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Afghan Watercolors by Matthew Cook

by Ben Atlas on 10.26.2009.8:51am · 0 comments

Matthew Cook is a British soldier serving in Afghanistan. His watercolors are simply superb. There is currently an exhibition of his work at the Ministry of Defence in London. ►►►read more

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Van Gogh – Who will Have an Ear to Hear It?

by Ben Atlas on 10.23.2009.10:54am · 0 comments

To continue the theme (see my post Van Gogh Letters Set a New Standard for Online Manuscript Publishing) bibliodyssey published an extensive collection of sketches with excerpts from the corresponding letters – Handshakes in Thought.

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To Theo from The Hague. September 1882: “Well, I hope that the small bench, even if not yet saleable, will show you that I have nothing against tackling subjects with something agreeable or pleasant about them, which are thus more likely to find buyers than things with a more sombre sentiment. [..] There’s so much paint around that it has even got onto this letter — I’m working on the big watercolour of the bench. I hope it comes off, but the great problem is to retain detail with deep tone, and clarity is extremely difficult.”

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To Theo from The Hague. March 1883: “Do you remember bringing me pieces of natural chalk last summer? I tried to work with it then but couldn’t. So I was left with a few pieces that I took up again these past few days; enclosed a scratch done with it. As you see, it’s a warm, unusual black. I’d very much like you to bring some more, this summer say. It has one great advantage — the firm pieces are much easier to hold while sketching than a thin stick of conté, which has nothing to grip and breaks all the time. So it’s marvellous for sketching out of doors.”

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To Theo from The Hague. October 1882: “Imagine, this week to my great surprise I received a package from home — with a winter coat, warm trousers, and a warm lady’s coat. I was very touched. The churchyard with the wooden crosses is often on my mind, so I may do some studies for it in advance – I would like to do something like that in the snow – a peasant funeral or the like. In short, an effect like the enclosed scratch of miners.”

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To Theo from The Hague. March 1883: “Here’s a scratch, for example, that I did in that kind of daydream. It shows a gentleman who has had to spend the night at a village inn due to the late arrival of diligence or some such reason. Now he has risen early, and while he orders a glass of brandy for the cold he pays the innkeeper’s wife (a woman with a peasant’s cap). But it’s still very early in the morning, ‘the crack of dawn’, — he must catch the mail-coach — the moon is still shining and the glistening snow can be seen through the window of the taproom — and the objects cast oddly whimsical shadows. This story is really nothing at all, and the scratch is nothing too, but from one thing and another you’ll perhaps understand what I mean, namely that of late everything had a je ne sais quoi that made one feel like scribbling it down on paper. In short, the whole of nature is an inexpressibly beautiful Black and White exhibition when there are those snow effects.”

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To Theo Van Gogh from Laken (near Brussels). November 1878: “That little drawing, ‘The Au charbonnage café’ is really nothing special, but the reason I couldn’t help making it is because one sees so many coalmen, and they really are a remarkable people. This little house is not far from Trekweg, it’s actually a simple inn right next to the big workplace where the workers come in their free time to eat their bread and drink a glass of beer.

Back during my time in England I applied for a position as an evangelist among the coal-miners, but they brushed my request aside and said I had to be at least 25 years old. You surely know that one of the root or fundamental truths, not only of the gospel but of the entire Bible, is ‘the light that dawns in the darkness’. From darkness to Light. Well then, who will most certainly need it, who will have an ear to hear it?”

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Mystery – Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari behind Vasari in Palazzo Vecchio

by Ben Atlas on 10.19.2009.9:49pm · 0 comments

Palazzo Vecchio

Art historian Maurizio Seracini got permission from the city of Florence to prove his theory that the most significant masterpiece by Leonardo Battle of Anghiari is intact behind frescos by Giorgio Vasari in Palazzo Vecchio. Numerous sketches (below) are scattered around the world museums, although no one knows where the final work is. Telegraph – Italian palace fresco may hide Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.

Leonardo, The Battle of Anghiari, 1503-05, Black chalk, pen and ink, watercolour on paper, Musée du Louvre, Paris

“The Battle of Anghiari (Wikipedia) was fought on June 29, 1440, between Milan and the Italian League led by Republic of Florence in the course of the Wars in Lombardy. The League’s army concentrated on Anghiari, a small centre of Tuscany, and comprised: 4,000 Papal troops, under Cardinal Lodovico Trevisan; a Florentine contingent of around the same size, and a company of 300 men-at-arms (knights) from Venice, led by Micheletto Attendolo. Other men joined for the occasion from the Anghiari itself. The numerically superior Milanese force was led by the famous condottiero Niccolò Piccinino in the name of Duke Filippo Maria Visconti and reached the area on the night of June 28. Some 2,000 men from the nearby town of Sansepolcro joined the Milanese. Confident in his superior manpower, and on the element of surprise Piccinino ordered an attack in the afternoon of the following day. However the dust lifted by the Milanese on the Sansepolcro-Anghiari road was noticed by Micheletto and the League’s forces were made ready for battle.”

In 1503 Florence deposed the Medici mafia and proclaimed a Republic. They commissioned The Battle of Anghiari to Leonardo. 57 years later in 1560 the Medici family returned to power and allegedly asked Giorgio Vasari to cover the most significant art commission of the Republic.

