Ars et Natura

Roman Empire at its greatest extent (under Trajan) The Empire, as it was finally shaped by Augustus, included Spain, Gaul, Italy, and the Balkans, the north coast of Africa, Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor. The Mediterranean was a Roman lake. Every people who had contributed to the sum of Western civilization was now subjected to Rome. H.A.L. Fisher A History of Europe  (p. 85) Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1935

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's Dreamland (1902, Francis Simpson Coburn) Edgar Allan Poe Pompas del mármol, negra anatomía que ultrajan los gusanos sepulcrales, del triunfo de la muerte los glaciales símbolos congregó. No los temía. Temía la otra sombra, la amorosa, las comunes venturas de la gente; no lo cegó el metal resplandeciente ni el mármol sepulcral sino la rosa. Como del otro lado del espejo se entregó solitario a su complejo destino de inventor de pesadillas. Quizá, del otro lado de la muerte, siga erigiendo solitario y fuerte espléndidas y atroces maravillas. — Jorge Luis Borges ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧  ☙❧ Translation: Splendor of marble, black anatomy  horrified by graveyard maggots— the triumph of death he congealed with glacial symbols—he feared not, but feared of other shades, of love,  of other people's common lot. He was not deceived by gilded metal,  nor the tomb’s marble, but the rose. As if from the other side o...

Left: Petrarch (1304-74) Right: Vitruvian Man (1490, Leonardo da Vinci)                          In discussing the transition from classical antiquity to the Middles Ages, we were able to point to a great crisis — the rise of Islam — marking the separation be tween the two eras. No comparable event sets off the Middle Ages from the Renaissance. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to be sure, witnessed far-reaching developments: the fall of Constantinople and the Turkish conquest of southeastern Europe; the journeys of exploration that led to the founding of overseas empires in the New World, in Africa and Asia, with the subsequent rivalry of Spain and England as the foremost colonial powers; the deep spiritual crisis of Reformation and Counter Reformation. But none of these events, however vast their effects, can be said to have produced the new era... Perhaps the only essential point on which most experts ag...

Kingston, Canada                          Christmas 2005: Montreal, Québec City, Mont Tremblant, Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto… Sightseeing has become a wearisome parade of old churches, historic monuments, and kitschy souvenir shops. Even Niagara Falls seemed lackluster, as much from the grey winter light as from the hotel/casino perched right on its banks. It is Nature drained of the Kantian sublime, completely incorporated within the city, and turned into an urban spectacle like some Las Vegas attraction. Niagara Falls                         We live  in an immigrant ghetto of Montreal, a hub where Filipinos come to roost after caring for the young and elderly of posh French and Jewish neighborhoods. It’s quite disorienting to pick up Tagalog and Bisaya, or even more obscure Philippine dialects, dislocated from their sun-drenched origins. T...

Hôtel Biron (undated, after 1908), now Musée Rodin                         T he old Beaux Arts train station, now Musée d’Orsay; the broad gardens of the Tuilleries and the bridges of the Seine; and, of course, the Eiffel Tower viewed from Trocadéro, where dusk reduces it to pure geometric lines before it’s lit up. The shock of Paris seen for the first time. The L’Orangerie near the Tuilleries now shelters the Nymphèas of Monet — overwhelming in their hugeness, you could almost tilt and dip into the water.                          Around the Hôtel Biron, the well-kept gardens are littered with Rodin’s seemingly pulsating bronzes. This is where Rilke discovered his new voice. In response to Rodin’s aesthetic of “living surfaces,” he began to write what became his “thing-poems,” and, like one who gazes at the archaic torso of Apollo , ...

Left: Coronation of Roger II, robed in Byzantine splendor Right: Monreale Cathedral                          So under the full glow of papal benediction these freebooters of the North laid the foundations of a civilized state in Mediterranean waters. With Norman flexibility the descendants of Tancred organized government under new and difficult conditions and on original lines. In the kingdom of Roger II, who united the Norman territories on either side of the Straits of Messina, Europe witnessed a polity half Oriental, half Western, providing a shelter for Greek, Latin, Moor, and Jew, and better organized, seeing that it preserved the tradition of its Greek and Saracen past, than any other European government of that age. Among the orange groves of Palermo, Roger, the descendant of the Vikings, sat upon his throne, robed in the dalmatic of the apostolic legate and the imperial costume of Byzantium, his ministers...

The Course of Empire: Desolation (1833-36, Thomas Cole) Wealth, vice, corruption––barbarism at last. ~ Lord Byron Fall of the Western Roman Empire, A. D. 476                           From this moment, the germanization of the West steadily proceeded. Ostrogoths poured into the Balkan peninsula, creating by their restless and turbulent activities a problem similar to that which had taxed the resources of the Eastern Empire a century before. In Italy a succession of phantom and ephemeral emperors reached its close with a pathetic figure, named by the supreme irony of providence, Romulus Augustus, who was deposed by Odovacar, the East German master of the troops (476). Military revolutions were no novelty in the annals of the Roman Empire, and the act of Odovacar had many precedents… It is true that he deposed Romulus, but the lad was a usurper, unrecognized in Constantinople, and the deed condoned by the best...