निळा सावळा ...Ajanta Blue

ही पोस्ट वाचण्याआधी ह्या ब्लॉगवरची जुलै १४ २०२० ची ही पोस्ट ('प्रशियन, कोबाल्ट, अल्ट्रामरीन) निळासांवळा..... Starry Night Over the Rhône') वाचा. 

मी एक अतिशय सुंदर पुस्तक डिसेंबर २०२० मध्ये वाचायला सुरवात केली 'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks' by Richard Stoneman.

Pigments, naturally, were not imported from Greece. The pigments used at Ajanta are all derived from local materials, whether earths or plants, plus lamp black. Blue, orange, brown, green and purple are the most common colours in the later Ajanta murals. The earliest ones also use considerable quantities of white (from roots of Ipomoea digitata, with occasional substitutes, or from lime and gypsum), but in these the other colours have been much darkened, and are hard to study in the half-dark of the caves: reds, yellows, and browns are visible, as well as blues, so darkened now as to look black. Aided by some restoration in the last decade or so, vivid faces loom from the darkness, often topped by the voluminous turbans so typical of Maurya and Śunga figures, and shown in three-quarter profile like many of the faces in Macedonian tombs....

... Strong blues are the hardest colours to obtain in nature (lapis lazuli is the key ingredient), and Pliny has a good deal to say about indigo, ‘a product of India, being a slime that adheres to the scum upon reeds. There is another kind of it that floats on the surface of the pans in the purple dye-shops, and this is the “scum of purple”.’ Pliny shows marked distaste for this mucky but expensive substance, despite its known value also as a medicament for wounds. Later he is able to drag in Indian dyes as another illustration of his perennial theme of the moral decline of Rome caused by luxury:

Nowadays when purple finds its way even on to party-walls and when India contributes the mud of her rivers and the gore of her snakes and elephants, there is no such thing as high-class painting.¹⁰⁸

His account of indigo’s production is far from accurate. It was an important dye in India – where it is called nila – from at least 3000 BCE. It is produced from the leaves of the indigo plant by long boiling and treading, and throughout most of its history the reducing agent used to turn it from a pigment to dye has been urine – which may explain some of Pliny’s disgust, since the manufacture of indigo is certainly very smelly. (It is also very labour-intensive, and in 1859–60, just two years after the Indian Rebellion [‘Indian Mutiny’], the conditions of near-slavery in which it was produced led to riots in Bengal.)^"

Columba Livia Works If The Message Has a Subject

Neil Armstrong:

"The eagle ‘clasps the crag with crooked hands;/Close to the sun in lonely lands’. The nightingale, that ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’, sings ‘of summer in full-throated ease’. The skylark ‘from the earth … springest/Like a cloud of fire’.

The pigeon? Well, the great poets have generally been less inspired by the humble pigeon (Columba livia). Its song is not a mellifluous cascade of liquid notes. It does not fall like a thunderbolt from the sky. It is not rare or endangered – exactly the opposite – and familiarity has bred contempt.

But it does have a ‘superpower’, as Gordon Corera terms it: an innate homing ability. Selective breeding has produced birds that can be taken hundreds of miles from their nests or lofts, even to another country, and then unerringly return home. This ability, still poorly understood by science, was harnessed in the extraordinary Second World War cloak-and-dagger operation that is the subject of Corera’s fascinating book...."

(review of 'Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe' by Gordon Corera, 2018 for  Literary Review)

Artist: Will McPhai, The New Yorker, January 2016

“You know I hate when you check your messages at the table.”  

Artist: Benjamin Schwartz, The New Yorker, August 2015

फेसबुकावरील स्मारके...Status of My Facebook Pages at the end of Year 2022

 

This blog was launched in November 2006. It has completed 16 years. Today it has 2,222 published posts.

त्या ब्लॉगचे मराठी वर्तमानपत्र लोकसत्ताने डिसेंबर १७, २०१२ रोजी संपादकीय ("कुलकर्ण्यांचं लोणी..")पानात लिहलेले परीक्षण इथे (https://www.loksatta.com/sampadkiya/blogspot-searchingforlaugh-26372/) वाचा. (किंवा ह्या पोस्टच्या शेवटी)

Political Polarization and Weather Forecast

 “That was Brad with the Democratic weather. Now here’s Tammy with the Republican weather.”

Artist: David Sipress, The New Yorker, February 2017

Sense, Form, Portrait of Madame Devaucay, and Friedrich Schiller

John Armstrong:

"...Schiller thinks of human nature as an arena in which two powerful psychological drives are at work. On the one hand, there is the ‘sense’ drive which lives in the moment and seeks immediate gratification. It craves contact and possession. It can be coarse, as when one yearns to swig great draughts of beer; but it can also be elevated. Schiller associated the sense drive with his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who longed to see things with his own eyes. Goethe was a direct observer, a natural empiricist who immersed himself in practical detail.

