Two rhapsodies on the name of French philosopher Michel Onfray, by Basile Morin.
In the chain ambigram above, the first name is transfigured (at some point) into the last.
In the tessellation ambigram below, the two names appear simultaneously as figure and ground.
Ambigram shot glasses by Basile Morin. The design is here.
In 1782, during a tour of Hampton Court, Hannah More encountered landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, who compared his art to literary composition:
‘Now there‘ said he, pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’
From a letter to her sister, December 31, 1782.
Illusion Diffusion uses Stable Diffusion to produce illusion artwork.
The image above was produced by uploading an image of the Mona Lisa and specifying the prompt “colour photograph of an Italian city in the Renaissance” (illusion strength 1 and seed 0).
Below is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring modified with the prompt “Amsterdam canals in 17th century” (illusion strength 1.8 and seed 0).
Master of Number, a collage by Gianni Sarcone presented at the Museum of Illusions in Kuala Lumpur in 2001.
“The Great Matrimonial Admonisher and Pacificator,” a reversible lithograph published in Baltimore in 1861.
Via the Library of Congress.
For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.
— Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows, 1970
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”
A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”
Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.
In 2007, during a construction project at 39 Avenue George V in Paris, artist Pierre Delavie draped the site in a scaffolding tarpaulin of 2,500 square meters printed with a distorted image of the site’s former structure. Crows and cornices of polystyrene were even added to complete the effect. When the work was finished, pieces of the trompe-l’œil drapery were sold at auction.
Art dealer Ambroise Vollard was acquainted with many of the foremost artists of the early 20th century, and as a result he appears often in their work. Above are portraits by Cézanne, Renoir, and Bonnard, and he sat also for Rouault, Forain, Vallotton, Bernard, and Picasso.
Picasso wrote, “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved any oftener than Vollard.”
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