A Photographic Memory of Art

1914: The Arrest of Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip is unintentionally one of the most influential people of the 20th century. The 19-year-old Serbian student started World War I by pulling the trigger on Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. After shooting Franz Ferdinand and his Duchess Sophie von Chotkovato, Princip–the member of the Black Hand organization, tried to shoot himself. A man behind him saw what he was doing, and seized Princip’s right arm. A couple of policeman joined the struggle and Princip was arrested. The above photo, one of the biggest photodocumentary scoops of the century was born as Princip was being led to a police station. After a 12-day murder trial in Sarajevo in October 1914, Princip was sentenced to 20 years, the maximum penalty since he was younger than 20 when he committed his crime. Probably tubercular before his imprisonment, he had an arm amputated because the disease spread to the bone. He died in hospital in April 1918.

1933: Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the social condition as a result of the Depression. Exhausted from photographing farms in Nipomo, California, Lange turned down a dirt road to investigate a migrant camp of pea pickers. In less than fifteen minutes, Lange was back on the road after making five exposures of a woman (Florence Thompson) and her children in the camp. She submitted one of these images (titled Migrant Mother) to her agency. The image put a face to the Great Depression, and became its symbol as well as one of the most iconic and important photographs in the history of photography.

1944: Cartier-Bresson’s Matisse

Henry Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Henri Matisse is fully of ironies. The great French painter, known for his use of color and called Fauve (wild beast) is depicted in black and white, surrounded by birds. Moreover, the photograph does not show energetic, vivid Matisse remembered by many of his contemporaries. Although it is taken in 1944, ten years before the master’s death, Matisse was already a broken man. In 1939, he and his wife of 41 years separated. In 1941, he underwent a colostomy, which confined him to a wheelchair. His daughter is a captive in a Nazi concentration camp. The photograph showed all these ravages. Cartier-Bresson and Matisse remained good friends–when Cartier-Bresson published his seminal book, The Decisive Moment, Matisse drew the cover for him. 

1945: Potsdam Conference

When the Great Powers assembled in the conference room at Potsdam’s Cecilienhof palace in July 1945, it was without doubt that a Quadripartition of Germany was imminent. The conference’s progress had been hindered by the change in the British government and by Stalin’s illness, but the end result was certain on everyone’s mind. The U.S. Army photographer Frank Gatteri’s picture of the council room at Potsdam reflected this atmosphere. Unlike any other photograph of the event, Gatteri took this picture from a high vantage point, revealing all parties’ cards and reminding the viewers the earlier cartoons of partitioning nations. Josef Stalin is the only figure distinctly recognizable in this figure–it is as if Gatteri foresaw that the shadow of Uncle Joe would be upon Eastern Europe even after the other people around the table (Truman, Attlee, Eden, Byrnes) were gone. 

1949: Picasso in Madoura

“Why not have him draw in the dark, with a light instead of a pencil?”  mused the photographer Gjon Mili as he was on his way to the Riviera to photograph the painter Pablo Picasso. At Madoura Pottery, Mill accomplished just that; he showed Picasso some of his photographs of light patterns formed by a skater’s leaps – obtained by affixing tiny lights on the points of the skates. Picasso reacted instantly and this photo of Pablo Picasso drawing a centaur in the air,  taken in the dark with a flashlight, was born. ‘This spectacular “space drawing” is a momentary happening inscribed in thin air with a flashlight in the dark – an illumination of Picasso’s brilliance set off by the spur of the moment,’ wrote Mill in “Picasso’s Third Dimension”.  

1954: A Man of Mercy

W. Eugene Smith took a magnificent photoessay for LIFE in 1954. A Man of Mercy, which chronicled Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s humanitarian work in French Equatorial Africa is at times controversial because Smith used his darkroom prowess to manipulate and composite negatives. [See Schweitzer's famous portrait, where a second negative of the hand and saw is superimposed on the first] However, in the above photo, the photography plays a second fiddle to the documentary–Schweitzer tired after a hard-day’s work is seen working back to his quarters. In the foreground play the Africans who contrast sharply with the white-washed tents Schweitzer set up in Lambaréné. It is a documentary of what a true Christian Empire looks like.    

1959: Eisenhower at the Lincoln Centre

During Robert Moses’ program of urban renewal in the early 1960s, a consortium of New Yorker led by John D. Rockefeller III started ”Lincoln Square Renewal Project” to transform the place into New York’s new cultural centre. Thus, Lincoln Center was born. On May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower thrust a shovel into the ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to signal the start of construction. The occasion was lavishly commemorated. Leonard Bernstein was the master of ceremonies; the New York Philharmonic (which Rockefeller lured away from its old venues at the Carnegie Hall) and Juilliard Chorus performed the national anthem. The baritone Leonard Warren sang the prologue to Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.” The mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens sang the “Habanera” from Bizet’s “Carmen.” 

1966: Chagall at the Lincoln Centre

In this photo of Sept. 8, 1966, the painter Marc Chagall poses by his mural “Le Triumphe de la Musique,” The Triumph of Music, during the unveiling ceremonies in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, in New York. Through the transparent windowpanes of the building, The Sources of Music in yellow (right) and The Triumph of Music in red (left) dominate the frontal view of the opera house. Although specifically created for the opera house, there were various autobiographical elements by Chagall in those paintings. Only at night, the murals are on view. During the day they are covered with white sheets in order to protect them from the sun. 

