Albrecht Dürer's House

I did not know, until an acquaintance posted pictures on Facebook, that Albrecht Dürer's house in Nuremberg still survives. That's it above.

The house was built around 1420; Dürer purchased it in 1509. Since 1871, it has been a museum dedicated to Dürer's life and work.

It has, of course, been restored over the years, and it took substantial damage in WW II bombing that took five years to repair. But a remarkable amount of the fabric dates to Dürer's time. This is a recreated painter's workshop of the time.

And since we're on the subject, we might as well look at a few of the master's works. Self-portrait at the age of 13.

The famous self-portrait at the age of 28, 1500

Young Hare, 1502. Dürer's renderings of plants and animals achieved an unsurpassed perfection.

Emperor Maximilian I, 1519 detail.

And some woodcuts. Knight with Death and the Devil.

A personal favorite of mine, Melancholia.

Some people pass through the world leaving a mark only on those who knew and loved or hated them, while others send waves across the globe.

AI Generalization and Human Society

Fascinating piece from Scott Siskind:

In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on “emergent misalignment”. They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of vulnerabilities and backdoors. To their surprise, the AI became immoral in general. Its advice to a bored user was to try taking random expired medications and see what happened. Its money-making tips all involved theft and violence. When asked for its favorite historic figure, it chose Hitler.

Some co-authors followed up with additional weird discoveries. If you trained an AI to give the 19th-century names for birds (eg identify the American Pipit by its 19th-century name “Brown Titlark”), then the AI would behave like a 19th-century person in general (for example, assert that a woman’s proper place is in the home).

Siskind goes on the discuss AI alignment problems, and as I said the whole piece is fascinating.

But my thoughts go in a different direction: why do human preferences tend to form clusters that we identify as personality types, or political factions?

I would be willing to bet that all of the following are more common among ardent followers of Donald Trump than in the general population: American football fandom, driving large trucks or SUVs, watching "Yellowstone", interest in cryptocurrency, wanting to bomb Iran, not wanting to aid Ukraine, suspicion that the news fake and what really matters happens secretly among dubious people, cooking steaks on a backyard grill. Meanwhile followers of AOC are more likely to blame "capitalism" for their problems, listen to Chappell Roan, follow women's soccer, worry about monarch butterflies, support Hamas, use alternative pronouns, and do yoga.

You can, if you try hard enough, come up with semi-rational reasons for all of that, but I wave such rationalizations aside with the observations that while some of it makes sense, much of it does not.

I think a lot can be explained by that experiment with AI and old fashioned bird names: some things come to be associated in the culture by processes that are at least partly random, and once they are felt to go together, people of a certain sort will embrace the ones their friends share.

Jacques de l'Ange (Maybe)

Ecco Homo

Jacques de l'Ange is an extremely obscure Dutch painter of the 17th century. There were some paintings in European museums signed JAD, but before 1994 nobody knew what that stood for and the painter was known as "the Monogrammist JAD."

Allegory of Lust

Then in 1994 by the scholar Bernhard Schnackenburg linked those paintings to several others that seemed to be by the same hand, including one attributed to Jacques de l'Ange. Thus a new artist was born.

Martyrdom of Saints Dymphna and Gerebernus, and Detail

Wikipedia tells us:

Very little is known about the life of Jacques de l'Ange. It is not clear whether he can be identified with the genre and history painter Jacques (Jacob) de Langhe who was recorded in Antwerp in 1632–1633 and was a pupil of Jan Cossiers. It remains unclear whether he Ange could be the "J. de Langhe," who was active as a portraitist in 's-Hertogenbosch from 1644 to 1693.

So, yeah.

A Geographer

Whoever painted these, they are in the style known as Caravaggesque, because they copy the dramatic lighting and extreme facial features of Caravaggio.

I am of course skeptical of all these reconstructions based on style, but think some of these are terrific paintings, especially this one, Chained Promtheus.

