Experts say this artwork previously attributed to an anonymous German artist, is likely a drawing made by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci.

They claim that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German drawing of a young woman has convinced art experts that it’s actually a Leonardo. The print was found on the artwork and that it matched a fingerprint from Leonardo’s “St. Jerome” in the Vatican. The experts examined multispectral images of the drawing taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris. The lab used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.

“Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works,” Paul Biro -a Montreal-based forensic art expert- said. “I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint.”

Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence had experts believing they had found a Leonardo as early as last year. The discovery of the fingerprint now has them convinced. One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $150 million!

Now, I am not the judge of course but I heard some rumours that It could be a false alarm too. Apparently, as it is a very fresh discovery, they want to keep it quite not to cause too much attention. I think we will heard some news about it on the press soon for sure. It worths to keep an eye on it!

Check this very interesting article by ROB GILLIES Associated Press Writer, October 14, 2009

Herbert James Draper was born in London, primarily a painter of mythological marine subjects, he is often regarded as a successor to Frederic Leighton more by virtue of his consummate technique than his subject-matter. Trained at the Royal Academy and at the Académie Julian in Paris where he worked under Boulanger and Lefèbvre. He specialised in paintings depicting mythological events, not dissimilar to the subjects which attracted J. W. Waterhouse.

Herbert James Draper (1863-1920)

The Lament for Icarus, was purchased by the Chantry Bequest in 1898. In 1900 Draper was awarded a gold medal at The International Exhibition in Paris for Icarus. He exhibited at the Royal Academy each year from 1887 until shortly before his death.

The picture shows the dead Icarus from Greek mythology. He is surrounded by lamenting sea-nymphs. His father, the craftsman Daedalus, made wings out of wax so that he and his son might escape from the island of Crete. But, overcome by pride, Icarus flies too near to the sun, the wax melts, and he plunges to his death.This painting is Herbert Draper’s most famous work. He belonged to the generation of British artists that was influenced by French Impressionism but Draper devoted himself to the historical and literary themes of Victorian artists such as Edward Burne-Jones.

The painting is an imaginative adaptation of the Icarus legend which had become a popular pretext for the representation of ephebic beauty following the exhibition of Leighton‘s Daedalus and Icarus in 1869. In developing the composition Draper adopted Leighton’s method of making separate figure studies for which he employed four youthful models all of whom were Academy professionals. Although Draper endured by the persistent studio convention of posing male and female models separately, by the late nineteenth century audiences had come to accept the frankly erotic interaction of those models on the canvas, so much so that it was now possible to place the male nude under the desiring female gaze.

Artist Letter

The Lament for Icarus may have been conceived as a tribute to Leighton who had died in 1896, but as the autorities has recently suggested , it may also be a more private statement of loss, following the death of Draper’s father in 1898. The use of the male body as a vehicle for the projection of subjective emotion is a characteristic of late-Victorian painting and sculpture, and here the rippling wings and drapery gently caress the surface of a body that appears to melt within the arms of the nymph, accentuating the theme of human mutability.

So, finally I suggest you to check the Art Renewal site to explore more forgotten treasures:)

Cheers!

London Underground Tube Map

Beck was an Underground employee who realised that because the railway ran mostly underground, the physical locations of the stations were irrelevant to the traveller wanting to know how to get to one station from another — only the topology of the railway mattered. This approach is similar to that of electrical circuit diagrams; while these were not the inspiration for Beck’s diagram, his colleagues pointed out the similarities and he once produced a joke map with the stations replaced by electrical-circuit symbols and names with terminology, such as “bakelite” for “Bakerloo. In fact, Beck based his diagram on a similar mapping system for underground sewage systems. In this way, Beck built a diagrammatic map regarding the diagrammatic interpretation rather than geographic locations of the stations.

The 1908 tube map

It was clearly Beck who had the idea of creating a full system map in colour. He believed that passengers riding the trains were not too bothered about the geographical accuracy, but were more interested in how to get from one station to another, and where to change. Thus he drew his famous diagram, looking more like an electrical schematic than a true map, on which all the stations were more or less equally spaced. Beck first submitted his idea to Frank Pick of London Underground in 1931, but it was considered too radical as it did not show distances relative from any one station to the others. After a successful trial production of 500 copies of Beck’s map in 1932, the map was given its first full publication in 1933 (700,000 copies) and the reaction of the travelling customers proved it to be sound design; it immediately required a large reprint after only one month.

The central portion of the map, showing complex interchanges between routes, was enlarged in proportion to outlying areas. Meandering geographic lines were drawn on a grid of horizontals, verticals, and forty-five-degree diagonals. Bright color coding  identified and separated the routes. Although cautious about the value of Beck’s proposal, the publicity department printed the trial run and invited public response. When the public found the new map extremely functional, it was developed and employed throughout the system.

In preparing camera-ready art for the first trial printing of his map, Beck hand-lettered 2400 characters in Johnston’s Railway Type! Beck’s develeopement and revisions of the London Underground maps over twenty-seven years made a significant contribution to the visual presentation of diagrams and networks, for his discoveries inspired many varioations around the world.

