Month: April 2018

Calendar: April 26

A Year: Day to Day Men: 26th of April

Hanging at the Park

On April 26, 1478  the Pazzi Conspiracy occurred in Florence, Italy.

The Pazzi conspiracy was a plot by members of the Pazzi family and others to displace the de’ Medici family as rulers of Renaissance Florence, Italy. The Salviati, Papal bankers in Florence, were at the center of the conspiracy. Pope Sixtus IV was an enemy of the Medici family. He had purchased from Milan the lordship of Imola, a trade route stronghold on the border between Papal and Tuscan territory. Lorenzo de’ Medici also wanted this stronghold for the city of Florence. The purchase was financed by the Pazzi bank, even though Francesco de’ Pazzi had promised Lorenzo they would not aid the Pope.

Girolamo Riario, Francesco Salviati and Francesco de’ Pazzi put together a plan to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici. Pope Sixtus was approached for his support. He made a very carefully worded statement in which he said that in the terms of his holy office he was unable to sanction killing. He made it clear that it would be of great benefit to the papacy to have the Medici removed from their position of power in Florence, and that he would deal kindly with anyone who did this. He instructed the men to do what they deemed necessary to achieve this aim, and said that he would give them whatever support he could.

On Sunday, 26 April 1478, during High Mass at the Duomo before a crowd of 10,000, the Medici brothers were assaulted. Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed 19 times by Bernardo Bandini dei Baroncelli and Francesco de’ Pazzi. As Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor, his brother Lorenzo escaped with serious, but not life-threatening, wounds. Lorenzo was locked safely in the sacristy and the coup d’etat failed.

Most of the conspirators were soon caught and summarily executed; five, including Francesco de’ Pazzi and Salviati, were hanged from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria. Jacopo de’ Pazzi, head of the family, escaped from Florence but was caught and brought back. He was tortured, then hanged from the Palazzo della Signoria next to the decomposing corpse of Salviati. He was buried at Santa Croce, but the body was dug up and thrown into a ditch.

Although Lorenzo appealed to the crowd not to exact summary justice, many of the conspirators, as well as many people accused of being conspirators, were killed. Between 26 April, the day of the attack, and 20 October 1478, a total of eighty people were executed. The Pazzi were banished from Florence, and their lands and property confiscated. Their name and their coat of arms were perpetually suppressed. The name Pazzi was erased from public registers, all buildings and streets.

Felice Varini

Optical Installations by Felice Varini

Felice Varini is known for his geometric perspective-localized paintings in rooms and other spaces, using projector-stencil techniques. Varini’s work is really the opposite of a stereogram: a series of unintelligible figures painted across three dimensions, that when seen in just the right way, flatten themselves into a mind-bending 2D shape.

Varini is a Swiss artist who currently lives in Paris, and has done dozens and dozens of these types of installations. He thinks of his works comprehensively, not just from the single point where they come together.

“The viewer can be present in the work, but as far as I am concerned he may go through it without noticing the painting at all. If he is aware of the work, he might observe it from the vantage point and see the complete shape. But he might look from other points of views where he will not be able to understand the painting because the shapes will be fragmented and the work too abstract. Whichever way, that is ok with me.”- Felice Varini

Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, “Takagi Toranosuke Capturing a Kappa Underwater in the Tamura River”, No Date, Edo Period

Takagi Toranosuke appears in at least one other print by Kuniyoshi and one by Kuniyoshi’s pupil Yoshitoshi: both in the Lyon Collection of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Both have short texts describing him as a samurai originally from Hyūga Province who wandered through Japan and fought various monsters. It seems likely that he is a fictional character, possibly inspired by the historical figures Takagi Oriemon Shigetoshi, who founded the Hontai Hōshin Ryū school of martial arts in the seventeenth century, and his successor as head of the school, Takagi Umanosuke Shigesada.

Takagi Toranosuke, a native of Hyūga and an expert in the martial arts, is seen struggling with a kappa or kawatarō (also known as a suiko (waterbaby)). A kappa is a composite amphibious creature said to be a native of Kyushu. It has the shell of a tortoise, scaly legs, webbed feet and most mystifying of all, an ape-like head with a hollow depression in its crown that contains a strange fluid that provides the kappa with its strength. It tends to be harmless, but if one remembers to bow to the kappa it is forced to return the bow, thus losing its potent fluid and becoming powerless. Even as late as the 19th century, it was still widely believed that kappa actually existed.

Source: drakontomalloi

Calendar: April 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of April

Rivulets of Water

The first edition of “Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe was published on April 25, 1719.

Around 1692 at the age of thirty-two, Daniel Defoe began to write, partly as a moneymaking venture. One of his first creations was a poem written in 1701, entitled “The True-Born Englishman,” which became popular and earned Defoe some celebrity. He also wrote political pamphlets. One of these, “The Shortest Way with Dissenters”, was a satire on persecutors of dissenters and sold well among the ruling Anglican elite until they realized that it was mocking their own practices. As a result, Defoe was publicly pilloried—his hands and wrists locked in a wooden device—in 1703, and jailed in Newgate Prison.

He also worked as a spy, reveling in aliases and disguises, reflecting his own variable identity as merchant, poet, journalist, and prisoner. This theme of changeable identity would later be expressed in the life of Robinson Crusoe, who becomes merchant, slave, plantation owner, and even unofficial king. In his writing, Defoe often used a pseudonym simply because he enjoyed the effect. He was incredibly wide-ranging and productive as a writer, turning out over 500 books and pamphlets during his life.

Defoe began writing fiction late in life, around the age of sixty. He published his first novel “Robinson Crusoe”, in 1719, attracting a large middle-class readership. He followed in 1722 with “Moll Flanders”, the story of a tough, streetwise heroine whose fortunes rise and fall dramatically. Both works straddle the border between journalism and fiction. “Robinson Crusoe” is thought to be  based on the true story of a shipwrecked seaman named Alexander Selkirk and was passed off as history, while “Moll Flanders” included dark prison scenes drawn from Defoe’s own experiences in Newgate and interviews with prisoners.

His focus on the actual conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel. With the theme of solitary human existence in “Robinson Crusoe”, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation. Defoe died in London on April 24, 1731, of a fatal “lethargy”—an unclear diagnosis that may refer to a stroke.

Yofukuro

Paintings by Yofukuro

Yofukuro is a Japanese artistic duo from Kagoshima. The two brothers, Seiichi and Daisei Terazono, create mostly figurative art in different media: acrylic, pastel, and mixed media. Yofukuro means ‘owl’ in the Kagoshima dialect; owls are considered to bring happiness in Japan.

Seiichi Terazono graduated from the Faculty of Design, Okayama Prefectural University in Japan where he learned Communication Design and Computer Graphics Animation. He has worked as a digital artist and engaged in the production of movies and video games. The essence of his work is not only the figurative realism appearing on the surface. Instead, he explores and aims to capture the ‘realism’ within the mind.

Daisei Terazono graduated from the Tokyo University of the Arts, where he studied oil painting, fresco, and mosaic. During his studies, he was greatly inspired by the work of Francis Bacon. Daisei seeks to portray emotions such as suffering, the sadness, and pain, which are predominantly hidden from view.

The artistic duo paints together in a studio in Kagoshima and has exhibited all over Japan including the Fei Art Museum in Yokohama and  The Spiral Garden in Tokyo. Inspired by Egon Schiele, they add a specific recognizable touch to their paintings and aim at portraying the truth, be it beauty or sadness. Their raw and bold figures have lately attracted considerable international attention.