The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

in Art, History | April 26th, 2021

Over the half-millennium since Hieronymus Bosch painted it, The Garden of Earthly Delights has produced an ever-widening array of interpretations. Is it “a painting about sexual freedom”? A “medieval acid trip”? An “erotic fantasy”? A “heretical attack on the church”? The work of “a member of an obscure free-love cult”? James Payne, the London curator behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained, rejects all these views. In the opening of the in-depth video analysis above, he describes Bosch’s well-known and much-scrutinized late-15th or early-16th century triptych as, “pure and simply, hardcore Christianity.”

Dating from “a time when European artists, writers, and theologians were shaping a new, terrifying vision of Hell and the punishment awaiting sinners,” Payne argues, The Garden of Earthly Delights is “an intensely moralistic work that should be approached as what it is: religious propaganda.”

Depicting the Biblical creation of the world on its outer panels, the work opens up to reveal elaborately detailed visions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, then humanity indulging in all known earthly delights, then the consequent torments of Hell. It is that last panel, with its abundance of perverse activities and grotesque human, animal, and human-animal figures (recently made into figurines and even piñatas) that keeps the strongest hold on our imagination today.

Payne’s explanation goes into detail on all aspects of the work, highlighting and contextualizing details that even avowed appreciators may not have considered before. While identifying both the possible inspirations and the possible symbolic intentions of the figures and symbols with which Bosch filled the triptych, Payne emphasizes that, as far as the artist was concerned, “his images were a realistic portrayal of sin and its consequences, so in that sense, it wasn’t surrealism, it was realism.” This bears repeating, given how difficult we moderns find it “to look at this painting and not see it as surrealism or a product of the subconscious, not see it as a sexual utopia, a critique of religion, or even a psychedelic romp.” Just as The Garden of Earthly Delights tells us a great deal about the world Bosch lived in, so our views of it tell us a great deal about the world we live in.

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New App Lets You Explore Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in Virtual Reality

Figures from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Come to Life as Fine Art Piñatas

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

in Art, Google, History, Photography, Technology | April 23rd, 2021

To recent news stories about 3D printed guns, prosthetics, and homes, you can add Scan the World’s push to create “an ecosystem of 3D printable objects of cultural significance.”

Items that took the ancients untold hours to sculpt from marble and stone can be reproduced in considerably less time, provided you’ve got the technology and the know-how to use it.

Since we last wrote about this free, open source initiative in 2017, Scan the World has added Google Arts and Culture to the many cultural institutions with whom it partners, expanding both its audience and the audience of the museums who allow items in their collections to be scanned prior to 3D printing.

Community contributors have uploaded scan data for over 18,000 sculptures and artifacts onto the platform.

China and India are actively courting participants to make some of their treasures available.

Although Scan the World is searchable by collection, artist, and location, with so many options, the community blog is a great place to start.

Here you will find helpful tips for beginners hoping to produce realistic looking skulls and sculptures — control your temperature, shake your resin, and learn from your mistakes.

Got an unreachable object you’re itching to print? Take a look at the drone photogrammetry tutorial to prep yourself for taking a good scan — rotate slowly, remember the importance of light, and get up to speed on your drone by test-driving it in an open location.

Keep an eye peeled for competitions, like this one, which was won by a photo editor and retoucher with no formal 3-D training.

Art lovers with little inclination to crack out the 3D printer will find interesting essays on such topics as the Gates of Hell, scanning in the pandemic, and the history of hairstyles in sculpture

You can also embark on a virtual tour of some of the global locations whose splendors are being scanned, programmed, and rendered in resin.

A virtual trip to Paris takes in some of the Louvre’s greatest 3-dimensional hits: the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

(Any one of those oughta class up the ol’ bedsit…)

The virtual trip to Austria includes Kierling’s monument to Franz Kafka, the Beethoven memorial in Vienna’s Heiligenstädter Park, and Klaus Weber’s tribute to Hugo Rheinhold’s Darwinian sculpture, Monkey with Skull. (1,868 downloads and counting!)

A Google map awaits those who would tour the original flavor inspirations in person.

Begin your explorations of Scan the World here, and do let us know in the comments if you have plans for printing.

The Earth Archive Will 3D-Scan the Entire World & Create an “Open-Source” Record of Our Planet

The British Museum Creates 3D Models of the Rosetta Stone & 200+ Other Historic Artifacts: Download or View in Virtual Reality

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, and sometimes, a French Canadian bear known as L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite

in Architecture, Art | April 14th, 2021

The Japanese art of tsugite, or wood joinery, goes back more than a millennium. As still practiced today, it involves no nails, screws, or adhesives at all, yet it can be used to put up whole buildings — as well as to disassemble them with relative ease. The key is its canon of elaborately carved joints engineered to slide together without accidentally coming apart, the designs of which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture in animated GIF form. Though it would be natural to assume that 21st-century technology has no purchase on this domain of dedicated traditional craftsmen, it does greatly assist the efforts of the rest of us to understand just how tsugite works.

