Talk about your yard sale finds. A small porcelain bowl bought for $35 at a Connecticut yard sale turned out to be a rare, 15th century Chinese artifact worth between $300,000 and $500,000 that is about to go up for auction at Sotheby’s.
The white bowl adorned with cobalt blue paintings of flowers and other designs is about 6 inches (16 centimeters) in diameter. An antiques enthusiast came across the piece and thought it could be something special when browsing a yard sale in the New Haven area last year, according to Sotheby’s.
The piece, one of only seven such bowls known to exist in the world, will be up for auction in New York on March 17 as part of Sotheby’s Auction of Important Chinese Art.
The buyer, whom is not being named, paid the $35 asking price and later emailed information and photos to Sotheby’s asking for an evaluation. The auction house’s experts on Chinese ceramics and art, Angela McAteer and Hang Yin, get many such emails every week, but this was one of the kind they dream about.
“It was immediately apparent to both of us that we were looking at something really very, very special,” said McAteer, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of its Chinese Works of Art Department. “The style of painting, the shape of the bowl, even just the color of the blue is quite characteristic of that early, early 15th century period of porcelain.”
They confirmed it was from the 1400s when they were able to look at it in person. There are no scientific tests, only the trained eyes and hands of specialists. The bowl was very smooth to the touch, its glaze was silky and the color and designs are distinctive of the period. …
McAteer and Yin determined the bowl dates back to the early 1400s during the reign of the Yongle emperor, the third ruler of the Ming Dynasty, and was made for the Yongle court. The Yongle court was known to have ushered in a new style to the porcelain kilns in the city of Jingdezhen, and the bowl is a quintessential Yongle product, according to Sotheby’s.
The bowl was made in the shape of a lotus bud or chicken heart. Inside, it is decorated with a medallion at the bottom and a quatrefoil motif surrounded by flowers. The outside includes four blossoms of lotus, peony, chrysanthemum and pomegranate flower. There are also intricate patterns at the top of both the outside and inside.
McAteer said only six other such bowls are known to exist, and most of them are in museums. No others are in the United States. There are two at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, two at museums in London and one in the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, according to Sotheby’s.
How the bowl ended up at a Connecticut yard sale remains a mystery. McAteer said it’s possible it was passed down through generations of the same family who did not know how unique it was.
The Brienne trunk contained over 5000 undelivered letters.
Inverse.com reports that a new technology is being used to read undelivered and still sealed 17th century mail.
Simon and Marie de Brienne were the 17th century’s most active postmaster and postmistress, delivering personal and political letters alike across Europe. But the Briennes also had a secret.
In addition to delivering letters, they stored away for thousands of “dead letters” — the typically discarded letters belonging to recipients who couldn’t pay postage. Rediscovered in 1926, the Brienne’s trunk is the final resting place of over 5,000 letters. Nearly half have never been opened for fear of destruction.
Now, using X-ray microtomography instead of a letter opener, a team of scientists has opened one of these letters for the very first time and demonstrated their pioneering new system on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe.
Why it matters — This system gives scientists a powerful new tool for accessing the daily-lives of Renaissance people and for better understanding what the personal, professional, and political pressures of the day might have been like.
It also offers scientists an opportunity to explore one of history’s ancient security measures, a “letterlock.” This is an early, physical predecessor to today’s modern cryptography.
“[W]e developed virtual unfolding to prove our letterlocking theories, and elucidate a historically vital — but long underappreciated — form of physical cryptography,” write the authors.”
The research was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Here’s the background — Long before the invention of email, or even bitter-tasting lickable envelopes, Renaissance correspondents had to think more creatively about the safety of their epistolatory works. One way that these letters were kept safe, write the authors, was through intricate, origami-like letterlocks.
“Before the proliferation of mass-produced envelopes in the 1830s, most letters were sent via letterlocking, the process of folding and securing writing [materials] to become their own envelopes,” the authors explain.
“Letterlocking was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes, and plays an integral role in the history of secrecy systems.”
