#south European art

[ltwilliammowett]

Digital photograph of a painted rock art showing the figure of a ship, upright and painted in red. Made by San hunter-gatherer people, East of Porterville in the Western Cape, South Africa, mid 17th century

This image, which has been interpreted as a depiction of a seagoing ship, is from the mountains to the east of Porterville in the Western Cape. It appears to represent a wooden 17th or 18th century AD European vessel of the types that would have frequently been visible off the Cape coast at those time periods.

Portuguese ships first rounded the Cape in the late 15th century, and from the 17th century French, Danish, Dutch and English ships regularly visited Table Bay on the trade route to the East Indies. The leftmost element in the image may represent a monumental cross or other marker visible on the shoreline.

It has been suggested that the flags flying in different directions may indicate that the artist was unfamiliar with seagoing navigation; the apparent image of the tricolor indicates the painting to represent a Dutch vessel, indicating the painting to be perhaps mid-17th century.

[illustratus]

View of Merano in Spring by Konrad Petrides

[zevranunderstander]

number #1 tactic that people use to not sound as racist as they are when they talk to black people: 'uhh so you AMERICANS need to stop pretending everything is about YOU. why should i know this im not from the us :/' (= is talking about like. a phenomenally internationally well-known black artist)

[arthistoryanimalia]

#WorldCoatiDay:

Jacopo Ligozzi (Italian, 1547-1627) Coati in un Paesaggio, c. 1620-40 oil on canvas Villa medicea di Poggio a Caiano, Italy

Portrait of a South American Coati (Nasua nasua) wearing a red belled collar, presumably an individual from the Medici menagerie.

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Vittorio Matteo Corcos (Italian, 1859-1933) In the sunny south, n.d.

[diemelusine]

Alte Häuser in Scheveningen (1897) by Max Liebermann. Museum Georg Schäfer.

[bioeditr]

Aquatic Assault Over The Southern Shore

[travellingdragon]

Churki, Dulcia and @nighttimepatrons Genereux the Celestial having a rest.

Genereux's head was heavily influenced by @wanlingnic design for Temeraire which I like a lot!

[wagonlitcommunitytheatregroup]

You are offered 10 Million Dollars to go back in time, live for 10 consecutive years and record your findings. Where/when do you go and why?

Here are the rules:

You are offered to go back in time to any year of the holocene era and you must remain there for 10 consecutive years.

You will be outfitted with video recording devices that can't be detected and record what you see.

You will be innoculated against any potential diseases.

You will be trained in the dominant language of wherever you go prior to your departure.

You will start with enough money to get yourself a modest dwelling.

You cannot alter history, reveal yourself, or produce any children, inventions, art pieces, etc.

You must blend in and you will develop a backstory with historical experts before you go.

You can die/be killed during the duration of the job.

Upon your return you will be awarded $10 Million but 10 years will have passed in the present day meaning your loved ones may have died or moved on to other relationships.

Do you do it? If so where and when do you go?

[madtomedgar]

I thought yankees trying to use y'all was painful but when Europeans do it... Ouch.

[cureatikamekw]

[arthistoryanimalia]

It’s #WorldCoatiDay!

On top is the earliest known European image of this endemic American animal, from the Felix Platter (1536-1614) collection of drawings, originally owned by Conrad Gessner (1516-1565); it’s a color illustration of a coati sent by Antonio Musa Brassavola (1500-1555), who was a physician to popes and kings, and probably depicted an animal from one of his clients’ menageries (note collar!).

Below is the woodcut Illustration Gessner made from this model, which became the first published image of a coati when he added the animal to his Historiae animalium encyclopedia in the 1554 appendix. Although he called it “Mus Indicus,” we know from the original illustration it was in fact a South American Coati (Nasua nasua).

Unlike Gessner’s South American Coati, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s (1522-1605) woodcut illustration published in De quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis (1637) was modeled from an original illustration by Guiseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) of a much rarer Mountain Coati (Nasuella spp., probably the Western Mountain Coati, N. olivacea) in a Habsburg court menagerie (c. last quarter 1500s).