Now, thanks to researchers at the University of Tokyo, a new piece of software makes it possible for us to do our own Japanese joinery as well. Called, simply, Tsugite, it’s described in the video introduction above as “an interactive computational system to design wooden joinery that can be fabricated using a three-axis CNC milling machine.” (CNC stands for “computer numerical control,” the term for a standard automated-machining process.)

In real time, Tsugite’s interface gives graphical feedback on the joint being designed, evaluating its overall “slidabilty” and highlighting problem areas, such as elements “perpendicular to the grain orientation” and thus more likely to break under pressure.

This is the sort of thing that a Japanese carpenter, having undergone years if not decades of training and apprenticeship, will know by instinct. And though the work of a three-axis CNC machine can’t yet match the aesthetic elegance of joinery hand-carved by a such a master, Tsugite could well, in the hands of users from different cultures as well as domains of art and craft, lead to the creation of new and unconventional kinds of joints as yet unimagined. You can download the software on Github, and you’ll also find supplementary documentation here. Even if you don’t have a milling system handy, working through virtual trial and error constitutes an education in traditional Japanese wood joinery by itself. The current version of Tsugite only accommodates single joints, but its potential for future expansion is clear: with practice, who among us wouldn’t want to try our hand at, say, building a shrine?

via Spoon & Tamago

Mesmerizing GIFs Illustrate the Art of Traditional Japanese Wood Joinery — All Done Without Screws, Nails, or Glue

See How Traditional Japanese Carpenters Can Build a Whole Building Using No Nails or Screws

Watch Japanese Woodworking Masters Create Elegant & Elaborate Geometric Patterns with Wood

Nick Offerman Explains the Psychological Benefits of Woodworking–and How It Can Help You Achieve Zen in Other Parts of Your Life

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Watch a Master Japanese Printmaker at Work: Two Unintentionally Relaxing ASMR Videos

in Art | April 9th, 2021

Today we can appreciate Japanese woodblock prints from sizable online archives whenever we like, and even download them for ourselves. Before the internet, how many chances would we have had even to encounter such works of art in the course of life? Very few of us, certainly, would ever have beheld a Japanese printmaker at work, but here in the age of streaming video, we all can. In the Smithsonian video above, printmaker Keiji Shinohara demonstrates a suite of traditional techniques (and more specialized ones in a follow-up below) for creating ukiyo-e, the “pictures of the floating world” whose style originally developed to capture Japanese life and landscapes of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

“So uh,” asks one commenter below this video of Shinohara at work, “anyone else come from unintentional ASMR?” That abbreviation, which stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” labels a genre of Youtube video that exploded in popularity in recent years.

Attempts have been made to define the underlying phenomenon scientifically, but suffice it to say that ASMR involves a set of distinctively pleasurable sounds that happens to coincide with those made by the tools of printmakers and other highly analog craftsmen. When ASMR enthusiasts discovered Youtube art conservator Julian Baumgartner, previously featured here on Open Culture, he created special sonically enhanced versions of his videos just for them.

In the case of Shinohara, the Best Unintentional ASMR channel has done it for him. Its version of his videos greatly emphasize the sounds of brushes rubbed against paper, inks spread onto wood, and droplets of water falling into the rinsing bowl. Of course, the original king of unintentional ASMR in art is universally acknowledged to be Bob Ross, host of The Joy of Painting, whose soft-spoken industriousness seems now to inhabit the person of David Bull, an English-Canadian ukiyo-e printmaker living in Tokyo. In a sense, Bull is the Western counterpart to the Osaka-born Shinohara, who after a decade’s apprenticeship in Kyoto crossed the Pacific Ocean in the other direction to make his home in the United States. But however traditional their art, they both belong, now to the floating world of the internet. You can listen to non-ASMR versions of the videos above here and here.

Download 2,500 Beautiful Woodblock Prints and Drawings by Japanese Masters (1600-1915)

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

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Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

in Archives, Art, Design | April 8th, 2021

An online design museum made by and for designers? The concept seems obvious, but has taken decades in internet years for the reality to fully emerge in the Letterform Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look simple, but no one should be fooled into thinking it’s easy. “After years of development and months of feedback,” write the creators of the Letterform Archive online design museum, “we’re opening up the Online Archive to everyone. This project is a labor of love from everyone on our staff, and many generous volunteers, and we hope it provides a source of beautiful distraction and inspiration to all who love letters.”

