Art Nouveau Doors

Art Nouveau architects loved fancy doors. This one is at 29 Avenue Rapp in Paris and you see it posted often with the tag "best door in Paris." It was designed by Jules Lavirotte in 1899.

But not all are so over the top. This is 42 rue Belle Vue, Brussels, by Ernest Blerot.

Ornate or comparatively simple, I love the determination to make a door something other than a utilitarian gateway.

 At the time - mostly 1890-1914 - these seemed "modern," part of the age of automobiles, airplanes, and skyscrapers; what happened to these wonderful impulses that left us with a "modern" style that is so cold and barren?

Actually if you are a millionaire you can buy a door something like one of these for your mansion, so they are coming back for that niche. But public architecture remains sterile.

At least we still have these to admire.

Trade with China

Trade with China wiped out many American factory jobs; highly publicized estimates have ranged from 800,000 to 3.4 million. On the other hand Chinese goods are cheaper. According to this paper, since 2001 American consumers have saved $400,000 for every American job lost to Chinese competition.

A Black Kite

These long cool days at the end of spring
begin with a soundless blaze at sunrise
above the distant rim of the valley
all day clouds gather and clear again
as I remember other cold springtimes here
through the coming and going of years
the losses the changes the long love come to at last
with the river down there flowing through it all
under the clear moment that never changed
in all that time not asking for anything
still the wren sings and the oriole remembers
and every evening now a black kite
glides low overhead coming from the upland
alone not climbing the thermals not hunting
not calling nor busy about anything
wings and tail scarcely moving as he
slips out above the open valley
filled with the long gold light before sunset
sailing into it only to be there.

--W.S. Merwin

Links 11 October 2019

Glazed brick wall panel from Nimrud, 858-824 BC.

A trip to Erie, Pennsylvania, a town that voted twice for Obama and then for Trump, at least partly because it had lost thousands of jobs. Erie has a great record of welcoming refugees so it's hard to blame simple racism for this one.

The fight over the public library in Clinton, Arkansas as a microcosm of American politics.

Cormac McCarthy on how to write good scientific papers.

Homer called Achilles' companions "Myrmidons," or "ant men." Here's a theory that the name derives from people who built burial mounds.

Scott Ritter says the new Chinese missiles neutralize the US Pacific Fleet.

"Echo chambers" or "media bubbles" do not explain partisanship. Many hyper-partisan people watch the network news.

Against charging teenage criminals as adults.

A Short Trip to the Blue Ridge

When your main client is the National Park Service, you sometimes get to work in extraordinary places.

Tourist trap on the way, possibly fundamentalist propaganda. Sadly I failed to get a photo of the sign that said FIREARM RAFFEL.

Through little Virginia towns.

Down byways.

Mountains looming up.

And views from up on Skyline Drive.

The Power of Search Engines

For the past few years Google has been waging what they conceive of as a war against misinformation and lies online, and especially in health claims. The result has been to prioritize "official" sites like the CDC and WebMD even when they are not particularly useful. Examine.com, which some in-the-know people say is the best source for information on how substances from trans fat to Vitamin K supplements affect your health, has seen their traffic fall by 90 percent. Google has mostly pushed Wikipedia to the second page, even though it is generally very strong in biological science.

It seems to me that the problems with Google, and the widespread knowledge of those problems among internet power users, ought to create a real opening for competition. Yet whenever I try other sites they do no better. Often they give me exactly the same results, and when they differ they are less useful. It's time for one of those tech geniuses to step up and give us something truly different.

Etruscan Hut Urns

Many people around the world have thought of tombs as houses for the dead. One of the most charming evocations of that idea is these funerary urns from Tuscany. During the Villanovan Culture of 900 to 700 BC, they mostly looks like these huts. The Etruscans burned their dead thoroughly, so these are not very big, mostly less than a foot (30 cm) tall.

Archaeology shows that at least some houses of that period and earlier were oval, like these urns.

I should say that not everyone thinks these represent houses; some think they are temples. But if so they represent a temple design that was ancient even in 800 BC, since by then Etruscan temples were larger, grander stone things.

Most are ceramic but a few are bronze. These were never very common in this period, and most funerary urns just looked like urns. But more than a hundred are known.

A famous specimen excavated at Castel Gandolfo in 1817, now in the Vatican Museum. The decoration has inspired much commentary; does this mean that Etruscan houses were decorated in this way, or was the decoration special to the urns?

Over time the shape of the urns changed. By 500 BC they were generally rectangular, as, apparently, Etruscan houses had become.

