1870: Storm in the Mountains

Albert Bierstadt - Storm in the Mountains (c. 1870)

Albert Bierstadt: Storm in the Mountains (c. 1870) (source)

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2015: Under Construction

Anna Pantelia - from Recycle (2015)

Anna Pantelia: from the series Recycle (2015) (source)

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1855: Your Very Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem

Whitman - Leaves of Grass frontispiece (1856)          Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1855)

Sources here and here.

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312 AD: The Emperor’s Foot

Foot of Constantine (312-315)

Foot of the colossal statue of Roman emperor Constantine the Great in the Courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini. The statue, of which several fragments survive, would have been 40 feet tall. “Precise dating of the statue itself is problematical,” reports Wikipedia; “it has been suggested that a date of 312–315 for the initial creation of the statue is likely from political considerations, whilst a substantial reworking of the features some time after 325 is indicated on art-historical grounds.” (photo source)

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1690s: Cabinet of Curiosities

Domenico Remps - Cabinet of Curiosities (1690s)

Domenico Remps: Cabinet of Curiosities (1690s)

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1964: World’s Largest Miniature City

Chirs Devers - Panorama 2

Built for the 1964 World’s Fair at a cost of $672,000 (about $5.3 million in 2017), the Panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum is  the world’s largest architectural model of a city. It includes about 895,000 miniature buildings, streets, parks and bridges, made mostly of wood and plastic; at a scale of 1 inch = 100 feet, the 321 square miles of the city’s five boroughs take up 9,335 square feet and the 1,500-foot Empire State Building is 15 inches tall.

Sources here, here, here, and here.

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1903: Bicycle as Angel

HS Sårad ängel 63

Hugo Simberg - The Wounded Angel (1903)

A model in Hugo Simberg’s studio for his painting The Wounded Angel (1903). A bicycle is playing the part of the angel. Sources here and here.

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1996: Europa

Europa - September 7, 1996

Europa: September 7, 1996. Europa is the smallest of Jupiter’s moons. The bright crater on the bottom right is named Pwyll, after Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, a mythical Welsh king whose tale is told in the Mabinogion.

One day, while out hunting in the forest, Pwyll comes across a pack of hounds feasting on a slain stag. He drives them away and allows his own hounds to feed, earning the anger of the hounds’ owner, Arawn, lord of the mystical kingdom of Annwna paradisiacal realm that, with the influence of Christianity, is identified with the afterlife. To make amends, Pwyll assents to trading places with Arawn for a year and a day, taking on his likeness so no one will know the difference. At the end of the year, Pwyll (still in the guise of Arawn) fights Hafgan, Arawn’s rival, mortally wounding him and thus earning Arawn possession of all Annwn. During the year, Pwyll has also slept chastely with Arawn’s wife, so when the two meet again to trade back appearances and places, they become lasting friends.

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1898: The Keeper of the Threshold

Elihu Vedder - The Keeper of the Threshold (1897-1898)

Elihu Vedder: The Keeper of the Threshold (1897-1898)

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1902: Orchid and Hummingbird

Museo Thyssen- Bornemisza

Martin Johnson Heade: Orchid and Hummingbird near a Mountain Waterfall (1902)

The orchid pictured is Cattleya labiata (known also as the Crimson Cattleya or Ruby-lipped Cattleya), which grows in the states of Pernambuco and Alagoas in northeastern Brazil. The plant is an epiphyte, trypically growing on the branches of  trees, where light is plentiful. (Sources here and here.)

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