Jenna Naylor

[Dr Penny Hay 🇪🇺🕊💚🌳🐝🦋🌹🌈 @PenAHay]

Never more urgent Jeanette Winterson ❤️

[Christian Degn @christian_degn]

It took four years to finish this drawing.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

Exactly 112 years ago today a man called Vincenzo Peruggia walked into the Louvre and stole the Mona Lisa.

It is the most famous art theft in history, and it's what made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world.

And the man who stole it only spent 6 months in prison.

The Mona Lisa was commissioned in 1503 by a cloth merchant from Florence called Francesco del Giocondo. He asked none other than Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of his wife, Lisa.

But Leonardo — a famously slow worker — didn't finish the painting. When he went to work for the King of France he took it with him, finished it, and gave it to his new employer as a gift.

So the subject of the world's most famous painting, Lisa del Giocondo, never actually saw it herself! The Mona Lisa remained in the possession of French royalty, at the Palace of Fontainebleau and then at Versailles, for nearly 300 years.

But in 1797, after the French Revolution, it was moved the Louvre. Still, it wasn't a particularly famous painting at the time. In the later half of the 19th century certain critics started to acclaim the Mona Lisa as a masterpiece, but it wasn't popular with the public.

Until the 21st August 1911.

Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian tradesman who had moved to Paris in 1907 in search of work. He got a job at the Louvre, cleaning and reframing paintings.

There he learned how many Italian works of art Napoleon had taken from Italy and brought to France. Inspired to reclaim his country's heritage, Peruggia decided to steal the Mona Lisa.

Of course, although so many works of art all around the world were stolen or at least have murky history, the Mona Lisa was in France legitimately — Leonardo had given it to King Francis as a gift. Whether Peruggia knew this or not is still unclear.

How did he steal it? For what is probably the most famous art theft in history, it was remarkably easy. He entered the Louvre on the morning of 21st August, 1911, on a day when it was closed to the public, dressed like his fellow workers in a white smock.

He went to the Salon Carré, the room in which the Mona Lisa was kept, and simply took it off the wall when nobody was looking. Then he wrapped it in his smock and left the Louvre. Simple as that.

It wasn't until the next day that anybody realised the Mona Lisa was missing, at which point the authorities were alerted, the press heard about it, and the theft became an international phenomenon reported in newspapers all over the world.

The police were clueless. They arrested the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who implicated Pablo Picasso — he was then brought in for questioning. But they were both released and the case remained unsolved for two years.

The American businessman and art collector J.P. Morgan was even suspected of having commissioned the theft. There was a fear in France at the time that French art and heritage was being bought up by Americans, and the loss of the Mona Lisa was seen as a national disgrace.

Tourists came flocking to the Louvre to see the empty spot where the Mona Lisa had been — a relatively unknown portrait had suddenly become the world's most talked-about painting.

All the while Peruggia had the Mona Lisa in a suitcase in his Parisian apartment. In December 1913 he took it to Florence with him, hoping to sell it. At which point an art dealer called Alfredo Geri received a mysterious letter offering to sell him the Mona Lisa...

Immediately suspicious, Geri contacted the director of Florence's Uffizi Gallery, Giovanni Poggi. They pretended to go along with the sale, met up with Peruggia, verified the painting — and then contacted the police.

Peruggia was arrested, newspapers all around the world reported that the Mona Lisa had been recovered, and after being displayed for two weeks in Italy it was returned with great pomp and ceremony to the Louvre.

Thereafter the Mona Lisa became, and has remained, the world's most famous painting. It is undoubtedly a masterpiece, not least because of Leonardo's revolutionary use of a technique he called "sfumato", in which he blurred the colours and lines of the Mona Lisa's face to make it more realistic. But many people rightly wonder why it is *so* famous when there are many other paintings that are more important, interesting, and beautiful.

Well, it's all thanks to Vincenzo Peruggia, whose theft gave the Mona Lisa a unique place in the public consciousness. The Mona Lisa isn't famous because it's the best work of art ever made; it is the world's most famous painting... simply because it's so famous. A self-perpetuating cycle.

What happened to Peruggia? His trial took place in June of 1914, six months after having being first arrested — but by July he had been released.

See, Peruggia was hailed as a patriot and a hero in Italy, and there was immense public pressure for a lenient sentence. There had even been a campaign to raise money for him. He later served in the First World War, during which he was captured and imprisoned by the Austrians. After the war he returned to France, under a different name, and died there in 1925.

So, although he didn't precisely achieve his aim, Peruggia did succeed in making an Italian painting the most famous work of art in the world.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

We're so used to seeing and hearing about the pyramids that it's easy to forget how strange and extraordinary they really are.

