The Sacrifice of Isaac

The Sacrifice of Isaac, The Tunesian Jews Synagogue, Akko
Taken by: Geagea

The whole purpose of sacrifice ...

Isaac was chosen as the offering not only because he was Abraham's most precious possession but because he was a special gift of God's under the covenant, and remained God's like all the rest of his gifts to man. This underlines the whole purpose of sacrifice, a symbolic reminder that everything man possesses comes from God and is returnable to him.

Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews

Worth a Thousand Words: PB & Jelly

PB & Jelly
James Neil Hollingsworth

In honor of the Dickens' excerpts today, though he never would have encountered such a sandwich which is very modern. Nevertheless, Charles clearly loved a good sandwich and I hope he'd have tried this one.

 As you already know, I love paintings that reflect contemporary life. In a hundred years they'll be historical documents also! This one raises the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich level to artistic heights. Look at the jewel-like tones of that jelly!

Double Boxer

In honor of the Dickens' excerpt today, here's a picture from our double Boxer days, which were crazy. Zoe and Wash, gone now but not forgotten.

The Bible is a work of history

The Bible is not a work of reason, it is a work of history, dealing with what are to us mysterious and even inexplicable events. It is concerned with the momentous choices which it pleased God to make. It is essential to the understanding of Jewish history to grasp the importance the Jews have always attached to God's unrestricted ownership of creation. Many Jewish beliefs are designed to dramatize this central fact. The notion of an elect people was part of God's purpose to stress his possession of all created things.

Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews

Dormant apostles in Gethsemane garden

Dionyz Stanetti, The carved relief of the dormant apostles
as the detail of prayer in Gethsemane garden (1744 - 1751) by

God made us creators

Creativity, I believe, is inherent in all of us. We are the progeny of almighty God. God is defined in many ways: all-powerful, all-wise, and all-seeing; everlasting; the lawgiver; the ultimate source of love, beauty, justice, and happiness. Most of all, he is the creator. He created the universe, and those who inhabit it; and, in creating us, he made us in his own image, so that his personality and capacities, however feebly, are reflected in our minds, bodies, and immortal spirits. So we are, by our nature, creators as well. All of us can, and most of us do, create in one way or another. We are undoubtedly at our happiest when creating, however humbly and inconspicuously. ...

... the only problem is how to bring it out. A farmer is creative—none more so—and so is a shoemaker. A ticket collector on a red double-decker once remarked to me: "I run the best bus route in London." His pride was proprietorial, and clearly he felt he was creating something, rather like Pascal, the moral philosopher, who in the mid-seventeenth century first conceived the idea of an omnibus service for big cities like Paris. I sometimes talk to a jovial sweeper, who does my street, and who comes from Isfahan, in Persia, wherein lies the grandest and most beautiful square in the world, the work of many architects and craftsmen over centuries, but chiefly of the sixteenth. I asked him if he felt himself creative, and he said: "Oh, yes. Each day they give me a dirty street, and I make it into a clean one, thanks be to God." People do not always discern the creative element in their lives and work. But those who do are more likely to be happy.

Paul Johnson, Creators

I was really stunned to read this in the introduction to Paul Johnson's book. As a personal witness it can't be beat. Plus, of course, being true.

Weepers

Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was the leading art patron of fourteenth-century France. His tomb, by Claus Sluter and Claus de Werve, is inhabited by alabaster hooded figures, known as "weepers." Description from Paul Johnson, image via Wikipedia

I really love these figures with their individual features and positions. Paul Johnson, Art: A New History, delights in this eloquently. Of course, I am going to share his comments!

Sluter was obliged to interrupt his work to attend to Philips tomb, a grand affair mainly in alabaster ... Sluter was bidden to attend the funeral and observe it, and his contract specified that he had to provide, in addition to the effigy of Philip, fifty-four angels and forty "Images pleurants." The angels are lost but the "weepers," as they were known--cowled figures common in late medieval art--were all done from life, and may have been actual participants in the obsequies. Slater was a master of the draped figure and its folds, in which he took exquisite delight, especially when working in a soft, luminous stone like alabaster. But he also put in wrinkles and beards, even the stubble, and all the details of costume under the drapes, down to buttonholes and laces. What strikes one most, however, is not such details as rosary beads, important though they are in creating verisimilitude, so much as the facial expressions, which though convey shamelessly the mixed emotions of a funeral: genuine and feigned grief, joy that one is still alive, sharp observation of how other people are behaving. Even funeral fashions are attended to, for each figure is clothed according to rank and personality, and each has a distinctive, often slyly observed,life of its own. After looking at these works, we feel we have a clear idea of what a grand early-fifteenth-century funeral was like. And that was Sluter's intention, for he did not want to change the world, merely to record it truthfully. If only all great artists were like him!

