Dali House

If Dan Brown and Tom Hanks haven’t already destroyed any lingering awe you had for Leonardo, best have another go, right?

Hitching a ride on Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” swept me past several references to Mazeppa, and while it seemed a strange and confusing story from the start, I was riveted by the central image of a man tied naked to a horse that’s running wild across the landscape.

So was Lord Byron, who wrote up every feverish gallop in one of his proto-Poe poems, and Pushkin, Victor Hugo, Liszt and Tchaikovsky all had a go at the legend too, not to mention a couple of avant-garde filmmakers, and that’s Horace Vernet’s sub-famous 1826 painting above. It was in a review of one of these films that I heard about “Ivan Mazeppa, a Polish nobleman’s page who is punished for sleeping with his patron’s wife” by being trussed to a nag in the nude. It’s not quite the whole story, but legends do have a way of morphing fantastically if you don’t keep an eye on them. See the rest.

Big thanks to those fine folks the Frumplingtons for the heads-up that April Fool’s Day is less than eight months away! They sent the advance warning in the form of the following gripping report from the front line where science meets art …
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By Professor Emeritus Mustafa Tibreq

Whether you like your eggs poached, soft boiled, or sunny-side-up, you cannot fail to remember the wave of hysteria that happened in Britain during the 1980s, following government minister Edwina Currie’s pronouncements that all eggs in Britain contained the potentially deadly salmonella bacterium.
More recently (mid-June) similar concerns were raised about eggs imported into the UK from Spain.

The real danger however, lies in a totally different and some would say unlikely direction… See the rest.

Back in March, blogmother Shana nominated to the Dali House hall of amusements the tale of the Chinese artist who painted a picture of a panda on a single human hair. Unfortunately I misplaced the story and had to use a microscope to find it again.

It was in a tiny little capsule full of other electron-size peculiarities, all whirling around one another hoping for some mutual attraction. I’ve finally rediscovered it, so here we go. See the rest.

From 1920 to 1931, the post-impressionistic Group of Seven rode a queer, largely self-generated wave of nationalism to become Canadian icons. They were widely derided as iconoclasts in their day, as future icons often are, but now their history is taught in the country’s art schools, and in junior-school art classes by way of giving kids something to be proud about.
But if you don’t know the real story, they’re a dusty lot. The average Canadian will have heard about them, and knows they’re painters, but thinks they’re something to do with either the Inuits or the Fathers of Confederation, those statesmen who dragged the pieces of the nation together 40 years before the Group of Seven existed. See the rest.