So, just to remind you:

When woolly mammoths went extinct the Pyramids of Giza were already more than 500 years old.

Cleopatra and Julius Caesar are closer in time to the present day — to the Burj Khalifa — than to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza.

Where are they and who built them?

There are three pyramids on the Giza Plateau, which is on the west bank of the River Nile, in northern Egypt. They aren't far from Memphis, which was the capital of Ancient Egypt when they were constructed.

The largest and oldest was built in less than thirty years around 2570 BC for the Pharaoh Khufu. The second was built for Khufu's son, Khafre, and is only a few metres shorter. The third and smallest was then built for Menkaure, Khafre's son. Three monumental tombs for three generations of the same family.

Nearby are many more tombs for various members of the royal court, the Sphinx, several more temples, and the remains of a sort of workers' town including houses, workshops, bakeries, kitchens, breweries, a hospital, and a necropolis.

Khufu's Pyramid, known as the Great Pyramid, was the tallest building in the world for over 3,800 years — that is, until the spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England was constructed in 1311.

And at more than 6 million tonnes it was the heaviest manmade structure ever built, and is still third behind only the Great Wall of China and the Three Gorges Dam.

The mortar used in constructing the Great Pyramid alone weighs over half a million tons, which is more than the total weight of the Burj Khalifa.

See, the Great Pyramid is almost entirely solid — there are only a few narrow shafts and three small chambers inside. It was largely built from huge blocks of local Giza limestone, although its exterior was once covered in polished white limestone transported there from nearby Tura, and its interior includes blocks of granite weighing up to 80 tonnes transported from Aswan, over 500 miles away.

The *precision* of the pyramids is also remarkable. On a technical level their masonry is astonishingly accurate, but even more amazing is that the four sides of the Great Pyramid are all almost exactly the same length — they have a variation of no more than 60 millimetres.

Not to forget that all three pyramids are aligned according to the points of the compass — within one tenth of a degree of perfect geographical accuracy.

And if these facts weren't impressive enough, the actual construction of the pyramids — the specifics of how the blocks were quarried, transported, and lifted into place — remains a marvel we have yet to fully understand.

But those are merely the facts of the Pyramids of Giza; perhaps more interesting is what they really mean.

After all, you can learn a lot about any society from its architecture. What we say about ourselves can rarely be trusted — but what we do and what we leave behind is always truthful. In other words, that which we build expresses our priorities, how our society works, and who has the most power.

Think of it this way: what are the biggest buildings in the modern world?

By volume it is factories (the Boeing Everett Factory is number one right now) and distribution centres.

By total floor space it is airports and malls.

By height it is mixed-used skyscrapers, though they are usually dominated by offices, especially relating to finance. The Pentagon was the world's largest office building until this year; it has been overtaken by the Surat Diamond Bourse in India.

By capacity? Well, there are sports stadiums, the biggest of which is the Narendra Modi Stadium in India, with an official capacity of 132,000. That being said, no single complex can hold a greater number of people than the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, which has a capacity of 4 million.

So the largest buildings in the 21st century are almost all related to industry, finance, retail, transport, and leisure — with religious worship something of an outlier. This is a technologically advanced, industrial, highly consumerist society in which businesses hold a great deal of power, and in which the wants and demands of the public are very important.

For comparison, during the Middle Ages nothing came remotely close to cathedrals in size or complexity, though castles and fortresses were also far bigger than everything else. We can draw the basic conclusion that religion was of immense and central importance, that the church as an institution was very wealthy, and that power was actually spread out among the hereditary nobility rather than being entirely concentrated in the monarch alone, not to mention the political and spiritual power also held by the church.

So, what about the Pyramids?

The Ancient Greek historian Herodotus remarked that the Pyramids of Giza were proof of how tyrannical a ruler Khufu — or Cheops, as the Greeks called him — must have been. In his native Greece the largest buildings were temples for public worship; the Great Pyramid was a monument to but one man alone, and this shocked Herodotus.

The biggest buildings of the 21st century are all useful. They have a clear and immediate purpose, and usually one which benefits — in some sense — lots of people. A factory produces things we all use, a distribution centre organises our online shopping, an office is a place of work, and a stadium is where we go for entertainment. Our largest buildings are intimately and inseparably related to employment and consumption.

What about the Pyramids? They were tombs for the Pharaohs and they were supposed to last forever. In other words, they had no immediate use or purpose, at least for the living. They served only one person: the Pharaoh — plus his family and closest supporters, though they were buried nearby rather than inside — in his journey through the Afterlife.

