Why We Recognise The Smell Of A Scent

(via ANI) Here is an interesting study by researchers on 'dynamic connectivity', which explains why, when we notice a scent, the brain quickly sorts through input and determines exactly what that smell is + other viewpoints @ http://in.news.yahoo.com/071217/139/6oinl.html

I see intriguing parallels between the smell of scent and colored stone/diamond grading + wine/tea/coffee/chocolate tasting.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)
Directed by: Sergio Leone
Screenplay: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach

(via YouTube): The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Opening
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGIelcG0r3s

The Good The Bad and the Ugly Finale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXldafIl5DQ

A Clint Eastwood classic + humorous + tragic + good story. I enjoyed it.

Top 10 Movies 2007

(via Time/Richard Schickel): Top 10 Movies 2007

#1. Michael Clayton
#2. No Country for Old Men
#3. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
#4. After the Wedding
#5. Black Book
#6. Breach
#7. The Savages
#8. In the Valley of Elah
#9. There Will Be Blood
#10. Dan in Real Life

The New Breed

Robyn Meredith writes about a new generation of art collectors + parallels between the tech industry and the contemporary art world + other viewpoints @ http://www.forbes.com/global/2007/1224/072.html

The Undiscovered O'Keeffe

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp writes about the unknown Georgia O'Keeffe's works on paper + other viewpoints @ http://www.artnewsonline.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=685

The Dawn Of The Reformation

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

2

After Durer’s death many carried on the tradition he had bequeathed to his country as an engraver—the prints of Aldegraver, Beham, and other followers are still treasured by collectors—but none of them won great fame in painting. Matthew Grunewald, Durer’s contemporary, had a pupil Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), who was much esteemed by his fellow citizens of Wittemberg and was appointed Court Painter to the Protestant prince Frederick of Saxony; but we have only to look at the doll-faced ‘Portrait of a Young Lady’ by him in the National Gallery to see how far Cranach’s art fell below that of Durer.

Only one other painter of German origin beside Durer has so far succeeded in capturing the world’s attention, namely Hans Holbein the Younger, who when Durer died in 1528 was a young man of thirty one, painting in England. No more than twenty six years separate the birth of Holbein from that of Durer, yet within the space of that one generation so great had been the revolution in men’s minds that the two artists seem to belong to different ages. Holbein grew up during the greatest Wonder-Time in world’s history. We who have benefited by and taken for granted the astounding discoveries made during what is known as the Epoch of Maximilian (1493-1519), which approximates to the opening of the reign of our Henry VIII, find it difficult to realize the crash of old ideas and the bombardment of new ones which filled the world during this epoch:

That time (as Lord Bryce has told us)—a time of change and movement in every part of human life, a time when printing had become common, and books were no longer confined to the clergy, when drilled troops were replacing the feudal militia, when the use of gunpowder was changing the face of war—was especially marked by one event to which the history of the world offers no parallel before or since, the discovery of America....The feeling of mysterious awe with which men had regarded the firm plain of the earth and her encircling ocean ever since the days of Homer vanished when astronomers and geographers taught them that she was an insignificant globe which, so far from being the center of the universe, was itself swept round in the motion of one of the least of its countless systems.

Nothing but an appreciation of these historical facts can teach us rightly to comprehend the essential difference between the art of the two great German masters: for as the ‘feeling of mysterious awe’ with which all his work, whether painted or engraved, is impregnated, makes Albert Durer the last and supreme expression of medievalism, so an inner consciousness of man’s insignificance and a frank recognition of material facts makes Holbein the first exponent in art of Modern Science.

The great Hans Holbein was the son of an artist of the same name, Han Holbein the Elder, a poor and struggling painter of religious pictures in the flourishing city of Augsburg. Here Hans Holbein the Younger was born in 1497. There was never any doubt as to his calling, for he belonged to a family of painters. Not only his father, but his uncle and his brother were painters also. His father, who was chiefly influenced by the Flemish painter Roger van der Weyden, had little to teach the son, and when he was seventeen or eighteen young Hans left his father’s house in company with his elder brother Ambrosius, and began a foreign tour which eventually ended as Basle. Owing to the lack of any exact records and the constant confusion of the two Holbeins, father and son, the details of Hobleins early life are still a matter of conjecture and controversy. Some hold that the elder Holbein with his family moved from Augsburg to Lucerne about 1514, but the one thing certain is that young Holbein was at Basle in 1515, where he at once found work as a designer with the printer and publisher Frobenius. Through Frobenius he came to know Erasmus, who had recently left France and now graced Basle with his universal fame as a scholar; and soon the young artist found plenty of employment both as a book illustrator and portraitist. One of the earliest and most loyal of his patrons was the Basle merchant Jacob Meyer, whose portrait and especially the splendid sketch for the same foreshadowed the future greatness of the artist as a portrait painter. About 1516 or 1517 Holbein the Younger was in Lucerne, where he decorated a house, and it is conjectured that about this time he also traveled in Italy; but there is no sure proof, and we can only guess at his movements till he reappears at Basle in 1519. Though but twenty two, he is now a man and a master. In 1520 he became a citizen of Basle—a necessity if he wished to practise painting in that city—and about the same time he married a widow with two children.

