Dali House

I suppose it make sense that cats, whose best years were back in ancient Egypt, would prefer the classics to modern interpretations.

In this witty pairing of images from the website Demonicious, which cares even less than Dali House about mentioning its sources, a mommy feline shows favour to Titian’s more urbane “Venus of Urbino” from 1538 over Claude Monet’s disrespectful 1863 version.

While we wait for Spielberg to get around to making “Close Encounters of a Fourth Kind”, we can happily gape at this mothership of a jellyfish.

It’s known affectionately as Aequorea macrodactyla, but not intimately, having only been discovered in a recent “sea census” deep in the Pacific.

Below, looking for all the world like a cute paperweight, possibly Persian judging from the stylisation, is in fact Megaleledone setebos, not an octopus but a close enough kin. And below that, a comb jelly, which, chillingly, is right at home in Canadian waters.

Just thinking out loud here.

The photo comes from the “World War II in Color” collection at Demonicious.com, not to be confused with the same site’s “Hot Girls” collection.

Future Picassos or Modiglianis on the assembly line? No, sardine eggs photographed by Richard Kirby of Britain’s Royal Society.

I’d like to think the terrific use that art lovers have made of Google Earth has prompted the remarkable innovation launched this past week with the Prado in Madrid. Users can now examine 14 of the museum’s masterpieces in minute detail, getting even closer to them than the artists did themselves.

This is the conservator’s-eye view through a powerful magnifying glass. The ultra-high resolution pulls in up to 14 gigapixels — that’s 14 billion pixels, which is about 1,400 times better than your basic camera can manage. The artworks were photographed section by section and the images stitched together digitally.

The free Google Earth software lets you swoop around and inside the Museo Nacional del Prado and zoom in on the paintings, scrolling across the surface of works by Bosch, Velazquez, Goya, Tiepolo, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt, José de Ribera, Rogier van der Weyden, Fra Angelico, Durer and, as re-created here, Juan de Flandes, whose “Crucifixion” from about 1515 is zoomed at the top of this post and seen in whole below. The original is 1.7 metres wide.

Not only can you track the tiniest brushstrokes, you get a hair-raising idea of how much damage these paintings have sustained over the centuries.

Below, a pair of jungle pals by Hieronymus Bosch, and below that, in the red circle, where they frolic in the four-metre-wide “Garden of Earthly Delights” …

See the rest.