The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.
Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.
When old Green, the frame-maker, had finished the frame for Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Hunt went to see it and told him it was quite satisfactory. ‘Ah,’ said Green, ‘but you’ll see the picture will set it off amazingly.’
— Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life, 1914
Franz Liszt’s 1851 étude “La Campanella” is one of the most technically demanding pieces ever written for piano.
In bar 102, below, the left hand has to jump 35 half-steps, nearly three octaves, in the space of a sixteenth note.
That’s about 46 centimeters.
Rinaldo Carnielo’s sculpture Tenax Vitae stands in the Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo in Florence.
After meeting the sculptor in 1893, Helen Zimmern observed that “for him, the shadow of death pervades all existence,” but “he cares not one jot whether his statues find purchasers so long as he himself is satisfied with the results.”
This just caught my eye: In his manuscripts and notebooks, Alexander Pushkin often sketched the characters he was describing, as well as friends, family, romantic partners, and other literary figures. One biographer calls the drawings Pushkin’s graphic diary. This page is from his 1822 poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus.
Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger to mark the system’s 150th anniversary. Each of the 270 black and white designs is unique to its location, and all of them are posted in publicly accessible locations, so visitors can examine them directly, tracing the path with a finger. They’re numbered according to the route taken by the contestants in a 2009 Guinness World Records challenge to visit all stations in the system in the fastest time.
A list of all 270 labyrinths is here.
Graffito, Paris, 2013.
Below: In 2008, while anti-graffiti vigilante Fred Radtke was overpainting New Orleans street art with featureless gray, Banksy visited the city to leave an image of his own.
When E flat made its entrée into the drawing-room, C and G considered it a third person.
‘It’s a dominant,’ thought A flat, while E natural cried out, ‘I recognize it: it’s my leading tone.’
… But the same holds here as in music where the chord of G sharp has not the same meaning, depending on whether you reach it by way of the sharps or of the flats, and does not sound the same as that of A flat to the sensitive ear, though composed of the same notes.
— André Gide, journal, January 14, 1912
A reversible print by John Kay, 1789.
nimiety
n. superfluity
brachylogy
n. a condensed expression
scrimption
n. a very small amount or degree
perficient
adj. that accomplishes something; effectual
Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic without using his hands, 1984:
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