He was a master, but a master of another order to Durer. Holbein was a pure professional painter, anxious to do a day’s work and do it as well as he possibly could; but he did not attempt to show how life should be lived or to penetrate its mysteries: he was content to paint what he saw, paint it truly and splendidly, but like the wise child of a sophisticated age he refrained from a futile endeavor to dig beneath the surface. Holbein can show you the character of a man, as in his portrait of Jacob Meyer; but Durer would have tried to read his soul.

In 1521 he painted his masterly, though to many unattractive picture, ‘The Dead Man,’ horribly realistic some would say, yet in truth it is not morbid. For this outstretched corpse is painted with the calm detachment of a student of anatomy; it is a manifestation of the sceptical, inquiring, but unmoved gaze of Science confronted with a Fact. In 1522 he painted ‘Two Saints’ and a ‘Madonna’ in the following year a ‘Portrait of Erasmus,’ in 1526 a ‘Venus’ and a gay lady styled ‘Lais Corinthiaca’ and in 1529 he painted a great ‘Madonna’ for his friend Jacob Meyer.

The Dawn Of The Reformation (continued)

The Agraffe Of Maximilian I

(via Diamond Cuts in Historic Jewelry:1381-1910) Herbert Tillander writes:

A most unusual agraffe was made in 1603 by the Augsburg master goldsmith Hans Georg Beuerl (now in the Schatzkhammer der Residenz, Munich). Set with 245 diamonds, it is an enormous jewel, weighing 410 grams and measuring 17.5 cm in height. It represents a trophy of weapons, with cuirass and helmet, set all over with diamonds, with six pearls adorning the upper part. The composition is dominated by large Table Cuts of exceptionally fine make, but it also contains a whole collection of different contemporary cuts, all beautifully fashioned, including trihedrally faceted lozenges.

The Beautiful Blonde Liked Emeralds

Louis Kornitzer's book, Gem Trader, is partly autobiographical and partly woven round the lore of pearls. It's educational + explains the distribution chain of gems, as they pass from hand to hand, from miner to cutter, from merchant to millionaire, from courtesan to receiver of stolen goods, shaping human lives as they go + the unique characters in the industry.

(via Gem Trader) Louis Kornitzer writes:

My chance to get away from Vienna came at last when a letter I had written to the head of an important firm of precious stone dealers in London (who was a relation of mine) brought me the welcome offer to join their Paris branch.

I was over the moon. My mother, although she was in great distress at the thought of losing me, refused to stand in my way, and so the great day came when with a good wardrobe, a little money I had saved up and the with the most wonderful plans for the future, I set out for Paris.

At first I was terribly disappointed with the city of whose beauty and charm I had heard and read so much, and during the first weeks I was so despondent that it would not have taken much to lure me back to Vienna.

One of my letters of introduction was a passport to the acquaintance of a certain Monsieur Gotin whom I had met at the home of my principal in Vienna. He was a bachelor in a good position, and my old chief had thought him a good parti for his daughter and had gone to great lengths to entertain him every time he went to Vienna.

It was Monsieur Gotin who first offered to introduce me to the night life of Paris. He would take me to dinner and then on to a show, he said. I was full of anticipation, for I had as yet seen nothing but office, street and boulevard-café life. I soon found that this Monsieur Gotin was a rare hypocrite, a smug fellow who had been lauded by the old gentleman in Vienna as a model of what a God-fearing young man should be. Dinner over, he suggested a visit to the Casino de Paris.

‘I am in your hands, monsieur,’ said I, wondering a little, for I thought it a queer place to be taken to by a model of propriety. The revue which was then being staged had the name of being one of the best of its kind for many seasons, but for all that, most of the audience seemed to be paying no attention whatever to the performance. In fact, the house was divided into two parts: the auditorium and the ‘promenoir’, and of the two the promenoir was the most important, because few of the men to be found there bothered to step beyond it. Instead they sat at small side tables on raised platforms where refreshments were served, and surveyed in comfort the moving crowd of well-groomed men and elegant demimondes who formed the concourse. Buy why should I describe at length what every traveled Englishman and American who has been in Paris probably knows by heart?

Even as a raw youth I, too, had seen painted vice on the trottoirs of Vienna’s mean streets and had fled from it as one flees from the plague. I had encountered it, too, in the fashionable thoroughfares of my home city in more alluring guise, but they were still street women all, to be passed by with disdain and fear if one’s upbringing had been as mine.

But here, openly unashamedly, in full view of many ‘good’ women who had come from all parts of the world to see Paris night life, were men young and old, some so decrepit that they could scarcely walk with aid of two sticks, buzzing around the graceful scented cocottes like bluebottles attracted by a morsel of decaying meat. We joined the promenaders. Monsieur Gotin and I, and I noticed that he had a friendly smile and a wave for several of the ladies who for the moment were seated alone at one or other of the little raised tables. Sometimes he would stop for a moment to exchange badinage with sundry female habituées, and finally he suggested that we, too, should take our seats. He ordered coffee and liqueurs and leaned back at his ease, pointing out to me those among the promenaders who were men of note. To me they all looked alike, personages of importance, well-groomed adventurers, blackguards, guides, pimps and procurers, except that perhaps often the gentlemen looked the least gentlemanly.

The scene was brilliantly lit, the orchestra played ceaselessly, the atmosphere was heavy with a medley of scents. There was a great buzz of voices, much senseless laughter, a gaiety somewhat forced: the picture of Pleasure with a capital P.

The Beautiful Blonde Liked Emeralds (continued)