1974: Nixon in the Knesset

Richard Nixon disliked Jews and may even have been anti-Semitic. However, in Israel, Nixon is fondly remembered for his role in saving Israel in the dark days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. When Israel had run dangerously low on ammunition during the war, Nixon sent planeload after planeload to resupply the depleted Israeli military stocks. The relations between Nixon and Golda Meir remained strong throughout their administrations. In June 1974, Nixon visited Prime Minister Rabin–the first visit by an American President to Israel. Under central tapestry which depicts the history of the Israelites from Moses to the Holocaust in the Chagall Hall, the President spoke to the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset. The picture by Harry Benson shows the president being upstaged and propped simultaneously by Moses who is seemingly preaching the Law to the beleaguered President, who will resign a few months later.

 

Coal Day In Hell

Coal is not good. Coal has no future. Yet, its Frankensteinian corpse is being revitalized by lawmakers and  the future of the coal industry is not as grim as it should be. So we dig for coal, and in process, we dig our own graves.

Coal is not good. Its difficulty to mine, transport and noxious burning severely limited coal’s widespread use when it was first discovered in pre-Industrial times. However, since then, our economies has dramatically shifted and now coal is the power behind many a developing nation. However, coal costs only 4 cents per kW-hour, which is the cheapest among all the alternative fuels if you exclude hydroelectricity (which is not really abundant). In comparison, natural gas and nuclear power costs 5 cents/kWh and wind costs 7 cents/kWh while solar energy costs whooping 50 cents/kWh. Coal’s relative cheapness becomes more apparent if one takes its energy density into account-energy from coal is roughly one-tenth the cost per unit mass as oil or natural gas (see Robert Zubrin’s Energy Victory, 2007).

In 2004, the New York Times ran an article, “Fuel of the Future? Some Say Coal,” which discusses the possibilities of lucrative investments in newly resurgent coal sector. Although policy uncertainty poses big risks for such investments in the coal industry, the investors are banking on the fact that the U.S. government would be unwilling/unable to take punitive actions against the coal industry.

Currently, America is driven by its own energy thirst. Although America’s own dependence on coal is not as serious as those of growing, developing Asian countries, the U.S’s own national security is at the stake with coal. As the possessor of the world’s largest hard coal reserves, the United States would not–and could not–let the industry die. After the September 11 attacks, the coal industry gained support from the American government which aimed to reduce its dependence on the Middle East Oil. 

Bureaucracy kept coal alive. Current Energy Secretary Stephan Chu once said, ‘Coal is My Worst Nightmare’. On the campaign trail, Obama was under criticism for saying that new coal plants will face bankruptcy unless they account for the future. However, now Washington, both of them have changed their tunes and seem to have espoused Bush’s Clean Coal Doctrine.  

Coal being such an important political, economical and social issue, it is not very surprising that there are attempts to make coal producing and coal consuming more palatable. At the forefront is the ambitiously titled “Clean Coal” initiative, supported by President George W. Bush and quickly endorsed by both Senators McCain and Obama during the election season last year. However, as the Sierra Club’s director Dan Becker pointed out, ‘clean coal’ is an ‘oxymoron’. The industry use the term to loosely refer to the number of technologies being developed to reduce the negative externalities of the coal usage. Burning coal produces chemical impurities (carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, etc) which intoxicate the environment by poisoning water supplies, polluting air and creating acid rains. Chemically washing minerals from the coal, capturing noxious emissions and storing them, and dewatering coal are a few methods proposed for clean coal but they are merely cures but not preventions.

The most vocal clean coal technology (and lobby, one is tempted to add) concerns removing of ash, soot and other particulates from the exhaust of the coal-fired generators, and desulfurization. However, after carbon capture and storage or IGCC installations, the cost of coal power will be raised by 40-90 percent (Sierra Club statistics). If this is the case, natural gas and nuclear power seem better alternatives. Even if American aid goes to clean emerging Asian coal plants, retrofitting old plants is a costly, efficiency-reducing and long-term process. In addition, ‘clean coal’ initiative blithely ignores other devastations caused by coal mining and transportation not to mention toxic ground water caused by the chemicals used in mining and bitumen.

In addition, coal advocates predicts the future as if the coal reserves of the world are limitless. This is not the case–if coal is produced at the current rates, the U.S. reserves would last only sixty four years. 

There are no real solutions to the coal dilemma–increasing the efficiency of the coal power plants fall under the umbrella of the clean coal, but a better alternative is to create internal market for carbon sequestration through cap-and-trade system. Carbon tax is an effective blanket tax on all emissions, but the political feasibility of such a tax is near zero. However, coal usage could be gradually phased out in the United States; first old coal power plants where there is extremely high cost for limited benefit can be effortlessly shut down. New coal plants should go through a thorough federal scrutiny and should be forced to use cleaner and more efficient method so the production will be economically unprofitable. However, in the other countries (especially China), such a control would be impossible. 

So the next time someone say we must find the new alternative energies to break oil addition, please be aware that we must break coal addiction too. Coal is not a substitute for oil, and coal addiction is not the substitute for oil addiction.