Bats at Mentmore Towers

It struck me as I was working on this post that the Rothschilds, the great bankers of nineteenth-century Europe and once the focus of a thousand conpiracy theories, have faded from the public consciousness. They got rich by helping the nations of Europe to set up bond markets on the model of the Bank of England, and their own fortune grew so great that they could bail out or sink national treasuries. They were also big in the growing oil business, especially in Baku (Azerbaijan), and got involved in many other businesses. Some branches of the family are still very wealthy, but I guess they have been eclipsed by new waves of wealthy predators: arms magnates, Arab sheiks, Russian oligarchs.

Although the Rothschilds made their money in Europe and Baku, several prominent family members chose to reside in England. I suppose they knew better than anyone about the shaky finances of many nations on the continent, and the political instability that was likely to spawn. Anyway one part of England, the Vale of Aylesbury, ended up with a whole series of Rothschild mansions, inclulding the famous Waddesdon Manor.

Waddesdon Manor is a National Trust property with an adequate trust for maintenance, so it is in no danger. But right down the road is another Rothschild estate, Mentmore or Mentmore Towers, and it is in trouble. A recent survey of the property found evidence that bats are nesting in the attic, which raised concerns both about the preservation of the structure and the situation of the bats, a protected species. Now the Buckinghamshire Council is saying that if the current owners can't clean up the mess it will have to be sold. (NY Times)

Mentmore was built in 1852-1854 for Baron Mayer de Rothschild. It was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton (architect of the Crystal Palace) and his son-in-law, George Henry Stokes, in a mishmash of historical styles known as Jacobethan. Love the huge triple chandelier in the Great Hall.

One of the Staterooms

The estate shrank over the years, including a major sale in 1944, but the mansion and its grounds remained in the ownership of Harry Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery, until his death in 1974. According to wikipedia:

The Earl's executors explored the possibility of Mentmore Towers along with its contents being preserved intact as a heritage property and opened to the public, as has been the case with some other National Trust properties (including Waddesdon). Despite prolonged discussions between the Executors and Government representatives over the following three years, no agreement to save the house for the nation was reached.

Unable to made a deal with the National Trust and hit by British inheritance taxes nearing $7 million, the family sold the house and got Sotheby's to hold a flash auction of its furnishings. Over nine days in 1977, nearly 3,000 items of Baroque art, gilded furniture and other treasures were sold, fetching more than $10 million.

The following year the empty mansion with its formal gardens and 80 acres were sold to the Maharishi Foundation, an Indian-owned entity that promoted Transcendal Meditation, which strikes me as a perfect image to sum up the decline of Old Britain. But the foundation couldn't afford the upkeep and the house continued to decline.

So in 1999 the house was sold to real estate investor Simon Halabi, of Syrian extraction, who planned to add a new wing and make the place a hotel and conference facility. Halabi was a shady character who was rated by a British magazine one of the ten richest men in the country not long before he went bankrupt. So far as I can tell, the house still belongs to some entity related to Halabi, but the County Council rates it as "abandoned and uninhabited." 

Mentmore has a long history in movies, including serving as Wayne Manor in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film “Batman Begins”.

I hope the house can be saved, but it not it will make a splendid ruin.

Moscow Refinery, Again

The Moscow oil refinery today, after a massive Ukrainian attack with several different families of drones and cruise missiles. Part of the point has to be for residents of the Moscow urban agglomeration to see that this is happening.

Update, 22 September: Reuters reports that both main crude processing stacks were hit, and the whole facility is offline.

Sebastiano del Piombo

Sebastiano del Piombo ( c. 1485 – 1547) was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance and early Mannerist periods. He was born and trained in Venice but ended up doing much famous work in Rome. I was drawn to him by this painting, "Head of a Woman," dated to the early 1530s.

If you have seen anything by him it was probably this, not because it is such a great painting but because the subject is thought to be Cristopher Columbus.

Another somewhat famous work is this, painted on the shutters of an organ in a Venetian church; now they reside in a Venetian museum.

Portrait of Andrea Doria

Two portraits of Pope Clement VII, the lower one on slate

Piombo did many frescoes in both Venice and Rome. This is the judgment of Solomon.

This one is in the Vatican.

