Art that wants to be free…
Alexander the Great in the Air; Unknown; Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, Europe; about 1400 – 1410 with addition in 1487; Tempera colors, gold, silver paint, and ink on parchment
Early this month, The Getty Museum announced the launch of their Open Content Program, which makes over 4500 images from their collection (including the three examples here) available under an open license– meaning that anyone can share the images freely and without restriction.
Among The Tree Tops Calaveras Grove; Carleton Watkins, American, 1829 – 1916; California, United States, North America; negative about 1878; print 1880 – 1890; Albumen silver print
A Crocodile [as then imagined from reports]; Unknown; England, Europe; about 1250 – 1260; Pen-and-ink drawings tinted with body color and translucent washes on parchment
Visit the Getty’s site to begin exploring. [via Public Domain Review]
###
As we share and share alike, we might send acerbic birthday greetings to journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic Henry Louis “H. L.” Mencken; he was born on this date in 1880. Mencken is the author of the philological work The American Language, and is remembered for his journalism (e.g., his coverage of the Scopes Trial) and for his cultural criticism (and editorship of American Mercury– published by Alfred Knopf, also born on this date, but 12 years after Mencken ) in which he championed such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson. But “H.L.” is probably most famous for the profusion of pointed one-liners and adages that leavened his work…
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
1932 portrait by Carl Van Vechten