Three Photos, Three Wars

The Death of A Loyalist Militiaman

This picture of the Loyalist Militiaman is a photo taken by Robert Capa for the French magazine Vu. Although it is taken during the height of the Spanish Civil War, the photo is not about the Civil War itself. The vacant spaces make up the majority of the picture. The main focus is on the man-one Federico Borreli Garcia-but his identity or those of his executioners matter a little in this deeply impersonal photo . He is fighting against the forces he neither control nor see-a war that is so removed from his everyday life, and one that is so removed for the viewers too. 

The picture is not about the war’s destructiveness-the face of the falling soldier is almost relieved. Even the ravaged countryside of Spain is not showing in the picture. The picture is not about the physical warfare-amazingly absent from the picture are mortars, armies or other accessories of war. The picture is about the void it creates, the catharsis it provides from life and especially its mysterious presence (or lack thereof). War is vilified in the picture, not through visual blood or gore, but through its absence and the silent and subtle nob to man’s nature to fear the Great Unknown.

The Execution of A Vietcong Guerilla

There were a lot of pictures taken during the Vietnam War-those of burning monks, fallen soldiers and whirling helicopters. But this picture by Eddie Adams is the one that defined the conflict and changed history. In the sharp contrast with Capa’s Falling Solider, personalities and identities did matter a lot in this picture. Amazingly, the picture that polarized the American public and shown the personal nature of the Vietnam War did not involved any Americans. It was the gunshot heard all over the world.

It is almost dehumanizing to personally witness the execution, no matter what the victim had done. It mattered a little that the person about to be executed was a Viet Cong Guerrilla responsible for killing twelve only that fateful morning. America–a nation that still supports death penalty by overwhelming numbers (for various reasons)–was shocked to its core.  In the picture, its framing, its lighting and its depth mattered little. For instance, picture was cropped again and again just to display the general and his victim. However, the act, ‘the thing itself’ spoke directly–the general is the personification of America’s hidden hand and her dirty involvement in the Vietnam Quagmire. Within two months, President Johnson would be announcing his desire not to pursue a second time. 

Exposing of A Gestapo Informer

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the greatest photographers of our time. He himself was a German prisoner-of-war and successfully escaped to France only on his third attempt. His photograph from inside Dessau exposed the society’s collective anguish in the aftermath of a war. It was a deeply personal photograph for him, and he ensured that it is a personal photograph for every viewer. 

In a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate. The faces are the most striking part of this photo. On them are the judge’s aplomb, the denouncer’s rage, the Gestapo informer’s resignation, and faces of apathy and anger that frame the picture. The picture draws the audience into that anguished circle of the wronged. Had Cartier-Bresson been a painter, these would have been the allegories of Rage and Shame standing before Justice with a Greek chorus in the background. And we are that Greek Chorus. The intimate circle ensured that we share not only Agony, but also Shame and Responsibilities in the Aftermath of a War.

 

The Greatest Story Ever Sold

On Easter Sunday, one of the most mystifying of all the Christian holidays, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ–a semi-legendary man who may or may not have lived in Judaea two thousand years ago. To what extent is the story of Jesus original and true? To what extent is the story embellished or contrived? 

A lot of pre-Christian customs were adopted by Christianity, because eradicating them will only alienate the people whom they are trying to sermonize. It is not coincidence that one of the earliest writers of Christianity, St. Jerome was a pagan scholar and theologian. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible–amalgamation of truth and fiction, pagan and Christian is to this day the authoritative Bible of the Catholic Church. Jerome and other founders of the Church outlined one important part of Christian belief: that there is some good in everything, and that in general things can be redeemed instead of being destroyed.

So old customs remained. Easter Bunny–the pagan symbol of vernal fertility–being just one example. The Easter Bunny joins other esteemed figures like God himself in the pantheon of pagan symbols.

Six thousand years of Bibical narrative looks down upon the visitors in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. The most striking figure is of God himself, lushly illustrated by Michelangelo, as the wizened, muscular old man. The Bible said nothing about God being an anthropomorphic being. Judaism and Islam both rejected this representation of God. Christianity drew its inspiration of God from the ancient Hebrew god which appears to have originally been a local, tribal storm god and some polytheistic tradition. Muscular, bearded Zeus, the pinnacle of Greek god hierarchy served as a model for Christian God. Like Zeus, Christian God attempted to remove humanity from the face of the Earth by sending a flood.

And Christianity’s most famous symbol, the Cross? It is not original either. One of the most enduring human symbol, the cross quadrants the world into four elements and four cardinal points. The union of vertical divinity and horizontal secularism is frequently the symbol of Egyptian deities (compare Ankh) and Norse gods alike. The cross represented (and represents) the tree of life, and its usual portrayal inside the sun in Prehistoric Europe suggests its comparability to the yin-yang symbol of the Orient.