The authors write that in their study of 250,000 letterlocked messages (beyond the Brienne haul) from the “Renaissance world,” they discovered a spectrum of security systems, ranging from simply sealed to booby-trapped letters with tamper-evident locking mechanisms to deter “man-in-the-middle” attacks.
In other words, a mechanism that would secretly signal to the recipient if others had snuck a peek at their secret writing.
Woke hypersensitivity and downright insanity keeps on coming every day, as this NY Post story proves.
Amazon has changed its new smartphone app logo after critics said the earlier incarnation was a dead ringer for Adolf Hitler.
The e-commerce giant introduced the new icon in January to replace the symbol of a shopping cart with one featuring a brown box with a jagged piece of blue tape above the company’s iconic smile-shaped arrow.
But sharp-eyed users noticed the tape disturbingly recalled the Führer’s toothbrush mustache. [!???- JDZ]
“It’s not just a ripped scotch tape, it’s a ripped scotch tape that has a similar shape and is right on top of a smiling mouth. Looks like a happy little cardboard Adolf to me,” one person said on Twitter.
“Amazon’s new app logo be lookin like they’re the THIRD most downloaded in the ‘Reich’ section,” another said, referring to the Nazi regime.
Users also took note of Amazon’s tweak, in which the blue tape was made to look folded over.
“lmao I completely missed that amazon quietly tweaked its new icon to make it look… less like hitler,” one wrote.
“Unsurprisingly they did not send out a press release to announce the second redesign.”
One thing that has obviously changed in America in recent years is that the adults have all died off or retired and our institutions and consumer corporations are now all run by sniveling sheep who can be stampeded in any direction, who can be intimidated into making preposterous concessions, by noisy crazies.
If somebody had come along a few decades ago and proposed tearing down statues of Columbus, George Washington, or Robert E. Lee, if some looney took offense at Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima, the people in charge would have made circular motions with an index figure beside their temple or responded with cuckoo noises. Today, the nonentities and poltroons running the world instantly grovel and hasten to comply with the demands of the sort of people who used to be locked up safely in rooms with mattresses on the walls in lunatic asylums. If I said this on Facebook today, I’d probably get 30 days in Facebook jail for using the phrase “lunatic asylum.”
Our new house in Northern Mississippi had previously been the home of a fairly distinguished female regional author, Sherwood Bonner, who had also been secretary, friend, and muse to the very famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Sherwood Bonner wrote mostly (now unpopular) dialect stories, and essays and sketches for periodicals like Harper’s and Lippincott’s. She left only one novel, Like Unto Like, whose plot superficially resembles Miss Ravenel’s Conversion: patriotic Southern belle, in aftermath of defeat, falls in love with Yankee.
I’ve just started Like Unto Like, and I find Sherwood Bonner a pretty good read. Her descriptions of her Southern town are perceptive and interesting and I like her active and observant outlook.
At the point I reached late last night, it is summer, a year or so after the war, Yankee troops are being transferred from New Orleans to “Yariba” in northern Mississippi (Holly Springs, fictionalized) to escape the summer heat. The Tollivers are in bad odor with local Society, having been forced by financial stress to accept a Yankee officer, Colonel Dexter, and his family as boarders. Our heroine, Blythe Herndon (recognizable as Sherwood Bonner’s fictional alter ego) is destined to fall in love with Roger Ellis, a Northern friend visiting the Dexters.
The tension in town is alleviated when old Mrs. Oglethorpe (the acknowledged head of Yariba society) makes a point of calling upon (and thereby accepting the society of) Mrs. Dexter. Mrs. Oglethorpe has decided that it is her Christian duty to promote reconciliation.
Mrs. Oglethorpe’s gesture provokes a conversation between Blythe and the Tolliver family. Blythe explains her family has put off calling on Mrs. Dexter due to her grandmother’s irredentist attitudes. She lost a son, William, and the South’s defeat caused the old woman to break down emotionally, lose interest in everything, nearly to lose her mind. She paced the halls at night, walking in her sleep, “as white as a ghost.” A year later, she has only slightly improved.