That’s letters as in fonts, not epistles, and there are thousands of them in the archive. But there are also thousands of photographs, lithographs, silkscreens, etc. representing the height of modern simplicity. This and other unifying threads run through the collection of the Letterform Archive, which offers “unprecedented access… with nearly 1,500 objects and 9,000 hi-fi images.”

You’ll find in the Archive the sleek elegance of 1960s Olivetti catalogs, the iconic militancy of Emory Douglas’ designs for The Black Panther newspaper, and the eerily stark militancy of the “SILENCE=DEATH” t-shirt from the 1980s AIDS crisis.

The site was built around the ideal of “radical accessibility,” with the aim of capturing “a sense of what it’s like to visit the Archive” (which lives permanently in San Francisco). But the focus is not on the casual onlooker — Letterform Archive online caters specifically to graphic designers, which makes its interface even simpler, more elegant, and easier to use for everyone, coincidentally (or not).

The graphic design focus also means there are functions specific to the discipline that designers won’t find in other online image libraries: “we encourage you to use the search filters: click on each category to explore disciplines like lettering, and formats like type specimens, or combine filters like decades and countries to narrow your view to a specific time and place.”

From the radical typography of Dada to the radical 60s zine scene to the sleek designs (and Neins) found in a 1987 Apple Logo Standards pamphlet, the museum has something for everyone interested in recent graphic design history and typology. But it’s not all sleek simplicity. There are also rare artifacts of elaborately intricate design, like the Persian Yusef and Zulaikha manuscript, below, dating from between 1880 and 1910. You’ll find dozens more such treasures in the Letterform Archive here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Artist Makes Micro-Miniature Sculptures So Small They Fit on the Head of a Pin

in Art, Creativity, Museums, Religion | April 6th, 2021

The jury remains out as to the number of angels that can dance on a pin, but self-taught artist Flor Carvajal is amassing some data regarding the number of itty bitty sculptures that can be installed on the tips of matchsticks, pencil points, and — thanks to a rude encounter with a local reporter — in the eye of a needle.

According to Tucson’s Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures, where her work is on display through June, The Vanguardia Liberal was considering running an interview in conjunction with an exhibit of her Christmas-themed miniatures. When she wouldn’t go on record as to whether any of the itty-bitty nativity scenes she’d been crafting for over a decade could be described as the world’s smallest, the reporter hung up on her.

Rather than stew, she immediately started experimenting, switching from Styrofoam to synthetic resin in the pursuit of increasingly miniscule manger scenes.

By sunrise, she’d managed to place the Holy Family atop a lentil, a grain of rice, the head of a nail, and the head of a pin.

These days, most of her micro-miniature sculptures require between 2 and 14 days of work, though she has been laboring on a model of Apollo 11 for over a year, using only a magnifying glass and a needle, which doubles as brush and carving tool.

In a virtual artist’s chat last month, she emphasizes that a calm mind, steady hands, and breath control are important things to bring to her workbench.

Open windows can lead to natural disaster. The odds of recovering a work-in-progress that’s been knocked to the floor are close to nil, when said piece is rendered in 1/4” scale or smaller.

Religious themes provide ongoing inspiration – a recent achievement is a 26 x 20 millimeter recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper — but she’s also drawn to subjects relating to her native Columbia, like Goranchacha, the son the Muisca Civilization’s Sun God, and Juan Valdez, the fictional representative of the national coffee growers federation.

See more of Flor Carvajal’s micro-miniatures on her Instagram.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete High-Resolution Digital Scan

in Art | April 6th, 2021

There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau — or, in its original Dutch title, Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst, a 900-page book of paint colors made before any such things were common tools of the artist’s, scientist’s, and industrial designer’s trade. Author and artist A. Boogert created one, and only one, copy of his extraordinary manual on color mixing in 1692. Appearing on the threshold of modern color theory, and featuring over 700 pages of color swatches, the book draws on Aristotle’s system of color rather than the new understanding of the color spectrum, fully elaborated by Newton in his Opticks over a decade later.

It would be another hundred years before a flood tide of color books began to make the theory more practical: from Goethe’s 1810 Theory of Colors and Werner’s 1814 Nomenclature of Colour to the dream of color standardization realized: the Pantone company, launched in 1963.

But if A. Boogert had much influence on the theory or practical application of color in his day, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for it. Of course most of the Dutch masters had died when the book was completed, and it seems unlikely that those still working in 1692 would have been familiar with its single copy.

Instead, the book was meant to educate watercolorists, hence its French title, which refers to “water-based paint.” (A literal translation of the Dutch runs something like “clearly lighting mirror of the painting art.”) Medieval historian Erik Kwakkel found the book in a French database, “and it turns out to be quite special,” he writes, “because it provides an unusual peek into the workshop of 17th-century painters and illustrators.

