Hours of fun!…
Your correspondent is headed out of reliable radio contact for a couple of weeks. Thus today’s post is a pair of tools– perhaps more accurately, mesmerizing toys– to which readers can turn for diversion until June 14 or so, when regular service will resume…
From Anselm Levskaya, a nifty polyhedron construction kit… and for more fun: Levskaya’s “Eschersketch,” a wonderfully-simple tool for creating repetitive geometric designs like this (or a nearly-infinite number of variations thereon):
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As we just doodle it, we might spare a thought for Peter Paul Rubens; he died on this date in 1640. A master of the Flemish Baroque, Rubens was renown for his portraits, landscapes, and history paintings (largely of mythological and allegorical subjects), for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces… and for his fondness for painting full-figured women (to wit, “Rubenesque”). Rubens was born into a Calvinist family, but educated as a Humanist. And while he was a remarkably prolific painter, both personally and via the studio he oversaw in Antwerp, he remained an active scholar and diplomat– for which services he was knighted by both Spain’s Philip IV and England’s Charles I.
Self-portrait, 1623