The first wealth is health

This 2020, the year of Rat coming slowly to the end, the rat the smallest of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac, its intelligence, agility, and quick-thinking enabled it to win the contest and become the first year in the system’s 12-year cycle. However the rat also represents the shadow psyche, it was believed at the beginning of this 2020 Chinese year, that social veneers could be stripped off in 2020, allowing people to better know their true selves and those of others. I’ve to start to believe in horoscope too 😉 This year was more gloom than boom year. Now, we are expecting the upcoming New Year and new opportunities. Yes, new better days the world is round and place which may seem like the end may also be the only beginning 🙂  

At this year also our conscious attention often turns to what we don’t have rather what we do. With the advent of the first official days of Christmas shopping, our shopping is closed. We fell overwhelmed by a season of lack. See before we head to the shops, it would do our souls good, it’s probably good to have now a reality check. We cant buy the gifts that count most: good health. Yes, today’s health is a blessing. We can purchase the best medical treatment available in the world, but good health is not for sale. health is a priceless gift from the Spirit that most of us take for granted until we become sick.   

On my work computer screen, each day is the image with the message clean your hands. I am working with heritage and working with art with clean hands is essential, many years ago my mentor said that if your hands are dirty, you still have to learn how to touch the art.

 Now also scientists are able to tell you more about your hands, probably they will be able to say who you are and what you do. Please take a short tour with me through bathing and hands cleaning art today. Art and artists always share stories. Artists illustrated our life, and also washing hands and bathing become part of their inspiration.

Raise the hand for hygiene!

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 You probably already have enough of these messages, and authors wrote at different times about cleaning hands and it’s hard to write something new, do not repeat the same facts again but I find myself it’s a pleasure and privilege to write, and I wish I knew all those stories before I become a conservator.

Also, I’m jealous 🙂 it wasn’t me to say Eureka! Eureka! I’ve no found this.  I had not been stepped into a bath and run naked through the streets of Syracuse such the Archimedes. My life was much easier, I just learn about the water level rose in an easy way in school. Almost everyone during study art conservation was able to meet Vitruvius. He is the oldest authority for the naked-Archimedes eureka story. He was a Roman writer, who included the tale in his introduction to his ninth book of architecture sometime in the first century B.C. Some people read some leave unread, some just pretend that know 🙂 and some scholars have doubted the accuracy of this tale.

Archimedes’ insight led to the solution of a problem posed by Hiero of Syracuse, on how to assess the purity of an irregular golden votive crown; he had given his goldsmith the pure gold to be used, and correctly suspected he had been cheated by the goldsmith removing gold and adding the same weight of silver. Equipment for weighing objects with a fair amount of precision already existed, and now that Archimedes could also measure volume, their ratio would give the object’s density, an important indicator of purity (as gold is near twice as dense as silver and therefore has significantly greater weight for the same volume). Eureka!” has another historic connection to gold. This time it happened during more modern times in the United States. During the California gold rush, prospectors looking for gold in the Californian hills were said to yell “Eureka! I found it!” when they struck gold. To this day, this expression Eureka becomes also the state motto of California, referring to the momentous discovery of gold near Sutter’s Mill in 1848. The California State Seal has included the word eureka since its original design by Robert S. Garnett in 1850.

Most likely, Archimedes never said “Eureka!” And who knows if he really ran through the streets naked. What we do know is that Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy, or what engineers still call today, the Archimedes principle. Science is all about facts and discoveries, with some of the remarkable breakthroughs coming from seemingly everyday occurrences and experiences. however to these days, saying “Eureka!” as a way of expressing an amazing discovery is out of style. So that’s why I am jealous 🙂 it wasn’t me to say Eureka! Bathing and hands washing are about hygiene. Maybe the most important word in 2020.

