#i read in a history book from like. a fuckton long ago

[averagewatertypetrainer]

Goomy

hehe slug dragon. 10/10

[itskirahhh]

My fondest memories

How many days have you had in your life that you will able to have again? Spoiler:none. You could have a day that’s similar, a moment that’s quite close. Truth is, you will never ever get the same opportunity for a moment again. I am only sixteen, and i hopefully have a long long time left on earth yet, but the amount of memories you can gain in the first sixteen years of your life is crazy really. Everyone says that your school days are your best days, and you don’t believe them when you’re in school. I literally left school nine months ago and already i realise what everyone was talking about. It really, really was amazing, thinking about it. If you’re still in school, or even if you’ve left school like me really, just please try and make sure to make the most of everything you do. Spend time doing things and try and have the most fun doing whatever you’re doing because the memories you will get from even the littlest things will be worth it. Maybe i’m just really sentimental or maybe i’m right, but i recommend you do. 

These are my fondest memories:) don’t read it if you don’t want, i just wanted to reminisce lol.

I will never get back the days in reception where we danced around with our teacher Lucy to the Woohoo song.

I will never get back the days i used to spend my lunchtimes inside with my brother’s form tutor and asking her about how he was doing in school. *cringe* I will never get back that day me and my friend were sat in her room playing with our polly pockets and she had a big cruise ship that we wanted to make a sea for and ended up tipping water all over the carpet and crying to her mum that we were really sorry.  I will never get back those days it was snowing and me and my brother got sent to my mum’s work nextdoor from school and just sat eating biscuits and putting lunches in brown paper bags. I will never get back that day where me, my brother and two of my cousins were playing ‘peter pan’, i whacked my teeth with the ladder of a bunk bed and we accidentally turned on the shower whilst inside it when hiding from captain hook and smee. I will never get back the time me and my friend wrote a book about me and her finding kittens in a box and taking them to someone who definitely wasn’t our teacher - who was called mr moggy - and we ended up getting a big house together with loads of pets that we listed at the start of the book. I will never get back those days where me, my dad and my brother rode our bikes through the woods and all the way to a shop on the other side where we brought little snap pots of squash. I will never get back those times me and my brother used to pretend we were gladiators on that show on the slide in my garden. He was always the fire king and had electrical powers (because logic) and i was the ice queen, which was probably something to do with the fact we spent most of our time sat on our dining chairs at the big computer playing fireboy and watergirl or papa’s pizzeria. I will never get back those days where me and my friend played in her shed that we thought was really cool because it had two floors, or when we made up a dance to the song “Hot n’ Cold” (that honestly is so vivid in my memory that i could probably do it for you right now) to show our mums.

I will never get back those sad, sad days i used to create bedrooms on girlsgogames on ‘my new room 2′ (i didn’t like the original or number 3) or look through the argos catalog for things to put in the bedrooms for the family i created for no specific reason that i can definitely still name now, and literally exactly what they looked like.  I will never get back those times in primary school that i played games i didn’t understand with my friend and we tried to figure out what monsters lived in the grate in the playground. I will never get back those days i used to stand on the bench in my garden and talk to my nextdoor neighbour every single day after school and on weekends and we would sit upstairs in the rooms that were closest to eachother and try our hardest to get our nintendo ds’s to connect so we could pictochat.

I will never get back the summer where i turned eleven and got my first phone, a white T-mobile unity that i had a green penguin case on that was intended for a blackberry phone. I had Now that’s what i call music 82 downloaded onto it, a shedload of awful selfies when my side fringe was just starting out, and i wrote fanfictions in my notes. Cool.  I will never get back those days where me and my new high school friends used to pretend we were doing music practice at lunch and instead just ate out lunch and sang along to the only song we knew how to play the chords to on a keyboard. I will never get back those days me, my boyfriend and his annoying little follow-along friend used to get kicked out of the little outside bit by our form, and the countless times we used to stand and flirt while his friend complained about it. 

I will never get back those days i used to go out to the field with my friend and her big photography camera and take photos for a project we invented for ourselves that currently remains incomplete. It was a book about two females who were together called Madison and Annabelle who were writing to eachother after getting split up during the holocaust. Sounds like a really fun project for two thirteen year olds lol. We slept around her house, had countless chinese meals and played with her kittens.

I will never get back the days where me and my best friend made videostars. The first one we did was last night by the vamps and we had her ipod resting against her tv while one of us tapped the record button and the other one was in shot. Id go through all the songs but there is a fuckton. 

I will never get back the day when my best friend’s mum and dad got married and me and some of my best friends spent the night in cute little party dresses trying to inhale helium from the party balloons and doing ‘the jellyfish dance’ and ‘i am the music man’ on the dance floor.  I will never get back those times we had triple history on a wednesday and i was just always so excited to see my new friend and current crush and not learn anything at all. I sat behind him in lesson and in one of the first ones i stuck a glue stick to the back of his elbow and he and my lovely, lovely teacher made me promise to buy him an indian takeaway to say sorry for doing so. (Who knew that was how you get a best friend??)