The second drive identified by Schiller was the ‘form’ drive: the inner demand for coherence over time, for abstract understanding and rational order. This drive, thought Schiller, seeks to leave behind the peculiarities of one’s own experience and discover universal principles. It is at the heart of justice – which is not about getting what you want for yourself – and is animated by principle. When we think that a person is entitled to a fair trial, we are motivated, Schiller says, by the rational ‘form’ drive. We are loyal to the abstract, general ideal of due process.

What he’s calling the sense drive and the form drive are powerful impulses in us. But they are often in conflict. The demands of the short term are at odds with the hopes of the longer view. Comfort and ease struggle against a sense of duty and responsibility. The allure of freedom clashes with the longing to be steadfast and rooted in existing commitments.

Schiller’s point is that human nature is fired by two divergent kinds of longing: we can’t hope to see why beauty matters to us unless we pay attention to them both. If we want to understand beauty, we can’t just talk about the things we find beautiful. We have to talk about our lives..."

Portrait of Madame Devaucay by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1807. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo by Getty

JA:

"...The portrait of Madame Devaucay, painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Rome in 1807, exemplifies his ideal. In one sense, the portrait is highly organised. Each detail has been manipulated so that it fits with every other. The rounded back of the chair is calculated to take the eye to her mouth, but it also balances the curve of her draped arm. The point of her chin is exactly halfway between the top of her head and the neckline of her gown. Nothing is left to chance. A hugely determined will to order dominates the image, meaning that the form drive is at full stretch. And this clarity and organisation appear to belong to the sitter as well. She seems calm, lucid and intellectually elegant.

Equally, however, the sense drive is given free rein. She appears merely to be sitting in her natural way, as we might encounter her by chance in the corner of a salon. Maybe in a moment she will laugh or adjust her necklace. For all her finery, she looks as if she would be warm and understanding – the perfect person with whom to discuss one’s troubles. The beauty of the painting is the way it calls simultaneously to our need for control and our longing for tenderness and intimacy.

It’s not a problem for Schiller if someone happens not to be moved by the particular examples that excite him. What matters is that something does, and that something is what we call beautiful.  This explains why beauty can be so moving – why it can make us weep. When we recognise beauty in a piece of music, or the graciousness of someone’s conduct, we see things that we know we have neglected or betrayed, and we feel an astonishing combination of anguish and delight...."

घाशीराम कोतवाल ५० वर्षे .....Ghashiram@50

'Ghashiram Kotwal' was first performed on December 16 1972

“Please direct your comments to the jury, counsellor, not the Greek chorus.” 

Artist: Drew Dernavich, The New Yorker, March 3 2010

"The Eumenides (also known as The Furies) is the final play of the Oresteia trilogy. Orestes and the Furies go before a jury of Athenians, the Areiopagos, or, Rock of Ares, a flat rocky hill by the Athenian forum where the supreme criminal court of Athens held its sessions, to decide whether Orestes' murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, makes him liable for the torment they have inflicted upon him."

Are You a Fox or A Hedgehog? Or Both?

Michael Ignatieff:

“… It is not merely that the fox knows many things. The fox accepts that he can only know many things and that the unity of reality must escape his grasp. The critical feature of foxes is that they are reconciled to the limits of what they know. As Berlin puts it, ‘We are part of a larger scheme of things than we can understand. […] we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it.’ A hedgehog will not make peace with the world. He is not reconciled. He cannot accept that he knows only many things. He seeks to know one big thing, and strives without ceasing to give reality a unifying shape. Foxes settle for what they know and may live happy lives. Hedgehogs will not settle and their lives may not be happy.

All of us, Berlin suggests, have elements of both fox and hedgehog within us. The essay is an unparalleled portrait of human dividedness. We are riven creatures and we have to choose whether to accept the incompleteness of our knowledge or to hold out for certainty and truth. Only the most determined among us will refuse to settle for what the fox knows and hold out for the certainties of the hedgehog….”

 Aesop’s Fable:

“A Fox, swimming across a river, was barely able to reach the bank, where he lay bruised and exhausted from his struggle with the swift current. Soon a swarm of blood-sucking flies settled on him; but he lay quietly, still too weak to run away from them.

A Hedgehog happened by. “Let me drive the flies away,” he said kindly.

“No, no!” exclaimed the Fox, “do not disturb them! They have taken all they can hold. If you drive them away, another greedy swarm will come and take the little blood I have left.”

Moral: Better to bear a lesser evil than to risk a greater in removing it.”

 Isaiah Berlin , ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox', 1953:

“There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes…”

Artist: Charles Branum Barsotti (1933-2014)