Posts Tagged ‘Renaissance’
If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled*…
Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks. -Summer Moonshine
From The Drone’s Club the ever-applicable Random Wodehouse Quote Generator…
I suppose I’m one of those fellows my father always warned me against. – Heavy Weather
[via friend KMc; illustration above from Klaus Joynson]
* from Code of the Woosters
###
As we leave it to Jeeves, we might light a birthday candle for Sir Francis Bacon– English Renaissance philosopher, lawyer, linguist, composer, mathematician, geometer, musician, poet, painter, astronomer, classicist, philosopher, historian, theologian, architect, father of modern science (The Baconian– aka The Scientific– Method), and patron of modern democracy, whom some allege was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I of England… but who was in any event born on this date in 1561.
Bacon (whose Essays were, in a fashion, the first “management book” in English) was, in Alexander Pope’s words, “the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced.” He probably did not actually write the plays attributed to Shakespeare (as a thin, but long, line of enthusiasts, including Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche, believed). But Bacon did observe, in a discussion of sedition that’s as timely today as ever, that “the remedy is worse than the disease.”
The Truth, Some of the Truth, Some of the Time…
“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.”
– Abraham Lincoln
from Clayton Cramer, via Tomorrow Museum.
As we engage the elements of epistemology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hal Foster debuted his long-running comic strip Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur, or more familiarly Prince Valiant. Foster had earlier distinguished himself drawing Tarzan; when he pitched his original idea to William Randolph Hearst, the baron was so impressed that he (uncharacteristically) gave Foster full ownership of the strip.
The Arthurian saga is clearly meant to take place in the mid-Fifth century, but Foster juiced both the story and its setting with anachronistic elements: Viking longships, Muslims, alchemists and technological advances not made before the Renaissance all play roles; while many of the the fortifications, armor and armament used are from the High Middle Ages.
The strip continues to this day, now in the hands of Mark Schultz and Gary Gianni… and is available on the verisimilitudinally-challenged internet.
Rotten Tomatoes: the Epistemological Edition…
Special cinematic bonus from Doug and Savage Chicken: All of Chewbacca’s dialogue from Star Wars on a large Post-It Note.
As we remark to ourselves that it’s all just so real, we might recall that it was on this date in 1498 that Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was commissioned to carve a statue for the funeral monument of French cardinal Jean de Billheres, a representative in Rome. We know the result, which was completed in 1499, as the Renaissance masterpiece “La Pietà.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.