Soo, the monumental gate designed and built by French architect René Binet for the Universal Exposition in 1900 in Paris had been inspired by Haeckel's radioalaria? Huh.

Vibrant colour projected onto a 2,600 year-old wall panel offers a glimpse of the past lived in glorious technicolour! From the North Palace at Nineveh (present day Iraq), where the walls were decorated with brightly painted reliefs. 🎥 by me #ReliefWednesday #Archaeology

Ernst Steiner, b. 1935, one of the key members of Vienna's Fantastic Realism movement, famous for symbolic-looking paintings that lie somewhere in-between abstract art, imaginative landscapes and fantastic still-lifes. Some of the most meditative paintings I know sacredartpilgrim.com/collection/v...

Along with everything else that's wrong here, I'm SUPER upset this is going to be a lot of people's first exposure to Bukharian jomahs. Which are actually pretty fab when they're worn where it's appropriate, and have a cool, but possibly apocryphal, origin.

I keep thinking about this. Imagine you live on an island (Bornholm) 5k years ago. Suddenly the sun stops being bright and warm. The sun is dying. Crops are failing. You'll die too. And in a world with no painting the entire island starts drawing suns on stones, as the last attempt to avert the end

Batak brass ornament. Allegedly it's a buffalo head, but I prefer seeing a hollow knight in a spiraly world. Batak people live in North Sumatra, Indonesia; speak Austronesian Batak languages, are now split 50/50 between Muslim and Christian, but with strong influence of local traditional religion

Not sea glass but fragments of plastic car tail lights, indicators and brake lights, probably washed into storm drains after heavy rain, eventually making their way to the sea. #oceanplastic

omg the practical theology of this. In a fancy suit, on TV, with a polished cross on wheels, but pretending, for no reason at all, to "bear" it... Like, if you can make THIS from Christianity, any talk about the inherent violence or niceness of this or that particular religion is totally senseless

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes. #romancelandia

It's rare to have one of your previous excavations and prehistoric artifacts so prominently featured, but here we are. As a part of my education, I dug at Vasagård, 2015, and uncovered some of the 'sun stones' in the ditches of Bornholm. It was a hot summer, and the results were even hotter 😎

You know how in some areas (e.g. Poland, Japan, Austria) there are lots of wayside chapels, tiny shrines, near roads and crossroads? To pray as you go, but also to sanctify the way? Well, around Venice they have/had "lagoon shrines", for the same very purpose, but on water!! 1/3

Miyawaki forests: 1. Learn the species of established forests in the area 2. Prepare the soil (add organic matter, cover with mulch) 3. Plant all species at once (not just early settlers), do it VERY densely! 4. Water and weed for the first 3 years Produces a mature-looking forest in 1/3 of time!

How to make a landscape pretty? 1) shitty winter for highest contrast and tree structure, 2) horrible air quality! Look, buildings just some 1 km away are completely lost in blue haze; chimneys with plumes, the sun is still high but is orange-yellow. It's coal smoke. 1870s could smell this painting!

“The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before” news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

A whole account that is (mostly) about stiles: arrangements of steps that allow people, but not animals, to climb over a fence or wall

A wild thing about having kids in your house is that sometimes you buy a cheap temporary something, or lift a thing off a curb, and then a few years later - BAMM it's a foundational memory of someone's childhood. The toys you always wanted to get rid of, the spoons you hope to upgrade. Nope. No way.

Unicorns are radical. Rainbows are radical. Being yourself is radical. Be radical. Be loud. Be proud. Stay strong. Stay united. I fucking love unicorns and rainbows.

Akkad, the city that was the capital of the first empire in History, has still not been found www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/09/a...

Tradition gets reinterpreted from scratch every day, love it!

A wholesome thread!

One weird peculiarity of Berlin Germans is that they only spend ~$10 on birthday presents when invited to a party, unlike Americans, Eastern Europeans, or Middle-Easterners, who spend ca $20. And that's a HUGE difference, if you ever had to buy presents: ~$15 a threshold from crap to a real object

My freshly 4 years old today: "I don't want to sleep. I want to LIVE!"

Here's the pudgy Pixiu from the flea market, whom I now want to paint as if it were an ancient polychrome, and my sketches of how it could be colored. Or rather, "could have been colored" as I want to try to only add "traces" of this color, as if weathered. I hope I won't ruin it haha

Ellen Thesleff's self portrait of 1895, goes beyond a depiction of outward appearances and conveys the enigma of the artist who helped introduce Impressionism to Finland; she regarded herself as a poet with a brush, always trying to capture what she called 'the dream of life.'

The weather here is very much for witches skidding sideways through the gloomy gales, so this Jill McDonald gorgeousness feels like just the right Puffin Post perfection for today

If you see a root that rectangular, does it mean that it used to grow around some rectangular object that was later removed? Or is it possible to achieve this level of straight-angledness naturally?

