William Blake, Poet, Artist, Mystic, Engraver.. unique among English artists

Setting a compass to earth: The Ancient of Days, 1794, by William Blake.

Nebuchadnezzar. 1795

Red dragon & the woman clothed in the sun, from Revelations. By William Blake, in 1805.

Poet, painter, engraver, and visionary William Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men. Though in his lifetime his work was largely neglected or dismissed, he is now considered one of the leading lights of English poetry, and his work has only grown in popularity.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-blake

.To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake/Blake-as-a-poet

The Lovers' Whirlwind illustrates Hell in Canto V of Dante's Inferno

The giant Albion, and his mysterious emanation

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/07/14/william-blake-john-trusler-letter/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake

Caturday. Cartoon by Sarah Anderson

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it. 

Thanksgiving is a day of celebration and while many of us now know, it's founded upon a myth, I don't think it's ever wrong to be grateful, celebrate and share. We can't undo the past but we can understand it better and try not to repeat the errors, the violence and cruelty that seen as OK if given to "the other." On Thanksgiving, let no one be "the other." We are all members of the human race on this tiny blue planet.

The illustration is from the Luttrell Psalter which  famous for its numerous illustrations of everyday life in rural England in the early 14th Century although it also contains numerous fantastical grotesques.

The Luttrell Psalter was commissioned for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham, Lincolnshire (b. 1276, d. 1345). This is indicated by the inscription 'Dns. Galdrifus Louterell me fieri fecit' and its accompanying illustration of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, his wife Agnes (d. 1340) and his daughter-in-law Beatrice, daughter of Sir Geoffrey Scrope of Masham, all on f. 202v

The text was written throughout by one scribe and illuminated by at least five different artists. The style of the Psalter represents the last stage of the highly accomplished East Anglian School of manuscript illumination. One master artist completed a large section including the lavish dedication miniature showing the Psalter's patron, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell, fully armed and mounted on a splendid war-horse.

Sir Geoffrey's will survives, and gives further insights into his life and times. The Psalter is not mentioned in the will. By the end of the century the Psalter was in the hands of the Fitzalan family, Earls of Arundel. The volume was acquired by the Library in 1929.  British Library Add. MS 42130

https://medievalmanuscriptsunlocked.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-luttrell-psalter-bl-add-ms-42130.html

"Take Cream a gode cupfulle, & put it on a straynour, thanne take yolkes of Eyroun, and put ther-to, & a lytel mylke; then strayne it throw a straynour in-to a bolle; ten take a..."

https://recipesnut.com/2010/08/cream-custard-tart-3/

Sun in Sagittarius

It’s Sagittarius season! Those born in the archer’s season are described as enthusiastic, generous, and adventurous… but also argumentative and careless,

The Sun is in Sagittarius from November 22 to December 21. Restless, cheerful, and friendly, Sun in Sagittarius people are generally on the go. They have a love of freedom, and a disdain for routine. Generally quite easygoing, Sagittarians make friends with people from all walks of life. They love to laugh and tease, and get along well with pretty much anyone, regardless of social factor.

Lorenzo Monaco (or, Lorenzo the Monk). Last great exponent of late Gothic painting

Today's artist without a (known) birthday: Lorenzo Monaco (or, Lorenzo the Monk). Here, Nativity from 1406, w/ ox & ass grumbling over their interrupted sleep. Know how they feel!

Lorenzo Monaco, (Italian: “Lorenzo the Monk”)original name Piero di Giovanni, (born c. 1372, Italy—died c. 1424, Florence), artist who was the last great exponent of late Gothic painting in what is now Italy. Lorenzo Monaco’s output and stylistic interests (incorporating the gold-leaf background typical of Byzantine art) represent the final gasp of gold-ground brilliance in Florentine art.

Saint Nicholas saving the sailors. Because last weekend Sinterklaas arrived in Holland! And because it's painted by Lorenzo Monaco, whose day is today.

Fantastic in every way, especially if you love gold skies: Adoration of the Magi by Lorenzo Monaco, 1422. Today is his day.

Everybody was admirably patient while waiting to adore him. , according to Lorenzo Monaco.

