"One theory is that he had an abnormally 'quick eye,' capable of isolating moments in time that almost anybody else would miss."

"That might have included the subject of the Mona Lisa just beginning to break into a tentative smile, or the asynchronous beating of a dragonfly’s wings. Jesse Ausubel, a co-founder of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, said: 'We think he saw things that you and I can’t see.'"

From "Leonardo da Vinci was a genius. New DNA tests could finally explain why/An international team of researchers believe the Renaissance master’s DNA could help to explain his extraordinary gifts" (London Times).

If you want to see that he saw things that other people can't see, I think you will.

"This garden is very interesting in that it’s part of a spiritual practice: It’s used for meditation. Moss is very tiny..."

"... and being in the garden, looking so closely to distinguish one type from another, requires a special kind of attention. It opens up a completely different kind of universe."

Said Harvard architecture professor Toshiko Mori, about the Saihoji Kokedera Temple and Moss Garden in Kyoto, quoted in "The 25 Gardens You Must SeeWe asked six horticultural experts to debate and ultimately choose the places that’ve changed the way we look at — and think about — plants" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see all the photos and read about the other gardens).

I love the story of the creation of this garden: "In 1339, Muso Kokushi, a Buddhist high priest and master gardener, created what’s believed to be the first-ever karesansui (dry landscape)... carefully placed rocks and swaths of sand or gravel raked to invoke rippling water... In the nineteenth century, Saihoji was flooded repeatedly when a nearby river overflowed its banks... Rather than fight nature, the monks embraced change... With more than 120 varieties [of moss]... Saihoji looks quite different than it did in Kokushi’s day, but, in the hands of the monks who continue to maintain it, its purpose of encouraging serenity and contemplation hasn’t changed....."

The monks carry on a traditional practice of meditation, bound to this site for 7 centuries. But what would it be for you to drop in one day?

"What is the insecurity, the anxiety, the deficit in our culture today that makes us worship figures like Leonardo?..."

"Leonardo sometimes seems like humanity’s miraculous pet unicorn, a pure and perfect, one-off instantiation of grace, intelligence, superhuman talent and bewildering wisdom. We feed and cosset his memory as if he is the spiritual father of all humanism, art and science, which he wasn’t. If Leonardo invented our world, how bad can that world be?... Near the end of the film, there is brief mention of 19th century rhapsodists... who helped launch Leonardo into the stratosphere of genius, 'lavishing Leonardo’s masterpieces with lyrical praise.' That’s what the film has also been doing for almost four hours. You can never say enough good about Leonardo, which is why it is an entirely uncontroversial cultural exercise to praise him. The work will continue until we actually understand the man, or no longer need his tacit benediction for the civilization we have inherited."

Philip Kennicott in "Ken Burns takes 4 hours to canonize Leonardo da Vinci. He needed only two.The celebrated documentarian turns his lens on the great Renaissance polymath, with mixed results" (WaPo).

Ken Burns things are always extra long. Why complain about this particular lengthiness? It's Burns's style to drag it way out. But Kennicott has a special problem here. It seems to have something to do with the idea that "our world" isn't so great, that "the civilization we have inherited" does not deserve reverence. I don't know if that's what Kennicott thinks or if he's just looking down on the people who feel "anxiety" and "insecurity" and want to be indulged with a vision of human glory. 

"You might recall the epic 2008 Beijing opening ceremony, which showcased the four great Chinese inventions: the compass, gunpowder, paper, and typesetting."

"This one in Paris, put up last Friday, celebrated analogous French contributions like threesomes, the Minions franchise, and dressing like a clown...."

Begins Suzy Weiss, in "Was the Opening Ceremony Demonic, or Just Cringe? Don’t feel bad for Christians—feel bad for the French" (Free Press).

Ha ha. Very well put.

"very shocking & disrespectful to make light of the Feast of Dionysus; deeply offensive to those who have devoted their lives to feasting, drinking, & salacious behavior."

Writes Joyce Carol Oates, tweeting in response to this:

ADDED: "Paris Olympics organisers apologise to Christians for Last Supper parody/Apology follows anger among Catholics and other groups at opening ceremony segment that resembled biblical scene" (The Guardian).

Here are 7 TikToks for your amusement and edification. Let me know what you like best.