Kid got a new English teacher in school, and they speak and write in German literally translated to English (maybe not quite, but definitely in this direction). It's not even that easy to put a finger on why they sound so awkward, it's technically grammatical I guess, just horribly, horribly awkward

Mood (kids have the first day of school)

According to Google, the tourist attraction of "The Highest Tree in Berlin" is temporary closed. Today I learned that it's only true at a geological scale: after the storm of 25.07.2025 (that frankly looks more like a tornado) hundreds of 200-yo beeches had fallen (and the highest tree, a larch)

For comparison, newly painted Balinese sculptures look about like that: pretty, but not as... mysterious and measured. The colors are bright, lots of gilding, lacquer. I wonder if there's a way from unpainted to mysterious that doesn't involve 100 years of aging, but that also isn't cringe kitsch...

I bought a cast (fake artificial stone, cheap) winged lion on a flea market, and now I'm considering painting it, but not as a "new thing", but trying to make it look like an old polychrome. Is it even possible? Or is it bound to look tacky?

So cuisine behaves like language? (Centers innovating, diaspora becoming archaic)? Quite plausible and super interesting!

That's how it feels these days to google anything academic-ish about history, linguistics, or anything humanities in russian. Even the olden sites of the 00s are gone. It's now a vast toxic poisoned landscape where every sentence sips with Traditional Values, Truth, Homeland, and Faded Glory. 1/

At first I got annoyed as in my book any shrine is better than a cold sanitary space of most museums, presenting artifacts without any environmental context whatsoever. But then it gets nuanced and interesting

Glagolitic! On a tram!

Very much this! I actually benefit from this, as I aim my broken German towards posh dialects (x, not ʃ or ɕ) and sparkle some English words when in need. Which is equivalent to sociolinguistic screaming: I'm acceptable! Please tolerate me! I don't have a subculture, I'm just foam on top of a wave!

US administration is planning to remove all self awareness from the Holocaust museum (everything about Nazi sympathizers, refugees denied entry, internal refugee concentration camps/shelters etc). Exactly the same thing that Putin did to Russian history in the 00s. Whitewashing, lying, propaganda

Great thread with fun examples. For all best things in life, the process beats the result. Ideation is cheap, the result doesn't belong to you, all you have is the process. All that is important is the process

By collecting fairy tales—as well as legends, songs, and myths—the Brothers Grimm sought to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.

Frog fairy. The most magical of critters.

The page above is about Tilsit. I wrote a short thread about Tilsit before. Tilsiter cheese and Königsberger Klopsen for Germans are as close to Armenian attitude to Ararat as it gets (a symbolic, patriotic, historical place that is lost, and is no longer accessible) bsky.app/profile/elst...

A book I didn't buy: one about narrow railroads of East Prussia. Only think of the scope. It's specifically narrow gauge railways (all gone) from East Prussia (that no longer exists, occupied by the soviets, ppl displaced) These villages are now called Мысовка and Краснознаменск (Red-banners-town)

YES!!! I so want this broch to be built. Go support this project if you can. Maybe one day we can have a wild Iron Age party in there, I'll bring mead :) www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/buy-the-br...

Lovely analysis! But also counterintuitive, as for me a fox is always a girl (she's always a girl in Slavic folk tales) She behaves super "girly": fashionista, scheming and social engineering rather than direct aggression (smth a wolf would do). To see her in the male half here is so weird! 😅

Is there a moral aspect to making art? I tend to think that "yes, there is". It's not nearly as simple as "bad choices in a book are bad", or "lack of justice", or "a sympathy to bad characters is bad". Of course not! Is hard, impossible to be certain. But I think there's a ghost of morality there

Purgatory from Alsatian Legenda Aurea, 1419. I love the optimism, and the existential perseverance of it :) We can all learn from this optimism

til while most of Spain has villages and towns, Galicia is made of hamlets. They still call it villages, but instead of 200 houses separated by 15 km of fields they have 5-10 houses every 15 minutes walk from each other. Each with its own name Source: www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeau...

A book I didn't buy today: an old description of stuff they found at Schliemann's troy. I was impressed by the archeological drawings; all these beautiful etchings showing the shapes so well, making it almost palpable; not perfect, but half-way towards restoration. A platonic idea of an artifact!

The Apollonian read of Taylor Swift, wherein she embodies in exaggerated form the neuroses and struggles of suburban white women, but through her divine celebrity persona and blesséd life Sanctifies them and thus makes them bearable, is a plausible explanation of her popularity.

Roy de Maistre was a pioneer of abstraction in Australia and has been described as Francis Bacon’s ‘most important artistic contact in the 1930s.' They once occupied adjacent studios on King's Road, Chelsea - this work shows Bacon's studio, presumably when he had just moved in.