And one more, Christ's trip through Limbo.

Laran, the Etruscan God of War

This small bronze statue is identified as Laran, the ancient Etruscan god of war. The Romans equated him straight out with Mars, although some noted that Laran could wield lightning.

Same statue. I wonder about calling this Laran. It certainly could be, but there are lots of these bronze statuettes from the late Bronze Age into the Roman Empire across the whole western Mediterranean. 

We know that some images from Tuscany depict Laran, since they helpfully include his name. This mirror is the most famous.

The rest of these, as far as I am concerned, might be Laran, or Mars, or some local hero. 

You often see the ancient Etruscans described as "mysterious," but thanks to Roman writers we know more about them than most peoples of the first millenium BC, and other than their obsession with reading lightning as omens, they seem much like other peoples of their time.

Links 18 September 2026

Carl Gustav Carus, Morning Bells (Old German City in the Morning Light)

What happened to industrial workers as manufacturing work shifted from artisanal handcraft to managing machines? This paper says, not much; what happened was that younger workers stopped going into the old trades and began going into new disciplines. Few workers actually changed jobs.

The World Bonsai Convention, 13-minute video.

Excellent Scott Siskind meditation on Ludd, from ancient Celtic deity to patron of modern Luddites.

The first known battle between naval drones has taken place in the Black Sea.

Roman gold hoard likely buried in 395 AD.

Inscription marking the site of a lightning strike found at Hadrian's villa.

Chinse "micro drama," made for watching on a phone, each episode about two minutes.

Kiaf Seoul, South Korea's biggest art show.

The American obesity rate peaked around 2021 and has been declining ever since.

Discussion of the new evidence on Dark Energy and the expansion of the universe, 15-minute video.

Richard Hanania, "the vibes of the right are genocidal."

Interesting article from Google on AI in science: scientists are using AI a lot, and report significant productivity gains.

Spitalfields Life, In Search of Roman London.

Re-imagining Himalayan Art.

Preserving the art in a Mexican cave that includes many paintings from the colonial period.

Interesting: "I find that hazardous occupations tend to have higher concentrations of conservative workers, even after controlling for several alternative explanations. Further, using longitudinal data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, I find that individuals employed in hazardous occupations tended to become more conservative over time relative to their peers in safer occupations."

A new way to detect scientific fraud: fraudsters often rely on sources hallucinated by LLMs.

Daycare pseudoscience: none of the various claims about how daycare hurts children have stood up to scrutiny.

AI regulation and regulatory capture (Marginal Revolution)

A final burial for cold fusion.

Niko McCarty: "We’ve invented microbes that can eat plastic, detect landmines, and extract rare metals. They’ve been swallowed by a (regulatory) black hole."

The history of women in mining.

The Lucas Museum

The latest big new museum is the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which houses the art collection of George Lucas and his wife, Melody Hobson. It looks like a spaceship, but then, what else was it going to look like? The architect was Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, who has done several large museums in China.

Based on the photographs in this NY Times piece, the building has the same problem as others designed around a cool shape: it looks great from a distance, but up close you're just standing next to molded concrete.

Anyway the point of the museum is to display what Lucas calls "narrative art," that is, visual images that tell stories. That includes comic book art (Jim Lee and Scott Williams, Future State: Justice League, 2001)

Book illustrations (Maurice Sendak)

Cover art from fantasy novels, (Julie Bell, The Huntress, 1996)

Stuff that looks like Norman Rockwell, (John Philip Falter, Lunch Counter, 1946, detail)

And historical work (Howard Pyle, Phoenician Traders, 1904)

Of course the museum holds the Lucasfilm archives, including the original art by Ralph McQuarrie, the chief visual designer of the Star Wars universe.

Persusing the museum web site, I mainly get warm feelings. The last big new art museum in Los Angeles, the Broad Museum, seemed to me a product of its patrons' desire to seem really, really cool. With the Lucas Museum I have the sense that this is all stuff the patrons actually like.

I mean, doesn't this classic N.C. Wyeth illustration capture the artistic vision of George Lucas as well as anything? The museum opens September 22.