These yellow rings are not superimposed on an existing photograph — they’re actually painted on the landscape. Swiss artist Felice Varini created Three Ellipses for Three Locks in 2014 by painting segments on roads, walls, and nearly 100 buildings in the historic center of Hasselt, Belgium. The effect was visible only to a viewer in one particular vantage point.
To mark the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1996 novel, Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor Christian Swinehart is creating a graphical companion to the book.
Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the book’s timeline and its many footnotes, are currently live, and more will appear over the next few months.
(Thanks, Christian.)
The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium hold two anthropomorphic landscapes painted in the 16th century, one masculine (above) and one feminine (below).
The artist is unknown.
The story goes that one day when Cézanne was picknicking in the country with some friends and a collector, the latter suddenly realized that he had dropped his overcoat somewhere on the way. Cézanne raked the landscape with his gaze, then exclaimed: ‘I’ll swear that black over there doesn’t belong to nature!’ Sure enough, it was the overcoat.
— André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1978
At Nuremburg a wolf’s tooth was shown to travellers … on which an Abbé is represented lying dead in a meadow, with three lilies growing out of his posteriors. This is not only the worst pun that ever was carved upon a wolf’s tooth, but the worst that ever was or will be made. The Abbé is designed to express the Latin word Habe. He is lying dead in a meadow, … mort en pré; this is for mortem præ; and the three lilies in his posteriors are to be read oculis, … au cu lis. Thus, according to the annexed explanation, the whole pun, rebus, or hieroglyphic, is Habe mortem præ oculis.
— Robert Southey, Omniana, 1812
In other words, the French phrase Abbé mort en pré au cul lys (“Abbot died in a meadow with lilies in his rump”) sounds like the Latin phrase Habe mortem præ oculis (“Keep death before your eyes”). This joke appears to be referenced in Hieronymus Bosch’s 1504 triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights:
“Erotic Temple,” an etching from Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s Oddities of Various Figures, 1624.
From the National Gallery of Art.
Jean-Antoine Houdon’s 1778 bust of Voltaire both does and doesn’t appear in Salvador Dalí’s 1940 painting Slave Market.
Dalí said his aim was “to make the abnormal look normal and the normal look abnormal.”
The manuscript for Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-Flat Major, K. 495, is written in inks of four colors, red, green, blue, and black.
It’s not clear why. Possibly the composer was teasing his friend Joseph Leutgeb, the intended performer. But possibly it’s a code meant to inform the performance.
Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, cooperated as Humphrey Carpenter prepared his biography, believing that the book wouldn’t be published until after his passing. Eventually he was forced to write,
My dear Humphrey
I have done my best to die before this book is published. It now seems possible that I may not succeed. Since you know that I am not enthusiastic about it you are generous to give me space for a postscript.
