Futility Closet

This is Eutyches, a young boy who died in Egypt during the Roman Empire. How do we know this? Because this portrait was stuffed inside his mummy.

This was actually a common practice in the Fayum region of ancient Egypt, and it’s given us some of the best-preserved paintings from ancient times.

Artists would paint the portraits on wooden panels, using hot, pigmented wax, and they’ve survived remarkably well in the region’s dry heat.

CAT scans show that the portraits match their mummies in age and sex, and they’re strikingly naturalistic, though reportedly a little formulaic.

Many, like Eutyches, were children, a sad mark of the era’s low life expectancy.

“Intellectual passion dries out sensuality,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci. Someone took him literally — and carved this likeness of the Last Supper into the wall of a Polish salt mine.
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

In 1897 the English composer Edward Elgar sent this enciphered message to his friend Dora Penny. Dora couldn’t decipher it, and neither can anyone else. Can you?

In 1961, Henri Matisse’s painting Le Bateau was accidentally hung upside down in New York’s Museum of Modern Art for 47 days. 116,000 visitors had passed through the gallery before the mistake was discovered.

Critics pan great art:

• Moby Dick: “Raving and rhapsodizing in chapter after chapter … sheer moonstruck lunacy.” (London Morning Chronicle)
• Rigoletto: “The weakest work of Verdi. It lacks melody. This opera has hardly any chance of being kept in the repertoire.” (La Gazette Musicale de Paris)
• Cezanne’s paintings: “He chooses to daub paint on a canvas and spread it around with a comb or a toothbrush. This process produces landscapes, marines, still lifes, portraits … if he is lucky. The procedure somewhat recalls the designs that schoolchildren make by squeezing the heads of flies between the folds of a sheet of paper.” (Le Petit Parisien)
• Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1: “The concerto will never be played by anyone on earth. … Prokofiev wouldn’t grant an encore. The Russian heart may be a dark place, but its capacity for mercy is infinite.” (The New York Times)
• Buster Keaton’s The General: “A mixture of cast iron and jelly.” (The New York Times)
• Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: “Pursues its theme of false identity with such plodding persistence that by the time the climactic cat is let out of the bag, the audience has long since had kittens.” (Saturday Review)

Henry Fielding wrote, “Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.”

Firefighter John McColgan “just happened to be in the right place at the right time” to take this photo on Aug. 6, 2000, while fighting a 100,000-acre blaze in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest.

He was standing on a bridge over the East Fork of the Bitterroot River, and shot the photo with a Kodak DC280 digital camera.

The elk were gathering at the river, he says. “They know where to go, where their safe zones are. A lot of wildlife did get driven down there to the river. There were some bighorn sheep there. A small deer was standing right underneath me, under the bridge.”

“Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.” — Moliere

From Edward Lear’s “Nonsense Botany” (1871):

Bottlephorkia Spoonifolia.

Manypeeplia Upsidownia.

Phattfacia Stupenda.

Piggiwiggia Pyramidalis.

Goya’s La Maja Desnuda and La Maja Vestida. In 19th-century Europe, it was common to have two paintings of the same subject, swapping them out depending on who’d be visiting. Still, the Inquisition confiscated both of these as obscene.

Said the Duchess of Alba to Goya,
“Do some pictures to hang in my foyer”;
So he painted her twice –
In the nude to look nice,
And then in her clothes to annoy ‘er.

– Cyril Bibby

Imaginary pictures “cataloged” in Thomas Browne’s Musaeum Clausum of 1684:

• “A Moon Piece, describing that notable Battel between Axalla, General of Tamerlane, and Camares the Persian, fought by the light of the Moon.”
• “A Snow Piece, of Land and Trees covered with Snow and Ice, and Mountains of Ice floating in the Sea, with Bears, Seals, Foxes, and variety of rare Fowls upon them.”
• “Pieces and Draughts in Caricatura, of Princes, Cardinals and famous men; wherein, among others, the Painter hath singularly hit the signatures of a Lion and a Fox in the face of Pope Leo the Tenth.”
• “Some Pieces A la ventura, or Rare Chance Pieces, either drawn at random, and happening to be like some person, or drawn for some and happening to be more like another; while the Face, mistaken by the Painter, proves a tolerable Picture of one he never saw.”

Borges wrote, “To write vast books is a laborious nonsense, much better is to offer a summary as if those books actually existed.”