Go here. It’s so worth it.
https://weather.com/news/news/2019-01-09-hidden-patterns-in-macro-frost-photos-copy
Category: Beauty
Just be kind.
This is wonderful and beautiful. There’s no one like Mr. Rogers.
He’s got the whole world . . .
Gracious Art, Artistic Grace
Usually when I reblog an article, I tease you with the beginning of the piece. But with this one, I am going to give you the ending. An excellent commentary on Babette’s Feast. (If you just want to “cut to the chase,” go here.)
Gracious Art, Artistic Grace
Dinesen’s feast of a story is a celebration of food and wine, tragedy and comedy, personalities rich and ridiculous. It is also, I believe, theologically profound. This little story preaches two startling things about the nature of this world and the God of this world—two things that should, perhaps, not startle us, but that we need regularly to be startled by.
Grace does not need our permission to go to work on us. In God’s economy, grace is stubborn, relentless, and inescapable: it hounds; it gets inside without permission; it rises like a wave. Our stories are written to double back and catch us unawares, to drive us again to the moments of our failure and force us to receive what we once refused.
But the reason that art can be gracious is that Grace is anartist. In our little worlds of perfect justice, we assume that our failures will frustrate God’s purposes and disqualify us from joy. We therefore live as if guilt and regret are righteous, fear holy, despair a wise conclusion to draw from the mess we have made. But God has far too much at stake in us for that to be true. Grace is like Achille Papin, refusing to abandon Philippa to a life of artistic barrenness because hisownlife, his own art, would be meaningless if he did not complete his work in her. Grace is Babette, the culinary genius of her age, spending all her money and skill on people who cannot taste, because it is her one opportunity to do her utmost. The reason God loves us faithfully is not because we have some inherent worth or usefulness that we increase by our cooperation, undermine by our failure. It is because God is an Artist, and making something from nothing—doing his utmost—is his great desire, the one long cry of his heart.
But he is not content with that—and neither, miracle of miracles, are we. An artist has not done his utmost until he has, like Lorens Loewenhielm, given taste to the tasteless, until he has, like Achille Papin, created in duet—and God is such an artist. He will not be content until he has made us into artists, too. At our best, at our truest, we desire to justify his gift, to respond with the gratitude that is itself an artistic act.
For now, his and our project is often shockingly anti-climactic: anecdotal failures and even more anecdotal redemptions, a meal no one can taste, dying people playing in the snow. But one day—how it will enchant the angels. •
Leta Sundetis a Ph.D. student in literature at the University of Dallas and attends a Reformed Episcopal church. Her current literary interests include Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and children’s books.
“The Artistry of Grace” first appeared in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you’ll find more of the same in every issue.
You can read the beginning here.
van Eyck’s lamb
Originally posted here.
Original, more “intense” Lamb of God is revealed in Ghent Altarpiece
Zelda Caldwell | Nov 01, 2018
Restorers working on the famous Ghent altarpiece, also known “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” discovered that the lamb was painted over in the 16th century in what, it now appears, was a botched attempt at restoration.
The original lamb, painted by the Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck in the 15th century, was discovered underneath layers of paint, and found to have a decidedly different character from its pretender.
While the more recently rendered lamb appeared to be ““an impassive and rather neutral figure,” according to the restorers, the original packs more of a punch.
The newly revealed lamb casts “an intense gaze and is characterized by a graphically defined snout and large, frontal eyes, drawing onlookers into the ultimate sacrifice scene,” said the restorers in a statement reported by Flanders Today.
The lamb is the centerpiece of the painting, which depicts a gathering of saints and sinners who have come to adore the Lamb of God.
Koenraad Jonckheere, professor of art at Ghent University, told Flanders Today that the 16th-century overpainting substituted a realistic animal for a figure that was meant to symbolize Jesus Christ.
“Their careful overpainting campaign subtly adapted the shapes to the taste of the time and to some extent neutralized the Van Eycks’ intense and humanized identification of the Lamb into an expressionless animal, seemingly unaffected by what was about to come,” said Jonckheere.
Restoration work on the Ghent Altarpiece has been underway since 2012, after a team of experts discovered that 40 percent of the 20-panel altarpiece had been overpainted, some parts as recently as the 19th century.
In the 1950s, restoration work revealed the original set of ears on the lamb. Out of fear that the painting would be damaged, restorers did not attempt to remove the second set of ears, leaving the lamb with four ears.
The restored panels on outer doors of the cabinet-like piece are on view at Ghent’s Sint-Baafs Cathedral. The inner panels are currently being restored and have been temporarily replaced by copies.
You can’t have one without the other.
“Theology is the North Pole and art the South Pole of the Christian Life. Theology is the study of what God does and says; art is what people say and do in the entire context of what God says and does…You can’t have one without the other.” (Eugene Peterson)
When despair for the world grows in me
Scotland on ice
Summer ends now
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
—“Hurrahing in Harvest” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world needs beauty
“This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man…” (St Paul VI Address to Artists, 1965)