The arrival of baby Jesus (as the King of the Jews) was announced to the King of Judea Herod the Great by the Magi. To prevent his throne being challenged, Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, creating an event now known as the Massacre of the Innocents. This episode, not recorded by any contemporary historian, is pure hagiography, which gave Christianity its first martyrs. The story drew its inspiration from the another earlier Biblical tale in the Exodus about the killing of the Hebrew firstborn by Pharaoh prior to the birth of Moses. This extremely suspicious description linking Christianity and Islam–the Moses stroy was recounted in the Quran too–was a trite literary trope. A similar story on Mordred’s birth appeared in the Arthurian legends but the source is thought to be the 7th century BC biography of Sargon of Akkad, who lived in the 24th century BC.

As predicted or annunciated (the birth of a religious leader of some importance, be it Buddha or Mohammed is usually uncannily foretold), Jesus did arrived through virgin birth. An oxymoron which laid the foundation for the Catholicism is by no means unique to Christianity. It is a long standing tradition burrowed from earlier polytheistic traditions where badly-behaving gods go about in assumed forms to impregnate women. Zeus was notorious for it; Hinduism is full of it and the practice is even observed with the Aztecs. The Zoroastrians furthered copied the concept from the Christians to elevate their prophet who lived in the 6th Century BC to divinity.

The New Testament doesn’t not give a date for the birth of Jesus. The first authority to date Jesus’s birth was the 3rd century scholar Sextus Julius Africanus, who conviniently placed the Annunciation on the spring equinox (March 25 on the Roman Calendar) and the birth on Sol Invintus, the feast-day of the unconquered Sun and of several gods associated with Winter Solstice in many pagan traditions. [Sol Invintus is a Syrian god later adopted as the chief god of the Roman Empire under Emperor Aurelian.]

If there was one single person primarily responsible for the fundamental feast days of Christianity, it was Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor, who in 321AD introduced Christmas as an immovable feast on 25 December. He introduced movable feasts (Easter) and also designated Sunday as a holy day in a new 7-day week. Sunday, the typical day for the sun worship, was chosen for obscure reasons but the Bible itself vacillated between Friday, Saturday and Sunday in its descriptions of the Holy Day. (Some contend that Sunday was chosen because it was on a Sunday that the Resurrection occurred; the crucifixion indeed occurred on a Friday and the Resurrection indeed is recorded on the third day, but it being a Sunday depends on how you count).

Christianity drew inspiration from other pagan religions and sometimes try to show its superiority over the earlier polytheistic beliefs by uniting their selling points. Christian notions of eating and drinking the “flesh” and “blood” of Jesus were influenced by the cult of Dionysus–a mystery religious cult very important in Asia Minor and Greece. Dionysus, the God of Wine and Bacchanalia, is also thought to be the inspiration behind Jesus’ Marriage at Cana, which was only once reported in the Gospels despite its apparent importance. At the festival of Dionysus, three water pots are placed in a sealed room and the following day be found to miraculously be filled with wine. Dionysus’ feast day is on January 6th, and the Marriage at Cana took place on the same day.

Ever story needs a villain and Judas provided color to Jesus’s hagiography. Judas is the 13th person to sit at the Last Supper–bringing misfortune to the number. Twelve-Thirteen Dilemma Effected many an early religion and still have its discernible impact today. Loki in the Norse mythology is also the 13th god–and in order to be 12th, he engineered the murder of Baldr, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. Twelve, the dozen, is universally regarded as a perfect number–there were twelve Olympians for instance. By outcasting Judas, the Christianity incorporates the magic of the numbers into its religious diktats.

The Greatest Story Ever Told ends with a cinematic climax–the Resurrection of Jesus. Human beings’ fascination with death and afterlife ensured that this too is neither original nor revolutionary. The resurrection is expected on the humanity–like one enormous zombie uprising–on the Judgement Day, by both Judaism and Christianity. However, the idea of gods leaving their bodies behind or resurrecting comes down from ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis (who receives this divinity through tyet–a comparable symbol to crucifixion cross). Isis also resurrected her husband Osiris (who has been killed in an episode mirroring Cane and Abel) who like Jesus died again soon afterwards. As late as 6th century AD, the believers equally venerated Osiris and Jesus in Egypt.

Jesus’ face itself is based on one of history’s most depraved. Since the Middle Ages, art was considered as religious expression, and the Borgia family was notorious for painting themselves into the Biblical milieux. Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI became a Cardinal at 17, a commander in the Papal Army, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and many other artists. Many of his contemporaries have left varying descriptions on Cesare’s appearance, but the celebrated portrait by Altobello Melone which depicts pondering and placid man belies Cesare’s bloodthirsty and depraved nature inside. However, when Altobello Melone painted his Christ figure in 1520, he drew inspiration from his earlier Cesare Borgia portrait, inadvertently blurring the distinctions between the visages and the ethnicities of one of history’s one holiest figures and one of its most depraved.

Jesus is succeeded by Peter, and other shepherds of the Church. No matter whether Jesus himself existed or not, his successors embellished his story (and history) to an extent that if Jesus were to return today, he will be flabbergasted–for instance, pagan or not, Christmas is now belongs to another latecomer with dubious background, Santa Claus. The fact is that we have been sheep for more than two millennia. Like sheep, we are being herded and chased into following someone, going somewhere, and giving something. May be it is time to rebel against that dogma most famously outlined in Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd.” I alone should be my own shepherd.