I will never get back the dance/school shows we did for maybe three nights in a row each year that we spent the first half of the year practicing for, sitting upstairs - or in the really early days, sitting in the canteen - with the other dancers, actors and ‘voices’ panicking over a spare line up sheet about getting dressed and putting stage makeup on in time before we had to go on stage again. We ordered a pizza from dominoes most years. The one in this year was one of the last ones i did and a group of us, including two of the main actors who me and my best mate thought were really cool, were sat on the floor in the corridor before we went on stage playing truth or dare and asking eachother silly questions. One of the dares was for my friend to give me a piggyback but on his shoulders, and he dropped me when i was up there and i landed on like a cement floor straight on my coccyx, and then had to do two dances after that. It was then a running joke between me and him that he had ‘broke my arse’. I will never get back those last moments with my dad at christmas when we played i spy because that was all he could understand, or on new years night when i lay next to him in bed and we watched alan carr until it hit midnight, or when we were eating biscuits in the hospice and he was laughing at himself because they were “o” shaped. I will never get back that moment i had my first kiss i had with my boyfriend or those four months over the summer period with my completely new (and improved) friend group and the day we went to the park and my best friend fell in the mud, we all tried to fit on a spinny thing, and we watched tangled, the day of our friends birthday when we went to the cinema and all lay on the trampoline at his house, my birthday that year. I will never get back the first house party i went to (which is perhaps a good thing to be completely honest), or the second one, or the third one, which was also the first time i got drunk and told my best friend she couldn’t sleep because she had hiccups, drunk texted my other best friend and then attempted to help my best friend when she threw up basically a whole bottle of bright orange caribbean twist on a white carpet.  I will never get back those lunchtimes every day where we sat underneath our tree (the one inbetween the year 8 tree and the smoking weed tree) on the field or on the first and seconds benches in the maths corridor and pissed about, made our own olympics and attempted to play rugby. There are waaaaay too many memories to list about lunch and breaktimes.  I will ever get back those last few days of school where we spent every lesson with our phones out and taking photos together or signing eachothers yearbooks rather than revising, and the fact i came home from school two or three hours late every day because i spent my time revising or doing dance practice. I will never get back my prom, one of the best moments of my life, to be honest, where i just saw all the people i had grown up with looking absolutely gorgeous and all dancing together and just not having a care in the world. Honestly, i wouldn’t have chosen to grow up with any different people. It is both amazing and emotional to think about both myself, and all the other amazing people in school growing up alongside eachother and shaping into who we are today.

Here’t to 16 more years of memories ay.

[mermaidsirennikita]

are you an art historian? sorry if I got that detail wrong but I was wondering if you knew how people know the identity of a person in a portrait? For example, how do you know if a medieval portrait is of the queen or a noble and not an imaginary person or someone unknown? sorry if my question makes no sense

No, it’s a good question!  And I wouldn’t call myself an art historian yet, but I’m a tentatively aspiring one.  I might be one later if I do a fuckton more research and/or… get up the energy for grad school.  But I have my B.A. in art history!

SOOOOOO, spiel below.

Unless there’s an inscription, note, title, etc. written on the portrait it’s technically impossible to be 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt sure about a sitter’s identity…  I actually ranted about this eons ago because people on Tumblr are super desperate to find new portraits of Anne Boleyn (why Anne?  why not literally any other famous lady whose face has been largely lost to history?  because she’s Anne Boleyn, and since several probably authentic images have not proven that she’s super foxy hot people are looking for something that will).  It usually takes years for art historians to come to a consensus about the identities of unidentified sitters, and EVEN THEN, people still argue about it.  I’m sure this painting of Mary, Queen of Scots took tons of effort to uncover and based on what little I’ve read there’s great reason to believe that’s Mary (it even looks like other images we have of her) but I’m sure someone will write an article about how it’s REEEALLY someone else entirely.  I researched Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci for my capstone project, and even tho we have letters from Cecilia Gallerani, a mistress of the man most likely to have commissioned the portrait, saying “yeah so you have this portrait of me painted by Leonardo when I was younger” clearly referring to Lady with an Ermine… but there will still be outliers who say it isn’t her.

So.  In more conclusive cases, there will usually be records in place that let us know that a portrait was commissioned in the first place.  In the case of Isabella d’Este, we know that she was after Leonardo to paint her portrait and that it never happened but was in the planning stages–which leads to the conclusion that there are probably preliminary drafts in existence.  You find a preliminary draft of a woman matching Isabella’s general description and age, dating to the right time…  You can probably guess that the woman is Isabella.

Today, we also have technology that can help us guess how old a work is–it’s way harder for forgers to do what they once did because art historians can test for pigments and other materials that were only in use for certain time periods, and that helps narrow down the era.  Before then, there were stylistic notes that could give you an idea of when a painting was made.  For example–prior to the popularization of the three-quarter pose by artists like Leonardo, female sitters of Italy were usually in profile.  So if you find a portrait of an Italian lady sitting in a three-quarters pose, you can probably date the portrait to the late fifteenth century or later–and then you go into things like her style of dress, etc.  Style of dress goes a long way towards identifying a person’s place of origin, especially for women–English women dressed very differently from Italian women of the same era, and so on.