Telegraphs reports that “Prof Seracini thinks he [Giorgio Vasari] left a clue to what was beneath by depicting a military banner which bears the words “Cerca Trova” – seek and you will find.” ►►►read more

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Paul Carr versus the Internet Anonymity – Manifesto

by Ben Atlas on 08.12.2009.8:01pm · 0 comments

Sir John Gilbert, A sketch on a card, January 15th, 1878

As a follow up to the article I just posted, Paul Carr wires another post with a real proposal to tackle anonymity on the internet. Here is the meat of the proposal and the prediction. The Telegraph – Internet anonymity: your questions answered, and a modest proposal:

“Which brings me to the most common quibble posted in response to my Schopenhauer passage: that without anonymity we wouldn’t have Alexander Pope, or the American Constitution, or the Watergate story. Anonymity, many argued, has a rich and noble history of allowing people to speak out against injustice and tyranny.

Indeed.

But there are two huge differences with anonymity in history and anonymity 2.0. First of all, likening Internet commenters to the founding fathers or Deep Throat is ludicrous to the point of parody. Any moron with fingers and an Internet connection can publish a comment online. In fact, had the majority of internet commenters been responsible for drafting the constitution, it’s probable that the first amendment would simply be the word “first!!1!!” and the second amendment would be an advert for a porn site.

Secondly, and more importantly, in the past anonymous authors and critics still required indentifiable editors and distributors to get their words heard.Deep Throat was anonymous, and as a result he needed Bob Woodward – an identifiable journalist – and the Washington Post – a trusted and identifiable newspaper – to act as his mouthpiece. The responsibility for verifying the information provided fell on these identifiable bodies and, as such, readers could trust that they weren’t being lied to. The same is true with almost all anonymous authors of old – they needed the services of identifiable publishers and distributors who could be sued if the work was shown to be libellous or untrue.

The ability for an anonymous writer to distribute his work without exposing himself to independent verification was limited at best. Perhaps to a few copies passed around a coffee house. Today, that has changed. An anonymous blogger or commenter can write what he likes about whoever he likes, and thanks to Google, his words can instantly be found read around the world. British law holds Internet publishers liable for such comments (once their attention has been drawn to them) but no such law exists in America or much of the rest of the world. The law, and the technology, favours the trolls over the truth – something which was simply not the case for the Constitution, Watergate or Pope.

One final question on the subject of banning anonymity was posed by my esteemed colleague, Andrew Keen. Andrew agrees with my hatred on anonymous trolls, he says, but wonders what can be done to punish offenders. His modest proposal can be found here. In reality, though, the law already provides perfectly adequate punishments for identifiable defamers. The only problem is in identifying them.

There’s only one absolutely foolproof way to verify identity online and that’s for an independent verification body to be created by either a government agency or a credit card company. That body would use pre-existing records to match online identity to real world identify, ensuring that we are all who we say we are. Unfortunately, trust issues aside, a government-backed scheme would only work on a country by country basis – rendering it useless for such a global medium – and one from Visa or Mastercard would mean that only people with those credit cards could comment online. Hardly democratic.

So a 100% solution is out of the question. But a huge leap towards outlawing anonymous cowards can be made simply by blog owners rewarding those who identify themselves, and penalising those who don’t. Both Facebook and Twitter already make it simple for blog owners to allow users to comment using their account credentials on those social networks. In the majority of cases, this will be sufficient to discourage anonymity – both Facebook and Twitter actively discourage the use of fake names, with the former actually deleting users who break their ‘real name’ rule. Also, it’s a simple matter of clicking through to a commenter’s Twitter or Facebook profile to see if they pass a smell test: the more friends or followers they have, the more likely they are to be genuine. Equally the more friends their friends have… and so on.

And it’s here that we get into what could be the real solution to anonymous comments: trust algorithms. It’s only a matter of time before someone develops a simple blog plugin that allows a Facebook or Twitter login to be used to comment on a blog, and then uses information like number of followers, and number of posts posted on other blogs, to calculate the likelihood that a commenter is genuine. Comments that pass this digital smell test can be posted almost immediately, while others will be referred for manual moderation. And of course, the results of this moderation can then be fed into the trust algorithm.

Sure, it’s still not fool proof, but if it’s even 75% effective in discouraging all but the most determined of trolls it will make the Internet a massively better place overnight.

In the meantime, there are already signs that major blog owners are realising that anonymous trolls pose the biggest anti-social influence since spam, and are prepared to shun comment quantity in favour of quality. At dinner the other evening, a few of us who write for TechCrunch petitioned Michael Arrington to try – for just a month – forcing users to login using their Facebook or Twitter identity if they wished to comment. He mulled it over for at least two courses before grudgingly agreeing.

I have no idea when it will happen – or which technology the administrators at Techcrunch HQ will use to manage it – but the very fact that a site the size of TechCrunch is considering forcing commenters to use their real identity means that other site owners will inevitably follow suit.

Those of us who truly believe that the Internet is the future of free speech can only hope that the trial is a success. And that what starts as a trial soon becomes standard procedure for every comment posted on every blog. After all, nothing less than the very survival of the Internet depends on it.”