1. How she worries people are going to react whenever she arrives anywhere.

2. What Elizabeth Taylor likes about Richard Burton most — his anger.

3. A granddaughter's love.

4. That walking is just too bouncy. It must be punished.

5. The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago.

6. "Inspirational quotes from my 11-year-old on today's hike."

7. "Mona Lisa" transformed into a photographically real-looking face.

"We were like, 'what if he bought it and ate it?'"

Said Kane Powell, author of the petition described in "Why Do People Want Jeff Bezos to Buy and Eat the Mona Lisa?/An online petition that started as a joke has gone viral, becoming a kind of digital performance art piece all of its own" (NYT). 

This article is illustrated with a photo of Jeff Bezos standing next to a portrait of Jeff Bezos. I would rather see closeups of Jeff Bezos and the Mona Lisa side by side, with Bezos looking as much like Lisa as possible. My slapdash effort:

 

Must I go back to the article? Powell's joke is explained pedantically. He's calling attention to "the absurdity of massive amounts of accumulated wealth." Oh, really? We're told the Mona Lisa isn't even up for sale, but if it were, what would it cost, and what would stop the buyer from destroying it? And what is it even made of? Tuna fish?

I swear I wrote that last question — a joke, based on the previous post — before I read this paragraph in the Mona Bezos article:

More recently, in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, the New York artist David Datuna ate the banana in Maurizio Cattelan’s buzzy and high-priced “Comedian.” (He said that “it tasted like $120,000.”) Mr. Datuna also claimed that it wasn’t an act of vandalism, but a performance. “This is the first time where an artist eats the concept of another artist,” he said.

The tuna! 

Was the fly on Mike Pence's hair divine intervention?

This is a question that occurred to me as I was recording my reading of the previous post — "Was there any discussion of 'systemic racism' during the debate?," — which has a bit to say about the fly that landed and lingered on Mike Pence's hair during the debate. It made it hard to listen to what Pence was saying, which I see, reading the transcript, was trenchant and substantive. Was the fly a meaningless, random occurrence or could it have been divine intervention? 

Surely, an omnipotent deity, if He cared about the outcome of American elections, could simply cause the person he wanted to win. Why would he merely put a thumb on the scales as We the People weigh the choices? And such a tiny thumb, a little fly, so lightweight that it made no impression on the mind of Pence as it stood staunchly on the man's silvery coif! He had no idea of that thing as he burbled about respect for our earthly justice system. Yet perhaps it tipped the election. Who can know?!

But I had divine intervention on my mind after what Trump said yesterday (transcript):

Hi, perhaps you recognize me? It’s your favorite president. And I’m standing in front of the Oval Office at the White House... A short 24 hours [after receiving the drug Regeneron], I was feeling great, I wanted to get out of the hospital and that’s what I want for everybody. I want everybody to be given the same treatment as your president because I feel great. I feel like perfect. So I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it. This was a blessing in disguise. I caught it. I heard about this drug. I said, “Let me take it.” It was my suggestion. I said, “Let me take it,” and it was incredible the way it worked.... You’re going to get better. You’re going to get better fast, just like I did. So again, a blessing in disguise....

I blogged that video yesterday, here, and then — because it was thematically relevant — I added video of the aged actress Jane Fonda saying "I just think COVID is God’s gift to the Left." So, people are talking about divine intervention. It's an idea that landed on my head and has been lingering — depositing eggs of ideas, one might say, to extend the metaphor. 

By the way, look what The New Yorker put in its crossword on Monday:

23 Down: "________ Jane, celebrity epithet of 1972." So many possible clues for "Hanoi." They had to want to go there. Is it, for them, just a funny old nugget of pop culture? 

Anyway, back to the question whether divine intervention could come in the form of a fly? I think of the play "The Flies" ("Les Mouches") by Jean-Paul Sartre. This is something that occurred to me as I was reading the previous post out loud, but I couldn't talk about the play off the top of my head — my almost certainly flyless head. I hadn't read it in 50 years. I had to end the recording and find some sort of recap. I'll use this, randomly:

"[Trump's] speech elevated the darkest themes of the convention.... Joe Biden, Mr. Trump said, is a 'Trojan horse for socialism' in whose America 'no one will be safe.'"

"Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) summed it up earlier in the week: 'The woke-topians will . . . disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.' All this scaremongering was accompanied by outright slander of Mr. Biden, against whom Republicans leveled unsubstantiated corruption charges — and whose record and platform alike Mr. Trump distorted into almost a parody of radicalism.... In this fictional realm, a man who lauded white supremacists as 'very fine people' becomes a champion of racial comity, and a leader who ignored warnings about the pandemic actually sets the global standard for disease response.... The conjured specter of widespread 'urban violence,' combined with warnings that the dictatorial Democrats against 'guns, gasoline and God' would force Americans to wear masks, lock them down and keep them from church, may well resonate with people the GOP is aiming to fire up. And the falsely comforting portrait of the president may soothe those the party is hoping to persuade: giving them permission to support someone whose values jar their consciences by pretending his values are something else altogether."

From "Trump desecrates a public monument in the finale to a convention of lies" by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post. Oddly, somebody chose a haloed image of the President to illustrate their condemnation:



I could laugh, but I won't, at "In this fictional realm, a man who lauded white supremacists as 'very fine people'...." WaPo editors speak of Trump's "fictional realm" while plainly displaying themselves as existing in their own fictional realm, the one in which Trump "lauded white supremacists as 'very fine people.'"

The haloed image could be understood as sarcasm. Biden is the light of the world. Trump is darkness. I do think it works to command attention to the hand gesture, because I fell into a reverie about paintings... but which paintings?! I linger over the hand gesture. What paintings am I thinking of? St. Thomas in "The Last Supper"?



"Salvator Mundi"?



Plato in "The School of Athens"?



Or am I supposed to see the white power "OK" sign?

When did political leaders first start showing their teeth in official photographs?

This is a question that occurred to me as I was looking at Wikipedia's list of Vice Presidents of the United States to try to answer a question I had about former Vice Presidents who run for the presidency.

Most of these VPs are not smiling at all, and it seems that only a hint of a smile seemed consistent with the exercise of political power. They look grumpy to us today, but presumably the idea was to look completely serious. We expect smiles now. The emergence of teeth comes in 1953 with Richard Nixon, a person whose smile made many people uneasy and suspicious, oddly enough.

Here's the list of U.S. Presidents, with their official pictures. The first one to smile showing teeth is JFK. Beginning with Gerald Ford in 1974, all the Presidents are smiling showing teeth, except one — Barack Obama.

The baring of teeth is a serious matter. How and when did it become part of a nice, warm smile? "How Did the 'Smile' Become a Friendly Gesture in Humans?" (Scientific American):

Anthony Stocks, chairman and professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, responds: "The evolution of smiles is opaque and, as with many evolutionary accounts of social behavior, fraught with just-soism. Among human babies, however, the 'tooth-baring' smile is associated less with friendship than with fright--which, one might argue, is related to the tooth-baring threats of baboons. On the other hand, a non-toothy, not-so-broad-but-open-lipped smile is associated with pleasure in human infants. Somehow we seem to have taken the fright-threat sort of smile and extended it to strangers as a presumably friendly smile. Maybe it is not as innocent as it seems. All cultures recognize a variety of mouth gestures as indexes of inner emotional states. As in our own culture, however, smiles come in many varieties, not all of them interpreted as friendly."

Here's "When did humans start to smile?" by Professor Antony Manstead (British Academy):

When did everyone decide that the photo angle for a selfie was from the perspective of someone looking down on me?

Look, it's Joe Biden, doing what I think was once just a silly, vain thing for young women to do:



I know people look saggy and grumpy looking down into their phones. I was just commenting on that here, where a NYT photographer had captured people at a Biden event looking "dull and inert" in part because some were staring down into their iPhones.

But just because looking down is bad doesn't mean you've got to go to the opposite extreme. Traditionally, a portrait is done looking pretty much straight into the subject's eyes:



Seeing eye to eye is an expression that means agreement. (That expression probably first appeared in English in translations of the Bible: "For they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion" (Isaiah 52:8, King James Bible).) Isn't that sense of agreement — and equality and harmony — something a politician should want?

My screen capture of Joe Biden comes from a WaPo front-page teaser for "Trump says Biden ‘deserted’ Pennsylvania. In Scranton, he’s a ‘hometown boy.’" As the article points out, Biden's father — looking for better job opportunities — moved the family from Scranton to Wilmington, Delaware when young Joe was only 10. So it was kind of jerky for Trump to say to the crowd at yesterday's rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania last night, "Biden deserted you. I guess he was born here, but he left you, folks. He left you for another state."