Little Things That Changed History

From Roman Chariots to Modern Railroad

The distance between the rails on a railroad (also called a gauge) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. This awkward distance comes from the length wide enough to accommodate the back-end of two horses. Yes, the first military vehicle to be mass-produced was the Imperial Roman Chariot, and they were specifically made to be just wide enough to accommodate two horses’ asses. When Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe for their legions, they built in ruts into the road. Rome may be long gone, but the rut remained and every man and every wagon maker since has been using the Roman rut distance for their wheels and axles. From wagon, the practice was transferred into trams and then into the modern railroads. Such was the power of tradition and human reluctance to change/adapt.

1st Century AD: Lead pipes fell the Roman Empire

A lot of causes has been cited at the source of the decline and the fall of the Roman Empire–decadence, incompetency of the latter empires, and internal strife. However, it seems that lead, the noxious metal the Romans used in water pipes and bath linings, was behind the fall of one of history’s greatest empires. Musonius, a Roman writing in the first century A.D., observed that masters were weaker, less healthy and less able to endure labor than the servant class. What Musonius didn’t guess was that the mysterious maladies were coming from the lead in food, water and wine. To boil crushed grapes, vintners insisted on using lead pots or lead-lined copper kettles for the best quality. Lead’s sweetness complemented food as well–the metal was used in one-fifth of the 450 recipes in a Roman Cookbook, complied by the gourmet Apicius. It was also used in the cosmetics. However, its toxicity and abilities to cause mental instability and impotency overlooked, lead would go on to play a major role well into the middle ages–its crowning achievement being the moveable type.

1347: Bubonic Plague kills Latin

There were many epidemics that plagued the Middle Ages, but not many epidemics were as devastating as the Black Death that occurred in the 14th century. Carried by the Mongols, who had been invading Eastern Europe for the past century, the first outbreak was recorded among the Tatar army ranks besieging the Genoese city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347. Over the next three years, the Bubonic Plague will sweep nearly every corner of Europe, killing a third of the population. The plague also set in motion one of the greatest linguistic transformation in history. Among the people who suffered the worst were the clergyman, who lived in close quarters in monasteries and attended their dying parishioners. Half of the Latin-speaking clergy died. Semi-literate laymen replaced these clergy, which hastened the fading of Latin and the rise of vernacular English, French, Spanish as languages of learning. Germany received the worst of the plague and it stunted the development of the German language. In addition, after the plague, the dwindling population demanded higher wages, consolidated wealth and broke free from the old feudal system. The new middle class and its vernacular language slwoly gained economic and social importance.

1415: Rain wins the Battle of Agincourt

Much has been written about the Battle of Agincourt–the stunning English victory over a larger French army in the Hundred Year’s War–starting with Shakespeare’s Henry V. Centuries of politicians and military strategists extolled this as a victory of both leadership and technology (longbow). However, it was another factor that played a bigger role in that fateful October day, 1415. Indeed, the odds were against the English – the troops were exhausted, hungry, and dysentery-ridden. Also the night before battle, heavy downpour left the English soaking wet. However, the rain was a blessing in disguise. It turned the battlefield into a quagmire. Having no cavalry of his own, Henry V was unperturbed, but the French cavalry, weighed down with heavy armour, were bogged down. The horses lost their footing in the mud and fell or ran into each other. They became an easy prey to Henry’s longbows, and within a few hours, a victory was secured. Above, central panel of ”The Battle of Agincourt” the triptych by Donato Giancola (2007).

1519: The Plague that Gave Us Bread and Butter

In 1519, Polish forces were besieged in the fortified town of Allenstein, a Polish town on the Prussian border. During the siege, the town was struck by a plague–a plague that comes from a contamination in bread supply. Sanitary conditions in the town were very bad, and the coarse black loaves were usually dropped in the dirty streets. However, luckily for the town, the noted scientist Nicolaus Copernicus [above] was in the vicinity. A man named Gerhard Glickselig suggested to Copernicus that the bread loaves be colored with a thin layer of light-colored spread, which would make it obvious if the bread was dropped or if debris fell on it. Copernicus ordered it be done, and the plague soon ended. For the first time in history, bread and butter were combined and the custom slowly spread in Europe during the following century.

1520: Jesus got his image from Cessre Borgia

Since the Middle Ages, art was considered as religious expression, and the Borgia family was notorious for painting themselves into the Biblical milieux. Some pictures of Jesus Christ produced in their time were based on Cesare Borgia, and that this in turn has influenced images of Jesus produced since that time. Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI became a Cardinal at 17, a commander in the Papal Army, a patron of Leonardo da Vinci and many other artists. Many of his contemporaries have left varying descriptions on Cesare’s appearance, but the celebrated portrait by Altobello Melone which depicts pondering and placid man belies Cesare’s bloodthirsty and depraved nature inside. However, when Altobello Melone painted his Christ figure in 1520, he drew inspiration from his earlier Cesare Borgia portrait, inadvertently blurring the distinctions between the visages and the ethnicities of one of history’s one holiest figures and one of its most depraved. [Above, Christ is the leftmost figure in Melone's Walk to Emmaus. Cesare is painted by Melone on right.]

