Tag: history

rowantheexplorer:

drst:

tiny-librarian:

A Pennsylvania museum has solved the mystery of a Renaissance portrait in an investigation that spans hundreds of years, layers of paint and the murdered daughter of an Italian duke.

Among the works featured in the Carnegie Museum’s exhibit Faked, Forgotten, Found is a portrait of Isabella de’Medici, the spirited favorite daughter of Cosimo de’Medici, the first Grand Duke of Florence, whose face hadn’t seen the light of day in almost 200 years.

Isabella Medici’s strong nose, steely stare and high forehead plucked of hair, as was the fashion in 1570, was hidden beneath layers of paint applied by a Victorian artist to render the work more saleable to a 19th century buyer.

The result was a pretty, bland face with rosy cheeks and gently smiling lips that Louise Lippincott, curator of fine arts at the museum, thought was a possible fake.

Before deciding to deaccession the work, Lippincott brought the painting, which was purportedly of Eleanor of Toledo, a famed beauty and the mother of Isabella de’Medici, to the Pittsburgh museum’s conservator Ellen Baxter to confirm her suspicions.

Baxter was immediately intrigued. The woman’s clothing was spot-on, with its high lace collar and richly patterned bodice, but her face was all wrong, ‘like a Victorian cookie tin box lid,’ Baxter told Carnegie Magazine.

After finding the stamp of Francis Needham on the back of the work, Baxter did some research and found that Needham worked in National Portrait Gallery in London in the mid-1800s transferring paintings from wood panels to canvas mounts.

Paintings on canvas usually have large cracks, but the ones on the Eleanor of Toledo portrait were much smaller than would be expected.

Baxter devised a theory that the work had been transferred from a wood panel onto canvas and then repainted so that the woman’s face was more pleasing to the Victorian art-buyer, some 300 years after it had been painted.

Source/Read More

Christ men have been Photoshopping women to make us more “pleasing” since for-fucking-ever.

Also, Isabella de’Medici is nice looking, but also has that look in her eye of all Medicis: “I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to kick your ass, buy you and everything you own, or have sex with you. Perhaps all three.”

Source: tiny-librarian

joanhello2:

setepenre-set:

joanhello2:

@setepenre-set replied to your post, “I suddenly feel how old I am”

“what was it like, seeing those first pictures? (space *is* eternally new; that’s *exactly* the feeling of it.)”

I know a lot of people have said it was a moment of awe for them, that those first pictures of the “blue marble” really transformed their point of view, but I was kind of already there? See, I was a little kid who loved maps, especially world maps. I would look at them for hours, thinking happily of all the people and countries and animals and ecosystems that exist in the world and being frustrated that the ones in my textbooks (printed during the Cold War, which was still going on) showed the Soviet Union and China as just blank spots, as if those countries weren’t part of the Earth, too, just because they had Communist governments. So the pictures of the Earth from space just confirmed the sense of the world that I already had. I think it was older people who maybe weren’t so bookish, whose mental picture of the Earth was centered on their own physical experience of it (kind of like the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cartoon that has been so often parodied that for a while those “View of the World” cartoons formed a genre of their own), who had their minds blown by the sight of this planet as a rather small thing compared to the vastness of the universe around it. Just a theory.

Oh my god, Cold War textbook maps had the Soviet Union and China as blank?? That’s…so weird and yet as soon as you said it, I was like ‘ah yes BUT OF COURSE THEY WERE’.

Not all of them and not all features. Topographic maps showed the Ural Mountains and the Yellow River. But cities, major roads and railways, internal boundaries, nope. Mad Magazine printed a parody in which people went around saying “big empty spot” instead of “China”. The culminating joke was something along the lines of “The dog tipped over the coffee table and broke six pieces of my wife’s best big empty spot.”

nerdycurvyboundandflirty:

hohomylad:

daddydommunismkills:

patheticjunkies:

patheticjunkies:

the weirdest shit i have ever experienced as a swede is when around the mid 2000’s it became popular in sweden for teenage boys to wear rubber bands around their legs on top of their jeans. the more rubber bands you had and variety in colors the more alpha you became to the other teenage boys

image
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i don’t understand

bring this quality fashion trend back to the streets 

could it be

the return of the anglo saxons

joanhello2:

@setepenre-set replied to your post, “I suddenly feel how old I am”

“what was it like, seeing those first pictures? (space *is* eternally new; that’s *exactly* the feeling of it.)”

I know a lot of people have said it was a moment of awe for them, that those first pictures of the “blue marble” really transformed their point of view, but I was kind of already there? See, I was a little kid who loved maps, especially world maps. I would look at them for hours, thinking happily of all the people and countries and animals and ecosystems that exist in the world and being frustrated that the ones in my textbooks (printed during the Cold War, which was still going on) showed the Soviet Union and China as just blank spots, as if those countries weren’t part of the Earth, too, just because they had Communist governments. So the pictures of the Earth from space just confirmed the sense of the world that I already had. I think it was older people who maybe weren’t so bookish, whose mental picture of the Earth was centered on their own physical experience of it (kind of like the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cartoon that has been so often parodied that for a while those “View of the World” cartoons formed a genre of their own), who had their minds blown by the sight of this planet as a rather small thing compared to the vastness of the universe around it. Just a theory.

Oh my god, Cold War textbook maps had the Soviet Union and China as blank?? That’s…so weird and yet as soon as you said it, I was like ‘ah yes BUT OF COURSE THEY WERE’.

kelagon:

malformalady:

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when
vinyl was scarce, people in the Soviet Union began making records of
banned Western music on discarded x-rays calling it ‘bone music’. With the help of a special
device, banned bootlegged jazz and rock ‘n’ roll records were “pressed”
on thick radiographs salvaged from hospital waste bins and then cut into
discs of 23-25 centimeters in diameter. “They would cut the X-ray into a
crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a
hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen.

I started to tag people who’d think this is cool
And then I realized that’s probably everyone

Source: vinyloftheday.com

arafaelkestra:

because-im-freaking-greed:

foxnewsfuckfest:

sixyearsofcollegedownthedrain:

airspaniel:

drunkwario:

Anon hate from the late 1800’s.

What I love most about this is that this person was SO INCENSED at the recipient that they couldn’t even wait the days/weeks it would take for the mail to go through. No, they had to say “FUCK YOU” as soon as fucking possible and, AND, let the recipient that they were not done with the fuck you, nay, this was merely the first volley in what would undoubtably be a dressing down of Biblical proportions.

i will gleefully reblog this every time i see it

My #brand

Telegrams were pricey too. They paid a lot to say fuck you as soon as possible

Does anyone else really want to know what the letter was about?

Source: drunkwario