In over 700 pages of handwritten Dutch, the author, who identifies himself as A. Boogert, describes how to make watercolour paints. He explains how to mix the colours and how to change their tone by adding ‘one, two or three portions of water.’… In the 17th Century, an age known as the Golden Age of Dutch Painting, this manual would have hit the right spot.”

The book is currently housed at Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, where you’ll find full-page, zoomable, hi-resolution scans. “Beyond being informational, the images from the book are stunning and addictive flip through,” notes Refinery29. “They resemble page after page of Pantone color chips, except without the household name.” One wonders if “A. Boogert” would have become a household name had his book been printed and distributed. But his color system was already passing away in the Newtonian age of color spectrums and wheels, until paint chips finally came back in style. Visit the color manual online here.

Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour, the 19th-Century “Color Dictionary” Used by Charles Darwin (1814)

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665-1810)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The History of Tattoos Gets Beautifully Documented in a New Book by Legendary Tattoo Artist Henk Schiffmacher (1730-1970)

in Art, Books, Design | March 30th, 2021

I always think tattoos should communicate. If you see tattoos that don’t communicate, they’re worthless. —Henk Schiffmacher, tattoo artist

Tattooing is an ancient art whose grip on the American mainstream, and that of other Western cultures, is a comparatively recent development.

Long before he took up—or went under—a tattoo needle, legendary tattoo artist and self-described “very odd duck type of guy,” Henk Schiffmacher was a fledgling photographer and accidental collector of tattoo lore.

Inspired by the immersive approaches of Diane Arbus and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Schiffmacher, aka Hanky Panky, attended tattoo conventions, seeking out any subculture where inked skin might reveal itself in the early 70s.

As he shared with fellow tattooer Eric Perfect in a characteristically rollicking, profane interview, his instincts became honed to the point where he “could smell” a tattoo concealed beneath clothing:

The kind of tattoos you used to see in those days, you do not see anymore, that stuff made in jail, in the German jails, like, you’d like see a guy who’d tattooed himself as far as his right hand could reach and the whole right (side) would be empty…I always loved that stuff which was never meant to be art which is straight from the heart.

When tattoo artists would write to him, requesting prints of his photos, he would save the letters, telling Hero’s Eric Goodfellow:

I would get stuff from all over the world. The whole envelope would be decorated, and the letter as well. I have letters from the Leu Family and they’re complete pieces of art, they’re hand painted with all kinds of illustrations. Also people from jail would write letters, and they would take time to write in between the lines in a different colour. So very, very unique letters.

Such correspondence formed the earliest holdings in what is now one of the world’s biggest collections of contemporary and historical tattoo ephemera.

Schiffmacher (now the author of the new Taschen book, TATTOO. 1730s-1970s) realized that tattoos must be documented and preserved by someone with an open mind and vested interest, before they accompanied their recipients to the grave. Many families were ashamed of their loved ones’ interest in skin art, and apt to destroy any evidence of it.

On the other end of the spectrum is a portion of a 19th-century whaler’s arm, permanently emblazoned with Jesus and sweetheart, preserved in formaldehyde-filled jar. Schiffmacher acquired that, too, along with vintage tools, business cards, pages and pages of flash art, and some truly hair raising DIY ink recipes for those jailhouse stick and pokes. (He discusses the whaler’s tattoos in a 2014 TED Talk, below).

His collection also expanded to his own skin, his first canvas as a tattoo artist and proof of his dedication to a community that sees its share of tourists.

Schiffmacher’s command of global tattoo significance and history informs his preference for communicative tattoos, as opposed to obscure ice breakers requiring explanation.

When he first started conceiving of himself as an illustrated man, he imagined the delight any potential grandchildren would take in this graphic representation of his life’s adventures—“like Pippi Longstocking’s father.”

While his Tattoo Museum in Amsterdam is no more, his collection is far from mothballed. Earlier this year, Taschen published TATTOO. 1730s-1970s. Henk Schiffmacher’s Private Collection, a whopping 440-pager the irrepressible 69-year-old artist hefts with pride. You can purchase the book directly from Taschen, or via Amazon.

Why Tattoos Are Permanent? New TED Ed Video Explains with Animation

Browse a Gallery of Kurt Vonnegut Tattoos, and See Why He’s the Big Gorilla of Literary Tattoos

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and the human alter ego of L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite

Watch a Master Japanese Printmaker at Work: Two Unintentionally Relaxing ASMR Videos

The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

Artist Makes Micro-Miniature Sculptures So Small They Fit on the Head of a Pin

A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete High-Resolution Digital Scan

The History of Tattoos Gets Beautifully Documented in a New Book by Legendary Tattoo Artist Henk Schiffmacher (1730-1970)

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