The excitement and inspiration of Job's prologue

[The Book of Job's] prologue with God's wager with Satan about Job's piety in the face of continual testing makes it one of the most exciting and inspirational books of the Old or New Testament.

Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song

Well, that was unexpected. But it makes me want to go read the Book of Job!

Man Riding on a Horse

Bhimbetka rock painting showing a man riding on a horse, India

Today's quote by Bob Dylan about the Book of Job sent me looking for an illustration of one of my favorite passages from that book. I didn't expect to find something this ancient but it fills me with pleasure to think of how long men and horses have had an association.

Do you give the horse his strength,
and clothe his neck with a mane?
Do you make him quiver like a locust,
while his thunderous snorting spreads terror?
He paws the valley, he rejoices in his strength,
and charges into battle.
He laughs at fear and cannot be terrified;
he does not retreat from the sword.
Around him rattles the quiver,
flashes the spear and the javelin.
Frenzied and trembling he devours the ground;
he does not hold back at the sound of the trumpet;
at the trumpet’s call he cries, “Aha!”
Even from afar he scents the battle,
the roar of the officers and the shouting.

Job, 39:19-25

A powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

Paul Johnson

Doge Leonardo Loredan

Giovanni Bellini, portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
via Wikipedia

The Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501-1505) by Giovanni Bellini shows how a great master can turn a formal state portrait into both a penetrating study of character and an image of beauty. ...He had a wonderful eye for a face and huge skill at getting it down on panel. He broke the old Venetian tradition that a ruler could only be presented in a formal "medal" profile, by showing the Doge Leonardo Loredan in an almost frontal position, a faultless work which many would rate one of the best half-dozen portraits ever painted.

Paul Johnson, Art: A Modern History

All I know is that when I look at this portrait it almost looks as if someone photographed a modern face and stuck it between the hat and cape. Simply amazing.

The Meeting Scene

Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), The Court of Mantua
via Wikipedia

I love how realistic this is. I discovered it in Paul Johnson's "Art: A New History" where he tells us:

The Camera delgi Sposi, being an exercise in contemporary realism, is perhaps the most authentic presentation of court life in Italy's golden age that we possess. The painter actually witnessed it, and the two main scenes, one outdoors (The Meeting), one indoors (The Signing of the Contract), take us straight into the world of marriage diplomacy, ceremony, intrigue and secret manoeuvering we read about in letters and chronicles. That world was later described by Machiavelli in The Prince and by Castiglione in The Courtier. But Mantegna's cold brush brings it horribly to life. I say horribly because, though there is exquisite beauty in the room, particularly in the rendering of the young, their elders have hearts of ice. ... there are no tricks about the figures, which have a Flemish realism. They are the actual faces of living people--fifteenth-century Italians of the urban, courtly breed, whispering in ready ears, hiding their deepest thoughts, making honeyed speeches, dissimulating and boasting, Cutting a bella figura while keeping their poignards sharp, strutting for effect and feigning every kind of emotion ... As in all Mantegna's works, one learns a great deal because, though a master of illusionistic devices, he always tells the truth.

Truly this man was the Son of God!*

In short, we must dismiss any idea of Jesus being a simple figure. His actions and motives were complex and he taught something which was hard to grasp... How could the intentions of God be conveyed so as to be understood by all men and for all time? Equally, how could any solution contain elements meaningful for all types and temperaments of men, as well as all races and generations: the activist, the militant, the doctrinaire, the ascetic, the obedient, the passive, the angular, the scholar, and the simple-hearted? How could it impart both a sense of urgency and immediacy, and at the same time be valid for all eternity? How could it bring bout, in men's minds, a confrontation with God which was both public and collective, and individual and intimate? How could it combine a code of ethics within a framework of strict justice and a promise of unprecedented generosity? These were only a few of the evangelical problems confronting Jesus. Moreover, he had to resolve them within a preordained series of historical events which could be adumbrated [suggested or disclosed partially] but not forecast and whose necessary enactment would terminate his mission.