And in classical times they looked like these.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Ferrara

Today Ferrara is a modest city of 130,000 people in northern Italy's Po Valley.

During the Renaissance it was a place of much more significance, because it was the seat of the d'Este family. The d'Estes became lords of Ferrara in 1264 and retained that title (among many others) down to 1598. They never held much land but they punched well above their weight in Renaissance politics through a strategy that included numerous illustrious marriages and support for the arts on a grand scale. Plus the luck of producing a sufficiency of sane, fertile offspring for 350 years running.

The main sites on any tour of Ferrara are the many d'Este palaces.  This one, dating to the 15th century, later became the town hall.

The Palazzo dei Diamanti (Palace of Diamonds), yet another 15th-century construction. This now holds a branch of the Italian National Gallery, specializing in works by the many painters who benefited from d'Este patronage.

Famous painting of an unidentified woman by Bartolomeo Veneto, traditionally assumed to be Lucrezia Borgia, who was married for a while to Alfonso I d'Este.

Ercole I d'Este by Dosso Dossi.

The Palazzo Bentivoglio, dating to the late 16th century.

In the center of Ferrara is a rather incongruous fortified castle, the Castello Estense. In 1385, after a run of bad years (plague, floods, war, the usual woes) the people of the town revolted against the high taxes imposed by their rulers. The current d'Este lord, Niccolo III, appeared to the people but failed to calm them. So  following ancient tradition he blamed everything on his chief minister, Tommaso da Tortona. Niccolo allowed Tommaso to confess and receive communion, then handed him over to the mob, which tore him to pieces.

This scare convinced Niccolo that he needed a safe refuge in the city, lest the mob come after him again and no minister be on hand to sacrifice. So he built Castello Estense to be a safe refuge in time of trouble, and perhaps also to loom over the people and instill in them a little fear of authority.

Equestrian statue of Niccolo III.

Construction of the cathedral began in the 1260s, but the original Romanesque structure has been overlaid by so much later work the only the facade gets much attention these days. The interior is all Baroque.

The town is said to be a charming, stylish place, with many restaurants serving wonderful food.

The root of my interest in Ferrara has to do with one of my writing projects. Some of you know that I am writing what I call a Historical Fantasy about the England of Edward II, real events plus magic, and I have imagined a whole series of others in the same vein. One might be set in the years around 1500, with a great deal of alchemy, Neoplatonism, and magical ideas concealed in complex allegorical emblems. It struck me that the court of the d'Estes would be a great place to set some of the action, and so I started reading about them.

So when I send my thoughts wandering they sometimes take me to Ferrara, city of palaces, home of artists, poets, and humanists, one of the best places, they say, for imagining the Renaissance world.

Come

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of travel.

It doesn't matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow

a thousand times

Come, yet again, come, come.

--Rumi

Links 4 October 2019

Roman ring carved from a single sapphire. This used to belong to the Dukes of Marlborough, and back then everyone thought it had been Caligula's although I gather that is no longer the consensus view.

Very interesting: Why is Millennial Humor Weird?

Skepticism about Sun Tzu's Art of War from ancient and modern strategists.

Gay Street in Greenwich Village is celebrated as a bastion of LGBTQ+ culture; does that "erase" its black history?

Should scientific papers come with publicity web sites, hashtags, and Instagram campaigns?

Ben Pentreath in New York, and at his country home in Dorset; two great photo sets in one post.

Feverish right-wing rhetoric about Civil War in the US. Honestly I think some people just enjoy the fantasy.

This week brings us to the 100th anniversary of the Elaine Massacre, in which racial conflict, an attempt to form a black farmers' union, and the Red Scare of 1919 came together, producing a mob of white vigilantes who killed more than 100 black Arkansans.

A poll of Nature readers says most researchers have felt pressured by peer reviewers to cite studies in their papers that seem irrelevant.

Reforestation in China: $100 billion spent, more than 31.8 million hectares of new forest created, an area larger than New Mexico. On the other hand the trees are chosen because they grow fast and will control erosion, not because they are good for wildlife. But I would still say even the wrong trees are better than exhausted, eroded cropland, and the forests should diversify over time.

This to That, a web site that gives advice on how to glue anything to anything else.

Some amazing entries in the 2020 Sony World Photography competition.

How a hospital in Memphis was shamed into wiping out the medical debts of 6.500 poor patients.

Should we censor social media to prevent violence?

Khayamiya

Khayamiya is an Egyptian textile art, once used to make elaborate tents, which is why you buy it in Cairo's Tentmakers' Street.