An early Renaissance icon by Lorenzo Monaco

Noah, with his birdhouse, er ark, which frankly does not look very seaworthy but OK, whatever. 1408. Clearly painter/monk Lorenzo Monaco was not a sailor.

The combined splendors of gold and ultramarine. the two most expensive pigments of the time. : Lorenzo Monaco’s Coronation Virgin for the high altar of Santa Maria degli Angeli 1414

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lorenzo-Monaco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Monaco

Agnolo Bronzino. Painter to the Medici & the elite of 16th century Florence.

Poet Laura Battiferi of Urbino, Rome, and Florence, painted in 1560 holding a book of Petrarch's sonnets, by Agnolo Bronzino.

Agnolo Bronzino’s was the man to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and bells of the Counter-Reformation. Holland Cotter. 

Absolutely perfect lady in red and her son

Bronzino — a nickname — was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori in 1503, the son of a Florentine butcher. After initial training with so-so artists, he had the luck to be taken on by Pontormo, who was only nine years his senior and on the cutting edge of new Florentine art. Temperamentally they were opposites, Pontormo a misanthrope, Bronzino a people person. Yet they developed a close bond, and collaborated on and off for decades.

Perfect portrait of a lady with her lapdog, in 1537

Eleanora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo d'Medici 1, in a glorious dress, w/ her son Giovanni de’ Medici, in 1544

What Eleanora looked like after having 11 children,.
She died with her sons Giovanni and Garzia in 1562, when she was only forty; all three of them were struck down by malaria while traveling to Pisa.

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Bronzino’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” owned by the  Met. Done in the 1530s, it is a portrait of an unknown but superbly supercilious member of Florence’s elite, someone who wears his basic republic black with arrogant flare. 

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time: the painting that defines all that is weird and wonderful about Italian mannerism. Painted in the 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino,

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Il-Bronzino
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Claude Monet. Born on this day in 1840

Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

When he was 5, Monet's father moved the family from Paris to Le Havre. Monet's early artistic efforts there were charcoal caricatures. He met the legendary regional painter Eugène Boudin when he was 18 and learned to paint landscapes in oil from him. Following a productive stint in Argenteuil, near Paris, in the 1870s, Monet returned to Normandy and began his serial paintings (of haystacks and other subjects) in the 1880s and '90s. He spent the last 40 years of life in Giverny, the site of his oft-painted garden.

Claude Monet, to many art lovers, calendar connoisseurs and collectors of museum postcards, is Impression itself. For them, it's all about light in his paintings -- morning light and moonlight, blazing summer sunshine and a pallid winter glow, light reflected in water and refracted into a prismatic dazzle of color. The subjects that he painted again and again -- haystacks, water lilies, a cathedral facade -- are often seen as scaffolding for his real preoccupation: light, in all its infinite manifestations and glory.  Stephen Winn, SF Chronicle, 2006

Did you know the Art Institute has the largest group of Monet’s 'Stacks of Wheat' in the world? Explore these paintings among the 28 works by Monet now on view: http://bit.ly/2NKWBoW

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Monet

https://www.biography.com/artist/claude-monet

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cmon/hd_cmon.htm

In Flanders Fields

BY JOHN MCCRAE

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

 That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly 

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

Kristallnacht”, "Night of Broken Glass". Never forget

“#Kristallnacht”, "Night of Broken Glass": 81 years ago, the Nazi government led people to attack Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues throughout the country and in parts of Austria. Synagogues were burned, 91 Jews were murdered, 30,000 Jews were taken to concentration camps. And that was just the beginning. Worse was to come.

Melozzo da Forlì. 1438 - November 8, 1494

Died on this 1494, Melozzo da Forlì. Painted beautiful works, many of them since lost or damaged. Here, angel of the Annunciation, 1466, with some wild drapery.

He was an early Renaissance painter whose style was influenced by Andrea Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. Melozzo was one of the great fresco artists of the 15th century, and he is noted for his skilled use of illusionistic 
perspective and foreshortening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melozzo_da_Forl%C3%AC

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Melozzo-da-Forli

Annunciation. 1470s at the Pantheon in Rome

Angel with a lute, by Melozzo da Forli in 1480.

Focus on the beauty of a single angel in Melozzo's vault of Sacristy of San Marco, Santa Casa di Loreto.