1648: Dwaves to Democracy

One of history’s most dramatic entourages was maintained by Ferdinando I and Francesco II, brothers and dukes of Mantua in the early 17th century. Their penchant was for dwarves. In the process of collecting them, they managed to bankrupt the Mantuan state. Their family, the Gonzagas, had amassed what was at the time probably the greatest private art collection ever assembled. To pay for their dwaves, they had to sell the art. The buyer was Charles I of England. He wasn’t on very good terms with Parliament, and the purchase of the Gonzaga art collection helped put him over the line into the red, triggering the English Civil War. So constitutional government in the Sceptered Isle rests, in a way, on a pair of Italian princes’ insatiable need for dwarves.

1715: Nature Gives Us Stradivarii

Scientists for decades have been trying to explain superb sound quality behind violins of Antonio Stradivari. A group of American scientists claim that a drop in temperatures between 1645 and 1715 (because of a reduction in sunspots and solar inactivity known as the Maunder Minimum) enhanced the quality of wood from which the instruments were crafted. These factors slowed tree growth, thereby creating the ideal building material for violins later manufactured according to the tree ring science journal Dendrochronologia. This also explains why history’s most famous violinmakers—Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari—all hail from the 17th and early 18th centuries. Other contending theories however state that Stradivari and his contemporaries used a special varnish (the secret of which has been lost today), or that the wood was chemically treated, soaked in water, specially dried, or stored for long periods of time.

1862: Close but No Cigar

The bloodiest one-day battle in American history came on September 17, 1862 when some 24,000 soldiers died in the clash between Union and Confederate troops at Antietam Creek. The battle’s outcome was decided by McClellan’s ability to predict the Confederate Army’s movements–however, McClellan got his help from three cigars. Yes, the outcome of the battle and of the Civil War was decided by three lost cigars being discovered in a field. A Union solider discovered Special Order 191 wrapped around three cigars; the order noted Lee’s army’s movements. Although McClellan waited long enough to lose the opportunity to defeat Lee decisively, Antietam became the first battle in which Lee’s army had been denied its main objective. Lincoln decided to release the Emancipation Proclamation only after the Union victory at Antietam. [Prior, a string of disastrous Union defeats had prevented Lincoln from issuing the proclamation for fear of appearing desperate]. In the proclamation’s wake, the war not only gained a higher moral purpose, but also record numbers of now-emancipated slaves joined the Union Army, thereby increasing its military strength. A carelessly lost parcel containing three cigars extended the American Civil War for four years, tipped the scales to the Union side, and altered forever the United States’ future. And as , in great part, it came down to that carelessly lost, cigar-encasing battle plan. [Above, Lincoln at Antietam]

1873: Jamming leads to an iconic keyboard

The QWERTY keyboard, so-called for the top row of letters on its left-hand side, came into existence because of a terrible structural flaw when the typewriters were first invented. In the first practical typewriter, designed by an American Christopher Sholes in the late 1860s, the keys were arranged in a sort of circular basket under the carriage. The first typewriter was extremely prone to frequent jamming at fast typing speeds. To solve the jamming problem, Sholes and Co., who had originally arranged the keyboard in alphabetical order, decided to put the most commonly used letters as far apart as possible in the next model. The next year, 1873, when they came up with the new invention which would set the standard of the keyboards. A faster, more convenient keyboard ‘the Dvorak’ was patented in 1932, but the cost of changing into a new system perpetuates the Qwerty.

1940: A Geological Map aids the Miracle of Dunkirk

The Miracle of Dunkirk was portrayed as a “divine” injuncture where the British Expeditionary Force incredibly were saved from the marching armies of Hitler. However, the ‘miracle’ wouldn’t have happened without an inadvertent help from Hitler himself. Hitler’s specific orders to halt the advance of German Troops for 3 days (which gave the British enough time to escape) was one of the last unsolved mysteries of the World War II. Some historians contend that Hitler was thrown into panic by a geological map, which convinced him that his tanks would be trapped in waterlogged, low-lying fields near Dunkirk if he let them advance. Hitler was haunted by his own experience as a solider in the notorious Flanders mud, but the land was dry and safe for tanks during this period and Hitler’s frontline panzer commanders sent a message to Berlin. Immediately Hitler rescinded the command, but the rain began to fall, which made the fields genuinely impassable, allowing the evacuation to be completed despite Luftwaffe attacks. It was the pause that lost Hitler the Second World War.

Oh the Humanity!

To say I don’t pay much attention to modern ‘art’ is a gross understatement. In truth, I try to block modern ‘art’ from my system. Yet, in a strange reversal of fortunes, I found myself visiting not one but three modern art exhibitions in past few weeks. I had hoped to blog that my prejudice is washed away. In fact, the opposite just happened: my disdain is further cemented.

Above left the picture of a gallery marked ‘installation in progress’ in the MoMA. Judging from the quality of the other art on display in the MoMA (above right, a display of cardboard boxes), I will say the distinction is blurred between what is modern and what is left sloppily unfinished.

I was in the MoMA, the great citadel of modern art in New York, but I found less than a fifth of its collection interesting. I like impressionism, admire the efforts behind pointillism and accept cubism. However, as I descend into the lower levels of the MoMa, the level of art portrayed also diminished. I was confronted with monochrome or even blank canvases which looked eerily like an awful cutout from a Piet Mondrain. I was confronted with the canvases on which paint is dribbled (sometimes thanks to Jack the Dribbler himself) which would be a museum worthy piece only if it had been done by an orangutan.

