Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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  • Tag: da vinci

    • The Ephemerality of Reality and the Permanence of Appearance

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on October 22, 2014

      The inspiration for this post was a much longer, more detailed paper I wrote as part of an undergraduate course on Medieval and Renaissance philosophy, which later I revised into my graduate school application writing sample.

      1280px-Última_Cena_-_Da_Vinci_5

      The first time I saw Da Vinci’s last supper, I admit, I didn’t understand the fuss. Of course, what I was looking at was a grainy photograph on a web site, and not the real thing. I saw that it was beautiful, and that it was interesting, but as I was not at the time terribly interested in Renaissance painting, I couldn’t see how it differed much from other works in quality and magnitude. However, the first time I saw the original in Milan, I felt something much more powerful. Perhaps it was my relatively new interest in the Renaissance – it was first time I’d seen something so large and so famous and so old in person – that prompted this strong reaction, but in the presences of the painting, I nearly fell to my knees.

      The rest of my short trip to Italy took me to Florence, where I saw Botticellis and Michelangelos and Donatellos up close. I walked the secret passageway of Medicis, the Vasari Corridor, and saw where Machiavelli lived. There was one central theme to my trip: I fell in love with the Renaissance when I saw it in person. When I saw the originals.

      But these weren’t really originals, of course – they were representations of either real physical things or imagined phenomena, interpreted through the mind of the artists. And because images and stories are reconstructive devices, when ephemeral reality fades, the appearance of the event takes over and replaces it. When we step into an artist’s interpretation of an origin, we don’t just see the representation of some reality; we see that reality as it appears to one particular person – and that tells us at least as much about the artist’s perspective as it does anything else.

      We don’t just want any depiction of the Last Supper, we want to see how Da Vinci imagined it. When it comes to art, we want the original replica so that we can get as close as possible not just to the original experience of something – we want to experience it as a genius would.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 9 Comments | Tagged appearance, art, da vinci, ephemerality, painting, renaissance
    • Anniversary Makers Faire

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on August 3, 2014

      A year ago, I got to marry the most intelligent, patient, kind, and inquisitive person I’ve ever met. On the surface, we seem like intellectual opposites – he’s STEM and I’m Liberal Arts – but we share a lot in common, and our interests often overlap in surprising ways. When I wanted to write about derivatives, he helped me clearly express what I wanted to say with the right amount of math. When he wanted to write about idioms, I talked him through the various ways that idioms function and why they’re useful. And we both love New Orleans Jazz, cooking, hiking, BBC’s In Our Time, and Norse mythology.

      To celebrate our first anniversary, we’re having a week-long mini makers fair (of sorts).

      Our Agenda:

      1) It’s time to finish Meduseld:

      IMG_3893

      We got this amazing 3D puzzle of Meduseld, the Gold Hall of Rohan, for Christmas one year, and got through everything but the roof. Since then, we’ve gotten married and moved into a new apartment, and it still has no roof. We’ll have to do some repairs first, and then we plan to see it to the end. I’m not sure what we’ll do with it once it’s finished – shellack it? Glue it together somehow?

      2) We’re going to make a huge pot of gumbo.

      3) Then we’re going to build this replica of Da Vinci’s Catapult:

      IMG_3892

      IMG_3897

      This caught our eye one day as we walked by a Marbles: The Brain Store at the mall. It was the perfect impulse buy, and we’re both super excited about it.

      4) We’re going to do some painting:

      photo

      I’d been keeping my paint supplies in a large plastic tub for as long as I can remember, and as my gift, the husband got me this amazing wooden case and some fresh new supplies.

      5) And finally, for our biggest feat, we’re going to assemble this wooden orrery:

      IMG_3903

      An orrery is a device for demonstrating the motion of the planets in the solar system, typically made with gears and brass and all sorts of cool looking bits and bobs. Orreries first came onto our collective radar a couple of years ago after we saw the incredible, absolutely monstrous, ones on a tour of a Gilded Age mansion. We saw them again at a science museum, and I thought then to get one for my husband for Christmas. My first search yielded only options that were unspeakably expensive or way too large to be practical, and when it came time to do more research, I got busy and forgot what I was looking for.

      Then, one of his projects for his self-designed challenge 30 Days of Python (which is awesome from start to finish) was to program a simulation of an orrery. Its easily my favorite day of his series. What I love about it is that it’s adaptable – he has the traditional heliocentric model, of course, but his program also lets you define any point of reference as the “center”, allowing you to get a clear visualization of what planetary motion looks like from earth, giving a glimpse of Greek epicycles. His screen capture is pretty awesome (and there’s video, if you follow the link!).

      I went back into research mode, and found this beauty – a small, wooden kit we can build together, with visible gears.

      http://www.planetaria.com.au/product/the-mini3-original-desktop-orrery-kit/

      It’s going to be awesome.

      Posted in Stories | 0 Comments | Tagged anniversary, catapult, da vinci, edoras, makers faire, meduseld, orrery
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