Now these artisans mostly make quilts and cushions for sale to tourists, and the decline in tourism since the revolution has hit them hard.

The old style was entirely geometric, but these days representation is common, including political scenes like this depiction of the Tahrir Square protests.

With tourism drying up Egyptian merchants are trying to sell these online, but so far that hasn't replaced sales to visitors who want something to remember Egypt by.

The Flaming Pigs of Megara

Greek military writers believed that war elephants were frightened of pigs, and they tell us that various Roman and Greek commanders tried to break up elephant attacks by releasing pigs or wild boars among them. When the Hellenistic ruler Antigonus laid siege to Megara in 266 BC, the Megarans went one better on this:

At the siege of Megara, Antigonus brought his elephants into the attack; but the Megarians daubed some swine with pitch, set fire to it, and let them loose among the elephants. The pigs grunted and shrieked under the torture of the fire, and sprang forwards as hard as they could among the elephants, who broke their ranks in confusion and fright, and ran off in different directions. From this time onwards, Antigonus ordered the Indians, when they trained up their elephants, to bring up swine among them; so that the elephants might thus become accustomed to the sight of them, and to their noise.

–Polyaenus: Stratagems, IV, 6

All accounts of flaming war pigs go back to this one source, so whether this actually happened is as unclear as with catapulting pots full of poisonous snakes. For some thoughts on how ancient Greek and Roman armies actually neutralized elephants, see here.

Kepler's Mother: "The Astronomer and the Witch" by Ulinka Rublack

Astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a fascinating man whose thoughts went in a thousand directions. He developed the first accurate description of planetary motion but he also thought the ratios of the distances from the planets to the sun defined musical harmony. Yeah, he was pretty strange.

He was Imperial Mathematician to one of Europe's strangest rulers, Emperor Rudolf II, who was obsessed with alchemy and astrology and preferred staring for hours at new works of art he had acquired for his collection to governing; his favorite portrait of himself was this one.

And he had a pretty strange mother, too, who in her old age had a feud with some of her neighbors that landed her in jail on charges of witchcraft. I've just finished reading The Astronomer and the Witch by Ulinka Rublack (2015), which describes the 1619 trial Katharina Kepler and the intervention of her famous son, who was able to secure her acquittal. It's a good book mostly because it sticks to the sources and what they actually say about these events and Kepler's part in them. This is important because Kepler is famous enough, and his involvement in a witch trial striking enough, that there exist dozens of popular and fictional accounts of his life (including two operas) that mostly mangle the Keplers' story.

This was a lousy period in German history, with plague, famine, religious strife, and violent conflict that led in 1618 to outbreak of what we call the Thirty Years War. Witchcraft accusations were part of the background horror; across Germany thousands of people were executed for witchcraft between 1600 and 1625, most of them older women. The Duchy of Württemberg where the Keplers lived had a fairly rational court system for the time, generally holding that one or two accusations were not adequate grounds for putting a suspect to torture. Unless, that is, she was a person of "bad reputation." Reputation was central to medieval and early modern law, which distinguished between people of good repute and others in myriad ways. So when some of Katharina's neighbors decided to press charges of witchcraft against her, their main challenge was to prove that she was a person of dubious reputation.

Leonberg, where Katharina lived

To achieve this they presented more than twenty witnesses. Some of them thought she was a witch, and others just admitted to wondering about it.  Like, "She came to my house, and then my calf got sick, but I was never sure if she was responsible or not." The wonderful thing about these intense investigations is that they provide almost our only way to get to know the ordinary people of the past.

Katharina, like many of her neighbors, was very interested in herbal medicine and regularly brewed her own concoctions and passed on prayers and other verbal formulae that were supposed to aid healing. A tailor testified,

When two of his children became seriously ill, Katharina taught his wife words to say during "full moon in the church yard under the open sky." (167)

One witness recounted a story she said she heard from a young woman who had gone to work in Katharina's house for a few days as a seamstress.

"Close to midnight", the girl had said, Katharina had risen from her bed to 'roam about' in the main room of her house. As the seamstress woke, she asked, "Why do you roam about in the chamber instead of lying in bed?" Katharina replied, "Would it not please you to become a witch?" promising the young girl "joy and debauchery beyond measure." On earth, Katharina had declaimed to the girl, there was "neither joy nor spiritedness."