So this is not the same as a large and lavish royal or presidential palace; such buildings are designed to be used as a seat of power and administration — by several succeeding generations or leaders.

Meanwhile, all the resources and labour that went into building the Pyramids, which were literally manmade mountains, were for the benefit of one Pharaoh alone, after his life had ended — and, to a lesser extent, those lucky enough to have been buried nearby at the time.

Does that mean Khufu and his descendants were tyrants? In some sense, yes. But there is evidence that those who built the Pyramids were not, as Herodotus thought, slaves, and were instead closer to conscripted workers and freely employed craftsmen who were fairly remunerated for their labour.

See, it wasn't just that Khufu held total political power; he was also the spiritual leader of his subjects, such that their work was fundamentally religious in nature — it might have even helped them achieve a better afterlife.

There was nobody who could refuse Khufu's desire to build the largest tomb in human history, because he was a divinely appointed intermediary between gods and humans; no regulation to stop him, because his will was the law; no limits to his expenditure, because he collected the taxes and owned all the land in the kingdom.

However powerful the world's richest and most influential people might now seem, none of it compares to the power wielded by Pharaohs like Khufu; a power that was political, financial, legal, military, and spiritual — absolute.

And so the Pyramids are a glimpse into a society fundamentally and almost irreconcilably different from that in which we now live, to the earliest epochs of human civilisation, long before democracy and the rule of law, when one man could rule as a god and have mountains built to serve as his personal, eternal monument on earth.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

This painting has no brush strokes — it is made from over 2,000,000 individual dots of colour.

And though this may look like nothing more than a sunny afternoon in Paris, it has a much darker hidden meaning...

[Darren Naish @TetZoo]

We are in a time of unprecedented ecological crisis. Animals large and small are declining everywhere. It is time to make small sacrifices to help the natural world survive and thrive. If you're lucky enough to own some garden space, here's a thread on things you can do help...

[Amanda @Pandamoanimum]

Pedro Pascal as Easter Eggs.

A thread.

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), German-born naturalist, entomologist and viewed as one of the greatest scientific illustrators #WomensArt

[Dr. Jessica Taylor @DrJessTaylor]

I have a question for you.

Do you have a narrator in your head? A voice that talks to you constantly, and never shuts up?

You can’t even get it to be quiet when you rest or meditate?
Do you have full blown conversations with the voice in your head?

[Thorben Danke @sagaOptics]

White plume moth, Pterophorus pentadactyla. A fascinating looking butterfly from the Pterophoridae family. The deeply split wings that are reminiscent of bird feathers are characteristic. The rear wings are split three times and the front wings split twice.

[NHM Library and Archives @NHM_Library]

Every day is #BlueMonday in the world of Anna Atkins (1799-1871) and her #cyanotype photographic prints of British #Algae [1 of 2]

View them all here: https://t.co/nLUa7H9CQd

#DigitisedCollections #PublicDomain #photography

[New Scientist @newscientist]

Orchidomania: A history of our obsession with orchids https://t.co/r7T5su04K2

[The Public Domain Review @PublicDomainRev]

Landscapes of the Western Front, 1914–1918 — A century after their strategic function has passed, these official British army intelligence photographs offer an unusual and haunting portrait of the front: https://t.co/p7AYCaLaR0 #RemembranceDay #RemembranceDay2022 #ArmisticeDay

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

Georgia O'Keeffe and her dog (photographer not known) #WomensArt

[Jenna Naylor @jenna_ln]

@samjohnson

[Jenna Naylor @jenna_ln]

“Spontaneous Revolutions”: Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement
https://t.co/fc5hkZk9rS

[Chris Jackson @ChrisJack_Getty]

As the flag is lowered to half mast over Windsor Castle an incredible rainbow appears over the castle, for a few minutes and then just like that it was gone….

[Tamsin Rosewell @autumnrosewell]

For a little Sunday joy, and in case you haven't found it yet, may I present the work of the Pingu Random House instagram account.

(Only slightly disappointed that it doesn't say 'Pinguin Classics')
#thread 🧵

[Dr. Clayton Forrester @DrClaytonForre1]

When sperm whales need a nap, they take a deep breath, dive down about 45 feet and arrange themselves into perfectly-level, vertical patterns. They sleep sound and still for up to two hours at a time between breaths, in pods of five or six whales, presumably for protection. 1/2

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

The Mona Lisa is a great lesson on fame.

Leonardo da Vinci began his masterpiece in 1503 but few people were talking about it for the next 400 years.

Today, it's the most famous painting in the world. How did it happen? A major scandal in 1911.

Here's the story🧵