Biden will be stressing his Pennsylvanianess, of course, over his Delawareness, because Pennsylvania is a big swing state and Delaware is a tiny blue state. And Trump will be antagonizing him on that subject: "This guy talks about ‘I know Scranton.’ Well, I know the places better. He left you for another state and he didn’t take care of you, because he didn’t take care of your jobs." That is, the question isn't where a candidate has his personal roots, but what did he do for the people of that place? Biden was a Senator and — aside from the fact that he represented Delaware — he was in a position for a long long time to push for policies that would help the people of the states he now needs to vote for him, and — as Trump puts it — "he didn’t take care of you, because he didn’t take care of your jobs."

Biden's father is responsible for the family's move. That's not on Biden. But Biden's father was in search of a job, and that's a basis for caring deeply about the loss of job opportunity in Pennsylvania. How did that motivate Biden as he lived out his political career? That's a good question, and it's not answered by going on about Biden being a Scranton guy at heart.

"Now the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s failure to exhibit 'Salvator Mundi' as promised has revived doubts about whether it is Leonardo’s at all..."

"... with skeptics speculating that the new owner may fear public scrutiny.... Others have argued that the painting was so extensively restored by Professor Modestini that it is as much her work as Leonardo’s," the NYT reports in "A Leonardo Made a $450 Million Splash. Now There’s No Sign of It."

Believed to have been painted around 1500, “Salvator Mundi” was one of two similar works listed in an inventory of the collection of King Charles I of England after his execution in 1649, Professor [Martin] Kemp said. But the painting disappeared from the historical record in the late 18th century.

The painting sold at the record auction later turned up in the collection of a 19th-century British industrialist. It had been so heavily painted over that “it looked like a drug-crazed hippie,” Professor Kemp said, and it was attributed at the time to one of Leonardo’s followers. In 1958, it was sold out of that collection for the equivalent of $1,350 in today’s dollars.

The claim that the painting was the work of Leonardo himself originated after a pair of dealers spotted it at an auction in New Orleans in 2005 and brought it to Professor Modestini of N.Y.U.

She stripped away overpainting, repaired damage made by a split in the wood panel, and restored details. Among other things, one of Jesus’s hands appeared to have two thumbs, possibly because the artist changed his mind about where the thumb should be and painted over the original thumb. It had been exposed by scraping later on, and Professor Modestini covered the thumb she believed Leonardo did not want.

Here's a time-lapse view of the restoration, beginning with the "drug-crazed hippie" and ending with Professor Modestini's vision:

"Da Vinci is believed to have had a condition called intermittent exotropia — commonly referred to as being 'walleyed' — a form of strabismus, eye misalignment..."

"... that affects about 4 percent of the U.S. population. Those with exotropia usually end up favoring one eye over the other, which means they are more likely to see the world as if it were, say, painted on a flat canvas. 'When they’re in that condition . . . they’re only seeing the world monocularly, with much reduced depth cues,' the study’s author, Christopher Tyler, a professor at City University of London and researcher at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, told The Washington Post. 'The image they’re seeing is much closer to what they want to paint on the canvas.' ... But in da Vinci’s case, the painter was, at times, able to control his wandering eye, which in turn provided him with an artistic advantage, Tyler said, noting that the ability to switch between the two perspectives meant that da Vinci would 'be very aware of the 3-D and 2-D depth cues and the difference between them.' Tyler, who has studied da Vinci’s life for more than 20 years, said he started noticing the disorder’s telltale sign while examining works by both the artist himself and those done of him. In many cases, 'they had the eyes diverted,' he said. 'This is something I would notice, what I’m attuned to notice,' said Tyler, who specializes in studying binocular vision.... Previous studies analyzing eye alignment in self-portraits have suggested that painters such as Rembrandt, Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso were also strabismic."

From "Leonardo da Vinci’s genius may be rooted in a common eye disorder, new study says" (WaPo).

A Picasso self-portrait:



What has he done to his eyes? Perhaps less than it appears.

"When a mother branch branches in two daughter branches..."

"... the diameters are such that the surface areas of the two daughter branches, when they sum up, is equal to the area of the mother branch."

Leonardo's observation, verified.

"I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use."

"And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense....  I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may."

From the cover letter of Leonardo da Vinci, age 30.