A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson

I never looked at Jesus' ministry in those terms. What an impossible task and, yet, He did it perfectly. It just affirms, in my mind, His divinity and God's omnipotence. *Mark 15:39

The Garden of Earthly Delights

(Center panel) The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1504) by Hieronymus Bosch,
the best of his forty works that survive, uniquely combines medieval and renaissance,
horror and humour, religious and secular values, and figures and landscape. (Paul Johnson)

 I read an entire large art book on Bosch and wound up with a real appreciation for his work, as bizarre as it often looks. The author's premise was partly based on disproving what Paul Johnson mentions in his Art: A New History, that Bosch was a member of a quasi-heretical congregation. This was the first time, to be honest, that it occurred to me that these large art books could be written to prove or dispute others' scholarship. Silly of me, I know, since that goes on in every other field so why wouldn't that be the case for art?

At any rate, the point I enjoy the point Johnson makes about how "reading art" was a popular pastime. Popular or not, it's something we've lost in our age and which I appreciate learning a bit about under Johnson's tutelage.

Yet there was laughter in art, even if double-faced. It is a common modern view that Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) painted the horrors of life and death, and aimed to terrify and to enforce repentance, by his alarming compositions. ... But he also aimed to excite, to thrill, to fascinate and to amuse. There is literary evidence, unearthed by the sharp reader of texts as well as pictures Ernst Gombrich, that collectors bought Bosch for that reason. He made them laugh at folly and its consequences, as Hogarth was to do 250 years later. The minute events of his gruesome tales were fantasies and obviously so. Yet by painting them in the Flemish tradition of realism and attention to detail, he made them seem credible at a certain level, and because credible hilarious. So the men laughed uproariously when, alone with their wine, they collectively considered a Bosch work, and put on straight faces and didactic expressions when their women fold appeared and asked to have the painting "explained."

Religion, Government, and de Tocqueville

What makes de Tocqueville's account memorable is the way in which he grasped the moral content of America. Coming from a country where the abuse of power by the clergy had made the anticlericalism endemic, he was amazed to find a country where it was virtually unknown. He saw, for the first time, Christianity presented not as a totalitarian society but as an unlimited society, a competitive society, intimately wedded to the freedom and market system of the secular world. "In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other," he wrote, "but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country." He added: "Religion ... must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of the country for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions." In fact, he concluded, most Americans held religion "to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions." And de Tocqueville noted on an unpublished scrap of paper that, while religion underpinned republican government, the fact that the government was minimal was a great source of moral strength:

One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government (when a people is fortunate enough to be able to do without it, which is rare) is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows from it. Each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all social needs. Man, thus accustomed to seek his well-being only through his own efforts, raises himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and stronger at the same time.

A History of the American People by Paul Johnson

This strikes me as something we all would do well to remember these days.

If Only More Americans Felt This Way

From A History of the American People by Paul Johnson

This book is dedicated to the people of America -- strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.

Dedication

I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the fly-blow philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen. I love them and salute them, and this is this is their story.

From the Preface

How refreshing.

Mr. Lee Wing

Mr. Lee Wing, via Traces of Texas

This is via Traces of Texas which, as far as I am aware, is only on Facebook. For those not on Facebook, here's the story that goes with this wonderful photo.

Circa 1900, Mr. Lee Wing, owner of a Chinese laundry in El Paso. The story of the Chinese in El Paso is not generally known: I will relate it in further detail in a subsequent post. Suffice to say that quite a few Chinese laborers were brought in to build the railroads, particularly in south Texas. When the job was completed, many of them remained in El Paso which, to this day, has a vibrant Chinese community. In fact, if you go to the Concordia cemetery in El Paso, there is a large, walled off, separate section for folks of Chinese descent ----- the only such section that I am aware of in any cemetery in Texas.

Virgin and Child with Saint George and Saint Anthony Abbot

Antonio Pisanello, The Virgin and Child with Saints George and Anthony Abbot
via Wikipedia

[Pisanello's] amazing Saint George in the London National Gallery, in his mostly silver armour, and wearing an enormous straw hat to protect him from the sun-radiance of the Virgin and Child, is the most mannered picture of evil in existence.

Paul Johnson, Art: A New History

I am absolutely captivated by Saint George's hat. I also was struck by the modern feel of the painting in the way the rays of the sun radiate into the atmosphere, causing it to radiate in turn.

Egg Curry

Egg Curry

This is Wikipedia's picture of the day today. Isn't it beautiful? It is also perfect for beginning a Lenten period of fasting from meat every Friday, proving that meatless doesn't mean flavorless.