This world Hygiene as most of our medical worlds comes from Greek worlds. Hygeia was the Greek goddess of health, who was the daughter of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. She was the goddess/personification of health, cleanliness, and hygiene. Hygieia and her four sisters each performed a facet of Apollo’s art: Hygieia (health, cleanliness, and sanitation); Panacea was universal remedy; Laso was recuperation from an illness; Aceso was responsible for the healing process; and Aglaïa took responsibility for beauty, splendor, glory, magnificence, and adornment. Hygieia was associated with the prevention of sickness and the continuation of good health. We know that cleaning without soap is not cleaning, some of the earliest signs of soap or soap-like products were found in clay cylinders during the excavation of ancient Babylon in 2800 BC. Inscriptions on the side of the cylinders say that fats were boiled with ashes but did not refer to the purpose of ‘soap’. Not only ancient Greeks and Romans took a keen interest in hygiene. The cleanliness in the history of art is often related to religious purification. Moses gave the Israelites detailed laws governing personal cleanliness. Biblical accounts suggest that the Israelites knew that mixing ashes and oil produced a kind of hair gel.

If you want to read more about the history of baths in Greece probably The Book of the Bath, Françoise de Bonneville will be the best. Here you will be able to find more about ancient Rome the first public baths called Thermae which was built by Agrippa (Emperor Augustus’ right-hand man) in the year 19 BC.

In Rome were at least 170 bats operating by the year 33 BC, with more than 800 operating at the height of their popularity in the world. Public baths had been popular since the 13th century. Due to the scarcity of firewood, bathing became an expensive practice.  Whole families and friends had to share a bath, or many of them would remain dirty. Before the Middle Ages, public baths were common, as the general public regularly took time to bathe one way or another. In the 4th and 5th centuries, Christian authorities allowed people to bathe for cleanliness and health, but they condemned bathhouses for pleasure; they also condemned women going to bathhouses that had “mixed” facilities. As time went on, Christians were prohibited from bathing naked, and the Church started frowning on “excessive” indulgence in bathing, as they believed it led to immorality, promiscuous sex, and disease. It was a common belief at the time that water would carry disease into the pores of your skin, and that since the pores opened after a warm bath, this would make you even more susceptible to disease – including airborne diseases. It was also the time that handwashing was not only a sign of good manners but an opportunity to display desirable possessions including basins, ewers, aquamanilia, and jugs. Medieval wills and treasury accounts often list them when they were made of fine materials. For example, the last will and testament of Jeanne d’Évreux, queen of France and wife to Charles IV, lists a basin for hand washing alongside other precious table decorations.

This led to (mostly) lower-class citizens, particularly men, forgoing bathing whenever possible. They did wash their hands and faces and rinsed their mouths, but even this was considered dangerous as it was thought that it caused an excessive discharge or buildup of mucus in the nose or throat and weakened eyesight. The upper class, instead of forgoing bathing altogether, tended to cut down the full-body baths to a few times a year, probably trying to strike a balance of stench vs. bathing. Can you imagine a situation that most of the entire populace smelling rancid wasn’t enough, during Medieval times in Europe, the streets of cities were coated in feces and urine thanks to people tossing the contents of their chamber pots into the streets. One 16th century nobleman noted, “the streets resembled a fetid stream of turbid water.” He also noted that he had to keep a scented handkerchief held under his nose in order to keep himself from vomiting when walking the streets. If that wasn’t enough, butchers slaughtered animals in the streets and would leave the unusable bits and blood right on the ground. You can only imagine how people survived the stench on sun-baked summer days.

Most of the historian knows the story King James VI of Scotland, story tells that he wore the same clothes for months on end, even sleeping in them on occasion. The son of Mary Queen of Scots, King James would supposedly wear the same clothes for months at a time, he also kept the same hat on 24 hours a day until it fell apart! He didn’t take a bath as he thought it was bad for his health! And yet as gross as this all sounds, it was pretty acceptable during the time he lived, in which bathing oneself was believed to cause poor health. He never washed. Sir Anthony Weldon (a man who knew the King) once wrote that ‘his tongue was too large for his mouth and his drink came out of each side of his mouth and dribbled back into his cup’. Manners: He swore all of the time, picked his nose, and used his sleeve as a handkerchief when he had a cold.

