St Paul’s Cathedral at night ✎

 

I took this photo earlier this week around midnight.

Designed by Christopher Wren, and modelled on St Peter’s in Rome.

The Hunt in the Forest by Paolo Uccello (1470) ✎

Famous masterpiece by Paolo Uccello. I saw this at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Uccello was one of the early pioneers of linear perspective in art, and he used this painting to show off. All lines converge at a single vanishing point deep in the pitch-black center of the forest.

The posture is hysterical, did he spot a spider in the trees above him?

Linear geometry over human anatomy.

At the Ashmolean.

“Caravaggio living paintings by Ludovica Rambelli Theater” ✎

Just saw this YouTube video. 

A theatre showing of Caravaggio’s “living paintings” 😁

A statute to the homosexual and the homoerotic ✎

My favourite statute at the British Museum.

This is a statue of Ganymede (Roman copy of Greek original).

Ganymede was a Greco-Romano coda or symbol of same-sex attraction in classical mythology and art. (Technically, not "homosexuality" as we understand it today.)

But, I like to us gays represented, and looking gorgeous. 😎

A Visual Encyclopedia of Antiquity ✎

I came across this beautiful encyclopedia by Bernard de Montfaucon at the BM.

It was lent to the British Museum by the House of Commons Library.

It’s quite famous scholarly work: L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures.

Written in French, and surprisingly, it can still be read - even by me with my so-so French.

What is remarkable is that Montfaucon, a Benedictine monk, meticulously gathered thousands of images of classical antiquities from private collections all across Europe, and categorised them systematically. Many of these artifacts he documented have since been lost or destroyed, so we owe him a debt of gratitude. 

Montfaucon’s engravings on the right refer to statutes he found on the mystery cult of Sabazios of the Roman Empire.

The bronze hands were probably left standing upright on an altar in a temple as a permanent votive asking the god Sabazios for protection or thanking him for a blessing.