"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
The artist of this painting was born at Alexandria, Egypt, from English parents but he spent most of his childhood in American after his father died and his mother moved closer to her family. He was adopted by his aunt after his mother died too,...
[caption id="attachment_17027" align="aligncenter" width="550"] The Mermaid 1882 Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt 1833-1898 Bequeathed by Miss Katharine Elizabeth Lewis 1961 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00457[/caption] In 1880 Burne-Jones acquired a second home at Rottingdean, near Brighton, to which he often retreated from the bustle of London. Encouraged by his proximity...
Piero della Francesca was born in Borgo San Sepolcro, Tuscany, in 1412. This will be important later. After spending decades honing his craft, he was hailed as both a great mathematician and an unparalleled painter, celebrated for his mastery of light and space. If we understand...
We're taking the run-up to prepare for April 15th, when Impressionism will celebrate 150 years from its conventional birth. It was April 15th 1874 in fact, at the studio of photographer Félix Nadar in 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, when the group of rascals later...
New rejection, new book on Patreon! Florence Marryat (1833-1899) was a British author and actress, and perhaps one of the most underrated figures in the Victorian era. Born the daughter of famed naval captain and novelist Frederick Marryat, Florence's life was marked by both privilege and upheaval....
Manea was an Etruscan goddess of the dead, of spirits and of chaos, of Oscan origin, associated with the Genetai group. Later Latin mythology incorporated her into their systems of belief, making her the mother of ghosts, of the undead, the night spirits, the Lares...
I was finally able to present my Patrons with a digitised, free version of one of the most underrated and yet more significant works by Jules Verne: The Castle of the Carpathians. Published five years before Bram Stoker consigned Transylvania to the public's imagination as a...
Last week I got another rejection and I wanted to give my Patrons one of the classical Gothic books I'm annotating but it isn't ready yet, so we'll settle for another bunch of folktales collected by Grazia Deledda and translated by yours truly. Whom, as...
Eurynome was an Ancient Greek deity traditionally connected with water, whose cult has been discovered near the confluence of the Neda and the Lymax rivers, down in Peloponnesus. She's called an Oceanid by Pausanias, and her representation resembles a mermaid. Though Robert Graves offers us a...
Nun-gal, literally the Great Princess, was a Sumerian goddess of prisons, mercy and the underworld, worshipped in the Third Dynasty of Ur (Neo-Sumerian Empire, from 2112 to 2004 BC) in cities such as Nippur, Lagash, Umma, Susa, and Ur itself. Today on my Patreon, we take a...