Most European portraits were of a certain class, up until some artists and patrons started playing around with everything from idealized peasant scenes to like... the proto-gritty shit Rembrandt dabbled in.  This is especially true for Catholic nations.  You had to be AT LEAST of the upper middle class to afford to commission a portrait, and for that matter, many artists tended to court a certain specified clientele.  Raphael spent much of the prime of his career working for the pope, and so that meant that he spent a lot of time in Rome, and that in turn meant that he was often in the service of glittery rich Romans.  Now, does this mean that the sitter is always rich?  No.  Raphael also painted a famous nude, La Fornarina, and the sitter was quite possibly his lower-class mistress.  But in that case, the person commissioning the painting was probably a rich guy who wanted a nude, and Raphael was like “fuck yeah getting a chance to paint Margarita naked and get paid for it, life is sweet”.  Patrons normally had $$$, basically, so if we see a typical portrait we know that we’re looking at that class, most likely, and the more expensive the portrait looks, the richer the sitter (and the patron) likely was.  Rarer pigments indicate more money spent, more detail on the clothing equals greater $$$.

When it comes to incredibly important families, there are spmetimes dead giveaways.  Bronzino’s portraits of Cosimo de’ Medici I’s household often featured details like rubies and pearls among the women, which one art historian I read from theorized was a signature of the Medici at that point in time.  It wasn’t unusual for women in particular to wear emblems of their families, because the portraits of them were usually commissioned by fathers or husbands, and essentially these were ownership tags.  That’s what Cosimo was doing, most likely.  If you know the artist–in this case, Bronzino–you probably know where they worked at a certain point in their lives.  If you know when the painting was executed, you know the artist was probably in X city.  Who would be most likely to employ Artist X during that time?  A small cluster of families.  You sort of have to narrow it down.  Most important families of Europe also had coats of arms, which can show up in their paintings–but unfortunately these are often the first to deteriorate and they begin to look similar.

When an artist was painting a famous sitter like Mary, they might include her initials somewhere, maybe in the case of a king or queen with a good Rex or Regina for measure.  Kings and queens are often given little identifiers, too, though these aren’t always consistent.  In several portraits of Mary her hands are emphasized because beautiful hands were prized at the time, Mary was considered a beauty, and so on (also Elizabeth’s hands were rumored to be scarred after her bout of smallpox, and whether or not this was exaggerated I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a dig after her reign began).  Mary is also often depicted in widow’s wear; now, this doesn’t mean that she wore those clothes often, but she was an iconically beautiful young widow after her first husband died, and then she *oh so tragically* lost another…  A lot of artists probably worked off of one painting Mary actually sat for in widow’s wear to have shopped around to potential suitors.  From what I read of this newly discovered portrait, Mary probably never sat for it; it was a tribute/propaganda piece by a support, and most likely the artist was working off of copies.

It’s kind of like how many portraits of Elizabeth I during her reign depict a few of the same things; grand red hair, magnificent clothes and jewels, flawless skin, dark eyes, the same basic facial features.  Did Liz have the time to sit for umpteen portraits?  No!  And she didn’t want to.  She didn’t want the reality of her aging appearance, she wanted the iconic Elizabethan image circulated, and so it was.  Art historians can later pick up on the commonalities between these propaganda pieces and figure out who they’re of.

In the case of this newly discovered work, I imagine the art historian also did a lot of research about the patron’s potential ties to Mary, the political climate at the time, whether or not the artist had materials to work from regarding Mary’s appearance, and so on.  Like I said, the painting looks like Mary, though that… doesn’t necessarily mean much–but the eyes are similar to the other portraits we see, the profile is right, her hair is styled as it was in other paintings, the outline of the clothes seems fine.

Basically, there is soooo much that goes into “proving” a sitter’s identity and even then you’ll never be 100% right in the eyes of everyone.  For years, people thought a portrait was of Katherine Howard, and recently that was debunked.  Everyone shops that portrait of a blond lady with one tit out as Lucrezia Borgia; it’s not.  Identifying people is cool but for a lot of art historians it’s somewhat irrelevant, because we’re more looking at what a portrait reflected about the times and that’s why Mary’s identity IS relevant in this particular case.  Going back to the Secret Anne Boleyn Painting conspiracy theories–people just wanna see a hot Anne there, and that’s what’s frustrating.  By showing us Mary here, this art historian has also given us an example of people showing their support for this embattled queen through propaganda commissions, and for that matter getting scared and covering it up.  That speaks to the political, social, and cultural goings-on of the time.

Some art historians love to find SEKRIT IMAGES because that sells books, but when you ask a lot of professors “do you think that’s a portrait of JANE SEYMOUR” or whatever they’ll probably be like “eh idk man”.  The identity is less important on its own than it is as it relates to the reasons by a commission.  I mean in my case the identities of portraits I studied in school were only really relevant in that I was able to discuss the political constructions that wives and brides became in one Italian court.  Otherwise identity didn’t matter at all.  And tbh, that ambivalence towards identifying people probably makes it even harder for the art historical world to come to a consensus on ANYONE.  But this new discovery sounds pretty solid and honestly, it’s really cool.