When I was not making judgmental comments on the creativity (or lack thereof) of the modern artists, I was being assailed by modernist sculpture or performance art–folded or torn pieces of paper, bundles upon bundles of cardboard boxes, and one man’s sadistic efforts to cage himself. This Kafkaesque performance art (Hungerkunstler, anyone?), albeit not pointless, is nothing but a shameless, narcissistic and even a pathetic ploy of a failed artist.

Among the modern artists, Andy Warhol is someone whom I can at least accept (although with serious doubts about the man’s mental stability). That is why I went to de Young Museum in San Francisco yesterday to look at Andy Warhol exhibition. Although I can tolerate atrocious product placement in his work (Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola, Brillo soaps), some work–especially those done in his Silver Factory, a den whose ‘creativity’ lies in it being covered by aluminium foil–totally baffles me. The work seems the handiwork of a bunch of fraternity pledges having the time of their life.

The worst, however, is John Cage’s Four Minute Thirty-Three Second recording–which is less modern art than not-even-elaborate con-trick. Yet, Warhol, Cage and others left behind a legacy–a legacy now cherished only by their successor modern artists whom, I believe, now includes a bunch of 5-year olds (or those with mental agility of a 5-year old) who probably spent as much time with their brushes as I with my toothbrush.

Yet, this morning, I saw the news that Vatican has been trying to bless modern art. This following Pope John Paul’s blessing of breakdancing a few years back, I wouldn’t say I am surprised. I am just disappointed in the humanity. I may just be a disgruntled snob but I believe a disgruntled or confused mob makes up a silent majority. I have a gut feeling that we, the silent majority, usually walk through these modern art gallery scorning privately, or laughing cynically or mocking shrilly at incongruent, incomprehensible, abhorrent modern art. Well, at least, I know I do.

Most Beautiful Charts In History

Smoot-Hawley Spiral

The flawed protectionist measure enacted in 1930, known as Smoot-Hawley Act led to decreased international trade and furthered the Great Depression. The full disastrous effects of the act are usually portrayed in economic text books with an ugly spiderweb chart, which serves as a silent testament to the perils of protectionism.

Salyut Cyclogram

Very similar to Minard’s famed charts (see below), this chart is handmade by a Russian cosmonaut, Georgi Grechko. The ‘cyclogram’ shows a 96-day flight of Salyut 6. Some 22 parallel time-series show 1500 sunrises and 1500 sunsets during the flight, a schedule for space walks and baths, and visits of resupply ships bringing equipment, fresh fruit, and gingerbread.

Harry Beck’s London Underground

Before Harry Beck, the underground lines are superimposed on road maps. However, it was Harry Beck who came up with the idea of creating a full system map in color, doing away with the geographical accuracy. Predicting that passengers riding the trains were not too bothered by those accuracies, Beck drew his famous diagram, a cross between a electrical schematic and a map, on which all the stations were more or less equally spaced. Initially scoffed by the authorities, the map gained popularity with the commuters and has since been copied by many underground services around the world.

Orbis Terrae Maps

Describing the world as noted by St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century, Orbis Terrae (or T and O map) represented the top-half of the spherical Earth–a convenient projection which included only the northern temperate (and inhabited) half of the globe. The T is the Mediterranean, dividing the three continents, Asia, Europe and Africa, and the O is the encircling Ocean. Jerusalem was generally represented in the center of the map. Asia was typically the size of the other two continents combined. Because the sun rose in the east, Paradise (the Garden of Eden) was generally depicted as being in Asia, which was posited at the top portion of the map. The most famous specimen of this T-O map are Mappa Mundi–the maps made during the middle ages.

Nightingale’s Coxcomb

At a dinner party in 1856 that Florence Nightingale met William Farr, the Compiler of Abstracts in the General Registry Office. Together, they complied a mortality table, listing causes of death in the general population–a novel concept popularized by Farr. Nightingale compared Farr’s numbers with her own and created a chart which noted that even in peacetime a soldier faced twice the risk of dying in a given year as a civilian due to bad conditions in barracks. The 1858 graph (now known as “Nightingale’s Rose” or “Nightingale’s Coxcomb”) was a stunning visual graphic that revealed that it wasn’t wounds killing the highest number of soldiers – it was infections.

Playfair Wheat Chart

William Playfair pioneered the first “pie chart” in 1801. It showed that, compared to other countries, the British paid more tax. Altogether, Playfair invented four types of diagrams now taken for granted in statistics: line graph, bar chart, pie chart, and circle graph. One of the first people to use data not just to educate but also to persuade and convince, Playfair compared the “weekly wages of a good mechanic” and the “price of a quarter of wheat” over time in 1821 to cast a light on the straining wheat prices. His overwhelming success in statastics didn’t prevent him from being profiled as “an engineer, political economist and scoundrel”, by Victorian biographers who remembered him mainly for his speculative get-rich-quick schemes.

