Canadian archeologists have found a ship abandoned more than 150 years ago in the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage and which was lost in the search for the doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin, the head of the team said Wednesday. Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada’s head of underwater archaeology, said the HMS Investigator, abandoned in the ice in 1853, was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada’s western Arctic.
— David Dunlap, on an 18th century ship found at the World Trade Center site
The initial interpretations of the art at Lascaux and in other related grottos were couched in suggestions that the paintings and engravings were decorative, or just art for art’s sake. Further analysis at the tail-end of the 20th century suggested that the cave art had deep links to prehistoric rituals promoting fertility and successful hunting. Recent studies have found a systematic sequencing in the renditions of horses, aurochs (an extinct ancestor of domestic cattle), and stags, corresponding to seasonal characteristics of each species representing spring, summer, and autumn respectively. Art historians working for the French Ministry of Culture and Communication have called this process and symbolism a “metaphoric evocation that, in this setting, links biological and cosmic time… with its central theme, the creation of the world.”
Soon after art historians accepted these seasonal and temporal connections within the cave art, archaeoastronomer Michael A. Rappenglück of The Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in Gilching, Germany, began addressing the possible astronomical significance of the cave imagery. He noticed a group of six spots painted above the back of one of the aurochs in a part of the cave known as the Hall of the Bulls. Charcoal freckles surround the creature’s eye, which Rappenglück thought could represent the eye of the Taurus constellation embedded in the Hyades cluster. Astronomical calculations of when the Hyades cluster would have been visible to Northern Hemisphere observers during the season depicted in the image match well with the date range given by carbon-14 dating of the charcoal traces. He added a fresh layer of interpretation to the images with his conclusion that the cyclical appearance and disappearance of the Pleiades provided a celestial clock, used alongside carved-bone lunar calendars by hunters of the Magdalenian period or just before.
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via GOOD
Lapham’s Quarterly is responsible for this fun chart showing how luminaries of literature and art including Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, and, yes, Kevin Bacon, are all associated.
This is incredible. It’s a reproduction of what was once the oldest map known in the world! You can see it at the Boston Museum of Science.
I think this one from a Spanish cave has now eclipsed it, though, in terms of age.
I’m going to try to see this while I’m in Europe in June:
Maps can be works of art, propaganda and indoctrination. Opening on 30 April 2010, “Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art” offers a rare chance to see an unrivalled collection of cartographic masterpieces on paper, wood, vellum, silver, silk and marble, including atlases, maps, globes and tapestries that were intended for display side-by-side with the world’s greatest paintings and sculptures. The exhibition coincides with two BBC Four series about maps broadcast this April. Peter Barber was series consultant for Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps which featured maps held in the British Library.
The Prado Museum opens its new galleries dedicated to Medieval and Renaissance Spanish paintings. This new development plan of reorganization and expansion of collections has been given the name, “The Collection: The other extension”, is yet another important phase of it, the one that completes the presentation of the collections installed on the ground floor of the Villanueva building.
I’d like to try to get to this exhibition:
Nearly a century after its creation, “The Red Book” by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) will be the centerpiece of a new Library of Congress exhibition titled “The Red Book of Carl G. Jung: Its Origins and Influence” on view June 17 through Aug. 18, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, in the Thomas Jefferson building, located at 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The 205-page illustrated manuscript—in the author’s own hand—had been locked in a vault after Jung’s death.