When a combined cabaret and dance hall, the Moulin Rouge opened on the boulevard de Clichy in 1889, and soon became the center of night life in Montmartre, one of Lautrec‘s paintings was displayed near the entrance. He himself became a conspicuous fixture of the place and was commissioned to create the six-foot-tall advertisement that launched his postermaking career and made him famous overnight. He turned a spotlight on the crowded dance floor of the nightclub and its star performers, one of the star turns of the place as the dancer La Goulue performs the scandalous chahut (can can) with her loose-limbed partner Valentin Le Désossé (the boneless).

In this debut poster, Lautrec had not only his first involvement with color lithography, but also departed radically from previous poster art. The work virtually established his career, and his name became immediately known throughout Paris. In terms of sheer scale the poster is commanding, and its composition is startling and memorable.

The choice of subject is revolutionary, marking the first time that specific “stars” had been used to advertise a place of entertainment. Lautrec portrays the famous pair performing in the middle of the dance floor surrounded by a circle of spectators that embraces the viewer.

Toulouse-Lautrec - La Goulue arrivant au Moulin Rouge

“La Goulue au Moulin Rouge” broke new ground in poster design. A dynamic pattern of flat planes – black spectator’s silhouettes, yellow ovals for lamps, and the stark white undergarments of notorious cancan dancer, who performed with transparent or slit underwear- move horizontally across the center of the poster. In front of this isthe profile of dancer Valentine, known as “the boneless one” because of his amazing flexibility. In this milestoneof poster designi simplified symbolic shapes and dynamic spatial relationships from expressive and communicative images.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had turned obsessively to drawing and painting after breaking both hips in an accident at age 13. Further growth of his legs was stunned, leaving him crippled. He was a  painter, printmaker, draftsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period.

Originally Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world”. The art form rose to great popularity in the metropolitan culture of Edo (Tokyo) during the second half of the 17th century and influenced european artists later on (such as Gaugin and Van Gogh) and eventually contributed to the creation of “Art Nouveau” movement.

What does means pictures of the floating world ? Altough it sounds pretty abstract, after a couple of hints about that era, you will catch the subtext in a blink of eye! Well, it was a time of economic expansion, internal stability and flourishing cultural arts. Foreign trade was restricted and Japanese artists were banned to travel overseas. During this period of isolation Japanese artists combined the realistic narratives of “emaki”(traditional picture scrolls) with influences from decorative arts.

They focused on living only for the moment, turning full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting themselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this was what they call the floating world.

Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) was an exceptional artist -imo- for his achievement of capturing the real essence of Ukiyo-e. He inspired European impresionists with his brilllant spatial compostion and ability to capture the transient moments of the landscape.  He illustrated the fifty-three way stations along the Eastern Sea Road from Edo to Kyoto, capturing subtle nuances of light, atmosphere and season. His exceptionality was not only to capture the poetic splendor of nature but also to relate it to the lives of ordinary people as well. Not surprisingly he was also the rival of  Ukiyo-e artist Hokusai who is extremely famous for his great print  “The Great Wave off Kanagawa“.

So, if you got curious about Ukiyo-e and Edo period, check out the Samurai Champloo’s 5th episode here (a marvelous japanese animated tv serie taking place during Japan’s Edo period ). This episode is about the  Hishikawa Moronobu -the first master of the ukiyo-e print- who deeply influenced Van Gogh with his ukiyo-e woodcuts.

The thing is, the Rosetta Stone was the critical key to the process of decryption or translation of Hieroglyphs. How ? This artifact which is made of stele with carved text possess  three translations of a single passage!  Two in Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in classical Greek.

After its discovery by the French in 1799 at Rosetta, it guided to construct the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The touching part  is that Rosetta Stone appears to be created in 196 BC, it means that: now we can perfectly understand and translate that era’s language maybe even older languages thanks to comparative translation of the stone which assisted in understanding many previously undecipherable examples of hieroglyphic writing.

Now i wish to look closer to this baby, because i’m so curious after reading about it..

But i missed my chance. C’est la vie

Oh! Don’t forget to visit it if u pass by near the British Museum and check out the detail photo here

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Rosetta_Stone_BW.jpeg

and the translation of course..

http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/rosettastone.htm

Cheers!

Here is one of the best printers of the golden age of French typography. He lived in an era -1600s- where the printers actually “design” the books. Books were used to written in italic text and with initials decorated with superbly crafted decorations. The innovation of de Colines is he was probably the first to mix roman and italic as we do today. The page shown here only hint at the typographic variety to be found throughout the text.

So i always admired renaissance initials in the old books, when i think of their creators i would use the title “illustrator” but in that era they used to called “printers”. An highly underestimated word in the sphere of designers. Isn’t it ? Now check out the stunning title page design from de Colines.

” The typography surrounded by an illustration that takes great liberties with natural scale and perspective to create a joyous interpretation of natural bounty of the earth’s flora.” P.B. Meggs