Recent links of note:
“The Casualties of Chaos and Bloodshed”
J. S. Marcus, The Wall Street Journal
Surrounded by the war-torn and ravished Netherlands countryside, Peter Paul Rubens painted The Horrors of War around 1637, almost twenty years into the infamous Thirty Years’ War. Beginning this piece towards the end of his life, Rubens drew upon a mixture of classical and Baroque themes to paint an embodiment of European civilization’s dramatic fall from grace. Rather than solely employing divine characters from classical mythology, Rubens notably includes mortals—a terribly frightened mother and child—to portray the devastation that civilians faced at the time. For decades, war, famine, and disease exacted such a dreadful toll on the civilian population to such a degree that the Baroque masters could not neglect in their art. With The Horrors of War, Rubens sought to perpetually remind humanity of the increasing total cost that came with increasingly total war. Recently, his work seems quite prescient.
“Previously undetected Buddha discovered in 16th-century ‘magic mirror’ after curator shines light on it”
Claire Voon, The Art Newspaper
Every now and again, conservators and curators stumble across a secret that entirely redefines a piece of art. At the Cincinnati Art Museum, a seemingly ordinary, sixteenth-century handheld mirror from China revealed itself to be something much more. When her colleague shined a light on the small, bronze mirror, Dr. Hou-Mei Sung was shocked to see the mirror’s projection of the Amitābha Buddha (the Buddha of Infinite Light) along a nearby wall. With no observable markings on the surface itself to reveal the hidden Buddha, this mirror is indeed a “magic mirror,” one of only three known to be housed in museums.
“What did Classics do to Christianity?”
Simon Goldhill, Antigone
Has the study of classics had a conservative or revolutionary impact on Western culture? To answer this question, Goldhill asks another, “What did Classics do to Christianity?” He answers it through a brief study of three periods: late antiquity, the Reformation, and the nineteenth century. Continuing the Renaissance’s spirit of reviving classical learning, Erasmus retranslated Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible into contemporary Latin using classical Greek sources for reference, causing a scandal as he claimed significant discrepancies that challenged the Church’s entire Trinitarian doctrine as misinterpreted and even fallacious. Goldhill argues a similar transformation took place in the nineteenth century with the discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest known Greek editions of the New Testament. With over twenty thousand corrections in the margins, the Codex clearly shows critical debate over the word of God dating back to late antiquity. Goldhill concludes by discussing the theological appreciation that the Church Fathers had for “pagan” literature. Over the course of history, classical philology has introduced new debates over humanity’s understanding of the past and what this says about the values of the present.