Poor soul!” said Mrs. Tolliver. “If William had been spared she wouldn’t have felt so. I’m sure I don’t think I could have had them in in my house if Van had been killed.”
“I don’t think Uncle Will’s death made any special difference; I think it’s the ‘Lost Cause’ grandma mourns. I can’t understand it. I think it is a great deal better to forgive and forget; don’t you, Van?”
“I don’t want to forget,” said Van throwing back his head with a spirited action peculiar to him. “We made a good fight for our rights, and I’m glad and proud to have been in it. But as for bearing any malice against the men that whipped us –not I. The war ended. I would just as soon have shaken hands with General Sherman as with Joe Johnston.”
“Or with Grant as with Robert E. Lee?”
“No,” said the young man, with a sudden reverence in his tone, “for I would have knelt to Lee.”
Dinos, Antimenes Painter, c. 520-515 BC, Cleveland Museum of Art: Greek and Roman Art
A wealthy, educated man would have served wine from such a vessel at an all-male party (symposium) in his home. In addition to drinking, the men would recite poetry and argue politics or philosophy. A favorite poet was Homer, who lived about 850 BC, and is credited with having written the Iliad, the epic poem of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the book of Ulysses (Odysseus in Greek) travels after the war. When the dinos was filled to the rim, the ships painted on the inside appeared to float on the “wine-dark sea,” one of Homer’s most famous poetic descriptions. The decorations on the rim of this vessel include battle scenes, perhaps from the Trojan War, and scenes from mythology. Look at the rim as if it were a clock’s face. In addition to the nine scenes of warrior combat, at 4:00 there is a scene of Herakles Fighting a Centaur; at 6:00, Theseus Slaying the Cretan Minotaur; and at 10:00, Herakles Wrestling the Nemean Lion. On the interior rim five warships with boar-head prows sail over a wavy sea.
Size: Diameter: 50.8 cm (20 in.); Overall: 33.6 cm (13 ¼ in.); Diameter of rim: 34 cm (13 3/8 in.)
Medium: black-figure terracotta
The NY Post has today’s daily story of leftist ideological fanaticism.
The company that publishes Dr. Seuss’ children’s books said it will stop selling six of his titles because they contain racist and insensitive images.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises — the firm charged with preserving and protecting the beloved author’s legacy — said it scrapped the books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
“Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families,” the company said in a statement Tuesday, which is also the author’s birthday.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises said it decided last year to stop publishing and licensing the titles — which include “If I Ran the Zoo,” “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” — after consulting with a panel of educators and other experts.
While Dr. Seuss — whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel — remains one of the world’s most popular children’s authors three decades after his death, his books have come under fire in recent years for how they portray black people, Asian people and other groups.
“If I Ran the Zoo,” for instance, has been panned for depicting Africans as “potbellied” and “thick-lipped,” as one biography of Seuss put it. It also describes Asian characters as “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell,” notes a 2019 paper on Geisel’s work published in the journal Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.
And “Mulberry Street,” the first children’s book Geisel published under his pen name, contains a controversial illustration of an Asian man holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice whom the text called a “Chinaman who eats with sticks.”
It’s too late to do anything about this international epidemic of insanity. It is apparent that, decades ago, badly-educated fanatics with their heads full of leftist egalitarian religiosity were permitted to take over the great bulk of petty educational institutions, and over the course of a generation, they successfully brain-washed the children irresponsibly committed into theirs hands.
Today, all those former little toddlers are the young adults operating as managers of media organizations, consumer product companies, and publishing houses, and they remain faithful Young Communists, seeing the whole world in terms of Colonialist Oppression, White Injustice, and Racialist Wickedness.
The mere sight of a whimsical cartoon referencing old-timey cultural stereotypes brings a tear to their eyes as they imagine humiliated and mortally offended representatives of groups sacred on the basis of their historical wrongs suffering afresh indignities.
These people have a bee in their bonnet that is driving them to regular outbursts of pure insanity. In the end, there is nothing more dangerous and destructive that a madman infected with delusions of absolute righteousness bent on punishing those he understands to be deliberately evil.