[voidwithtoomanygooglyeyes]

Izutsumi didn't get ice-cream because she's lactose intolerant, and can't taste the sweetness in sweet things.

beach episode

[monsterblogging]

"I know JK Rowing is a terrible person but her books are so good-"

You sure about that?

I mean, just for a start, have you taken a good look at her fantasy creatures lately? A whole bunch of them are straight-up based on malicious and dehumanizing stereotypes about actual people.

Remember the werewolves? And being a werewolf was made into a kind of metaphor for having AIDS?

And you know how AIDS was first associated with gay men? And how conservatives back in the day were claiming gay men were preying on children in order to convert them to gayness?

Remember how Fenrir Greyback preyed on children in particular? Yeah, she put that subtext in there. She was an adult in the 90's. She knew damn well what she was doing.

Remember the house elves? Remember how most of them loved to serve and needed to have a home and a master or else they just wouldn't know what to do with themselves?

Did you know that's literally what slavers in the American South said about the Black people they kept enslaved? Go look up the happy slave myth.

Do I even need to get into the goblins and the antisemitic tropes they're based on? No, folkloric goblins were not gold-hoarding bankers waiting for their chance to stab humanity in the back.

"But the characters are so good!"

Are you kidding me?

Most of her characters are pretty one-dimensional, including Harry. Her idea of making a morally complicated character is giving a tragic past to a bully. Numerous characters are little more than stereotypes. (Looking at Fleur right now.) Literally anybody, including you, can easily make dozens of characters just as good, if not better. (It doesn't exactly take a lot of character designing skill to go, "hey, actually, having a sad backstory doesn't make it okay to bully children" or "hey, maybe I should not base a character on the first stereotype that pops into my head.")

"But the rest of the worldbuilding!"

Sorry, but her worldbuilding is just as basic as her characters. Magical castles and secret passages are stock tropes. Magical people who keep their true nature secret from humanity is the premise of pretty much every White Wolf TTRPG. Most of her fantasy creatures are just common European fairy tale and folklore creatures with shitty stereotypes projected onto them.

I'm not saying "basic worldbuilding bad." I'm saying, you could do just as good, if not better, with minimal effort.

Also there's her magical bioessentialism, where only Harry's abusive blood relatives could provide him with supernatural protection from Voldemort. Rowling thus effectively declared that non-biological family isn't quite real family, and that abusive biofamily can give you some essential thing that a loving, supportive family that isn't related to you just can't.

The Hogwarts houses are one of the most insidious elements of her worldbuilding. The idea of being sorted gives you a little dopamine hit because wow now you have a li'l niche where you belong!

But the actual function of the houses and sorting system and the House Cup is teaching children to see each other as rivals, and ensure that the most toxic views of the upper class get passed on to every new batch of kids sorted into Slytherin.

Hogwarts effectively prepares children for a dystopia where magic serves to distract its citizens from how nightmarishly awful it is. Economic inequality is so bad that people like Arthur and Molly Weasley can barely afford to put their kids through school, casual sadism is just an accepted norm in everyday society, and non-humans are second class citizens. Rowling sorta acts like she thinks this is a bad thing with certain lines she gave to Dumbledore, but in the end, her special boy protagonist becomes an auror; IE, a defender of the status quo. So.

If you've never seen it, Lily Simpson's video goes into even more detail on how the worldbuilding of Harry Potter is actually incredibly fucked up, and how it betrays small-minded attitudes on Rowling's part. There's no separating the art from this artist, because Rowling's rotten values pour out of nearly every page.

Yes, there are many things in Harry Potter that evoke feelings and inspire people, but there's absolutely nothing in it that this series has a monopoly on. You can find those same experiences in much, much better media.

[robynsassenmyview]

Too many cradles, not enough hands

"One hand, too many cradles", a review of 'Mother' directed by Zornitsa Sophia, on the European Film Festival South Africa, 12-22 October 2023.

PLEASE don’t leave me. Jomo, one of the children of Kibera, with Elena, the central protagonist of Zornitsa Sophia’s film Mother, which features on this year’s European Film Festival South Africa. Photograph courtesy MQ Pictures. WHAT DO YOU think you were put on this planet for? To hone your artistic instrument? Make babies? Save the world? Whatever the question, the answer sometimes comes…

[emminsgallery]