Napoleon’s Russian Campaign

“The best statistical graphic ever drawn“ noted the statistician Edward Tufte. Indeed, Charles Jospeh Minard (1781-1870) created more than fifty memorable “cartes figurative” but this one ["Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-1813"] depicting the advance into and retreat from Russia by Napoleon’s Grande Armée “defies the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence.” (Marey, 1878) The map unites six different sets of data: geography, the army’s path, its direction, the number of soliders, temperature (in the republican measurement of degrees of réaumur) and time. [Napoleon entered Russia with 442,000 men, took Moscow with only 100,000 men, only to escape the Russian winter with barely 10,000 soldiers, which included 6.000 returning soldiers from the north.]

It is alive! It is a LIFE!

This morning, I received a wonderful email (but its wonderfulness didn’t prevent it from being deleted from my increasingly cluttered email account). The email said, “LIFE and Getty Images have joined forces to provide instant access to millions of breathtaking photographs … with more than 3,000 new photos added every day.” So, LIFE, thrice-defunct magazine, is reborn again as of this morning. 

To commemorate this occasion, I selected a few less-famous, but notable photographs that defined 20th century in this blog:

Kings of Hollywood

In the above picture (left to right) Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and James Stewart enjoy a joke at 1957 New Year’s party held at the Crown Room in Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. A photo in the series of four made by Hollywood’s premier photographer, Slim Aarons, the photo-op came almost unexpectedly when Clark Gable cracked a joke at the photographer’s expense. The conspiratorial laugher invited many into the rarified lives of Hollywood’s elite, in the picture Smithsonian magazine termed “a Mount Rushmore of stardom” and the novelist Louis Auchincloss ”the very image of American he-men.”

Khurschev at the Lincoln Memorial

Burt Glinn took many notable pictures in his life—he is the right man at the right place for Magnum, a photo agency he co-founded. (He captured Fidel Castro’s triumphant entrance to Havana in ‘59.) So, it seems ironic that the picture for which he is best remembered for today was the result of his tardiness. On the famous picture showing the back of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s head in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Glinn recounted: “I was late and I couldn’t get to where everybody else was, in front of Khrushchev …. If I’d been on time I would have gotten a very ordinary picture of Khrushchev and Henry Cabot Lodge looking at this statue of Lincoln but you couldn’t see the statue.”

Exposing a Gestapo Informer

If Death of a Loyalist militiaman exposed the pain afflicted on the individuals in the face of the unknown, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Dessau photograph exposed the society’s collective anguish in the aftermath of a war. “Dessau, Germany, 1945. In a camp of displaced persons waiting for repatriation, a Gestapo informer who had pretended to be a refugee is discovered and exposed by a camp inmate whose face is illuminated by the strong, sharp light of rage.” — that was how the photograph was described, but the words fail to convey the emotions seeping out of the picture. Like many a master with paintbrush centuries before him, Cartier-Bresson paints allegorical embodiments of Rage and Shame standing before Justice with a Greek chorus in the background. Cartier-Bresson himself spent three years in German prisoner-of-war camps, successfully escaping to France only on his third attempt.

Warschauer Kniefall

A picture can speak a thousand words, and that is what Willy Brandt had expected when he silently knelt down at the monument to Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The gesture of humility and penance was not favorably viewed by West Germans at that time. 48% thought the “Kniefall” was exaggerated. The opposition tried to use the Kniefall against Brandt with a vote of No Confidence in April 1972 which he survived by only two votes. However, Brandt’s Ostpolitik and Kniefall helped his reelection, as his reformist policies helped Germany gain international reputation, and he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.

Alfred Krupp by Arnold Newman

“By exaggerating or minimizing his subjects’ surroundings, [Arnold Newman] crafted impressionistic gems… that suggested his sitters’ personalities,” wrote TIME magazine. He did, taking pictures of Igor Stravinsky under the piano which suggested a musical note or of Andy Warhol, whose photograph is a reflection of the latter’s paintings. In 1959, Newman cast master builder Robert Moses as a giant against the Manhattan skyline that he helped to shape. The above photo, although not notable in itself, was at the centre of a minor controversy in Newman’s life; the intentionally demonic portrait was that of German industrialist and alleged Nazi collaborator Alfred Krupp. “As a Jew, it’s my own little moment of revenge,” Newman later admitted.

The Red Flag over the Reichstag

Directly inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photo of raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Stalin ordered the Ukrainian photographer Yevgeny Khaldei take a similar photo that would symbolize the Soviet victory over Germany. Taking a Soviet flag with him, Khaldei flew to Berlin where he sadly found out that the Soviet soldiers had already succeeded in raising a flag over the Reichstag a few days earlier. Yet, Khaldei recruited a small group of soldiers and, on May 2, 1945, proceeded to recreate the scene. On close examination, the censors noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. Khaldei not removed the watches from the photo, but also darkened the smoke in the background (right) to make his picture more dramatic. The resulting picture(left) was published soon after in the magazine Ogonjok to achieved worldwide fame.

Lady Diana At the Taj Mahal

During her trip to India with Prince Charles in 1992, Lady Diana is pictured alone at the Taj Mahal. On a bench (now affectionately known as Lady Di’s Chair) in front of the greatest monument to love, Lady Diana was photographed alone. A statement on her solitude and a symbol of her failing marriage, the photograph shifted the public sympathy from the stoic prince to seemingly vulnerable princess.