Klebl continued to repeat apparently verbatim how this strange nocturnal exchange continued. The seamstress worried, "If you have a lot of joy and voluptuousness in this world, you will have to pay for it eternally." Katharina had instantly dismissed such pious concerns. "There is no eternal life. When man dies, he dies, like senseless beasts." The seamstress had nonetheless insisted on the message she had heard in Lutheran sermons, catechism classes, and school for so many years. "The pastors preach that the one who believes and has been baptized will live for eternity. Those who do not believe will be damned." Katharina had responded darkly that the only reason for having pastors was that people could safely cross the streets when visiting one another instead of fearing violence. (161-162)

This fascinates me. If it really happened, I feel like I can imagine it perfectly: an older woman whose abusive husband has gone off and left her completely alone, so that she must work all the time to keep a roof over her head, and gets no spiritual comfort from her Lutheran church, says, "Wouldn't it be fun to be a witch? We could fly around the world and party all night and have sex with anyone we want!" When the pious girl responds that this is blasphemy, the older women lets slip her skepticism: "bah, there's no heaven or hell, it's just a lie the authorities tell us to keep us in line."  The cynicism is perfect: we know that such beliefs were in the air because the same accusations show up in heresy trials from the 13th century on, and in hundreds of books by divines complaining about the lack of faith around them.

Other witnesses brought up Katharina's troubled marriage. Her husband had left home several times to serve as a soldier in various armies, seemingly indifferent to what he was fighting for so long as he was paid. This was the subject of much gossip, as the trial record shows:

Some men blamed Katharina for driving her husband away. A "proper, honest wife, who valiantly keeps her husband well," they said, would not have a man leave her. (167)

Another witness lays out perfectly what some skeptics at the time said was really behind these accusations: the obligation of charity toward neighbors and the guilt over not doing enough. The witness repeated a story she had heard from her parents about Katharina from 25 years earlier:

They had told her that in 1590, just after her husband had left, Katharina had asked the forester to help her put manure on the fields, the all-essential treatment for her soil. He had been too busy, but in turn had worried that she, in revenge, had made one of his pigs go wild and die. (168)

And then there's this:

There was, however, one exceptional thing that Katharina Kepler had done: she had asked for her father's skull. . . . Allegedly, Katharina had entered the baker's house announcing to his wife what a "stately thing" is was for a person to possess her father's skull. The baker's wife had already heard from the gravedigger's widow that Katharina had asked him to dig out her father's head and bring it to her. She wanted to turn it into a drinking cup, and knew a man who had done the same. (171)

Witnesses alleged that she intended to mount it in silver and send it to her son in Prague, that is, Johannes. This is interesting partly because Humanistic historians were very interested in ancient tales about skull cups, and several collectors, including Emperor Rudolf, had specimens in their cabinets of curiosities. But it was a dangerous thing for an old woman who had issues with her neighbors to talk about.

In the end Kepler's learned brief convinced the judges that this was all rumor and spite, and they disallowed torture. Since Katharina never confessed, she was released after more than a year in prison and died peacefully in her home.

After the trial Kepler vented his wrath on some of his old academic acquaintances, for an interesting reason. Several years before he had circulated the manuscript of his strange story about a journey from the Earth to the Moon, in which the narrator learns about space travel from his mother, a witch. Kepler accused his friends of talking this over in front of their barbers, whence it had spread back to his mother's home and helped stir up resentment against her. Ulinka Rublack thinks this is far-fetched, and I agree; the charges seem to grow from conflicts between neighbors in the usual way, with no reference anywhere in the record to Kepler's stories.

What this weird episode does show is the vast distance between the half-mad, excessively learned court of Rudolf II of the lives of most of his subjects. When Kepler finally published his Somnium, Rudolf was long dead, his court dissolved, and Kepler included hundreds of footnotes explaining the many insider references and double meanings. For example, in one scene the narrator's mother summons demons at a crossroads who teach the narrator about the universe; the footnote explains that these demons represent facts learned by observing the natural world. What might have gotten a peasant woman put to the torture was at Rudolf's court just another game, another allegory that those in the charmed circle tried to puzzle out, either not caring about the thousands of innocents being put the stake or hoping to distract themselves from the wicked world around them.

As for Johannes Kepler himself, he was very much a man of this milieu. His brilliant mathematical discoveries were buried in immense books full of allegorical speculation about things like the relationship between planetary motion and the Trinity, or whether storms were bad moods in the Earth's soul. His mind went everywhere, tried to connect everything. Fortunately for his mother, his learning and status were sufficient to overmaster the testimonies of her angry neighbors, saving her from torture and death.