeur and sublime man-made decay. See the Library of Congress online catalog to view and download all forty-eight of these postcards.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...Behold the First Realistic Depiction of the Human Face (Circa 25,000 BCE)
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In 1894, archaeologist Édouard Piette discovered the “Venus of Brassempouy,” otherwise known as the “Lady with the Hood.” Unearthed in southwestern France and dating to around 25,000 BCE, this carving represents the earliest realistic depiction of a human face. The figure’s forehead, nose, and brows are carefully carved in relief, as is the hair, arranged in a neat geometric pattern. But what happened to the mouth? Or the eyes? We’re not sure.
The Venus is carved from mammoth ivory, likely using a stone flint, and stands just 3.65 cm tall. For some, it marks a major development in figurative art. Or, as historian Simon Schama has suggested, this figurine may well be the “dawn of the idea of beauty” in human culture.
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Read More...The Greatest Double Agent Ever: How a Spanish Chicken Farmer Became the Most Important Double Agent in WWII
Juan Pujol García was one of the rare individuals whose participation in World War II made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire and earned him the Iron Cross. He gained that unlikely distinction in perhaps the riskiest of all roles in espionage, that of a double agent. Despite ultimately working for the Allied cause, he created an elaborate fictional persona — complete with an invented spy network operating across Great Britain — who professed loyalty to the Nazi cause. Not only did Pujol get this character plugged into the real German intelligence system, he also got him on its payroll, receiving what came to the equivalent of more than $6 million in today’s U.S. dollars for supplying information — information that ultimately contributed to the Axis’ loss of the war.
The story of how this chicken farmer from Barcelona became the most important double agent of World War II is told in the animated Primal Space video above. Unlike many of the spies history has remembered more clearly, Pujol didn’t begin his espionage career in the employ of any government in particular.
Radicalized, if that be the word, by the experience of having been drafted into the Spanish Civil War, he vowed to dedicate his life to “the good of humanity.” Turned away by the British embassy, to which he’d offered his services because Britain opposed Nazi Germany, he went freelance, re-inventing himself as a Third Reich-loyal Spanish military man seeking an assignment in the U.K. Taken on by Germany, he instead decamped to Lisbon, where he began manufacturing ersatz intelligence reports using newsreel footage and tourist brochures.
However makeshift, Pujol’s craft proved impressive to both Germany and Britain, which launched an international spy hunt for him. He thus accomplished his goal of becoming an official British double agent, in which capacity he arrived at his finest hour: misleading the Germans as to the 1944 “D‑Day” invasion of Normandy in an effort called Operation Fortitude. In Spanish, that would be Fortaleza, which became the title of an RTVE documentary about Pujol’s long-untold story a few years ago. But if any single word reflects Pujol’s contribution to history, that word must be Garbo, the code name assigned him by his first British case officer. After all, what other name — at least in 1942 — could quite so evocatively befit an agent whose skills of crafting and inhabiting invented characters made his handlers regard him as “the best actor in the world”?
Related content:
The CIA’s Former Chief of Disguise Show How Spies Use Costumes in Undercover Operations
The French Designed a Fake Replica of Paris to Fool German Bombers During World War I
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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