Also one of the Kings of France; the Sun of King and his personal hygiene is a matter of debate among historians. On the one extreme is the rumor that Louis took only three baths in his life. It is quite clear how the rumor started: People in 17th-century Europe were told that bathing opened the body’s pores to disease. Bathing was considered to be a terrible health hazard. Instead, people doused themselves with perfume to mask the inevitable stench. They also observed the ring of dirt around the cuffs and collars of their linen shirts and concluded that the flax in the linen had the magnetic ability to draw out dirt and perspiration from the body. Therefore, changing one’s linen shirt often was the path to cleanliness in lieu of a bath. Louis was not immune to these bizarre notions. The modern nose would have turned away from his smell. Louis also had bad breath, which prompted his mistress, Francoise-Athenais de Rochechouart de Mortemart, marquise de Montespan, to lace herself with a prodigious amount of perfume to overwhelm the king’s halitosis. But that triggered Louis’s headaches. They had a flaming row in the royal coach about how bad they smelled to each other. However, some historians believe that the king bathed only three times in his life is rather implausible. Some historians highlighted that Louis did take care to keep himself clean, just not in the way we moderns go about it. Due to his perfume-induced migraines, he was rubbed instead with spirits or alcohol to disinfect his skin. The king changed his underwear three times a day. He even had an entire apartment in Versailles turned into bathrooms, with two private baths for himself. Though Louis was understandably reluctant to bathe, and then only upon his doctor’s orders, these baths must surely have been used more than three times. The Sun King wasn’t the filthy royal he was made out to be. Source: Listverse

In Elizabethan England, it was believed bathing made you ill. Queen Elizabeth, has been historically recorded by many historians as having black teeth with breath that stank, Her body was covered in perfumed talcum powder the whole time to disguise her body odour. It is well documented and a simple Google search will show this. The black teeth are presumed to be a result of her love of sugar and sweets which she was introduced to her during her reign. Her anti-social body odour is something people could not have criticised at the time because she had people beheaded on the slightest whim and change of mood. Shakespeare wrote not of Elizabeth I despite living in the same period (16th Century) because it would be suicide. “Elizabeth I got a law made in England prohibiting the circulation of unflattering portraits of her. Elizabeth’s portraits are notoriously fictitious in always showing her as a pearly-skinned icon of Renaissance beauty even when she was
old.” Despite the stereotype, people did clean and bathe themselves during the middle ages and renaissance age. In fact, peasants often bathed much more than nobility due to free public bathhouses and nobility always changing clothes, unlike peasants. Since the arrival of the Industrial Revolution (c.1750-1850) and the discovery of the germ theory of disease in the second half of the nineteenth century, hygiene and sanitation have been at the forefront of the struggle against illness and disease. However the water was stored in large lead tanks and often became stagnant, it wasn’t much better than the water supply the peasants used. In the decades after the Industrial Revolution cities choked with dirt. Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of the hardships of early modern life, wrote in “Oliver Twist” of a slum in Bermondsey, in south London, that consisted of “rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter”. It contained, he continued, “every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage”

From Georgian’, ‘Victorian times the fashionable ladies carried of the mixed flowers and herbs bougets- Nosegay ( also called tussie-mussie or posey) in the hands, it would also be held under their noses for walking through the crowds to avoid the unpleased smell. The Fashionable Magazine of September 1786 wrote an ‘Essay on Nosegays‘ that I thought might be of interest too.

Today cleaning hands remains as vital as ever, probably is even more important than usual.

Power is in your hands!

Spread Holiday cheer thorough your entire home decorations no matter what holiday you celabrate.

😉

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or to whatever else you’re celebrating this year!

All the best for 2021

All shall be well, and all shall be well

And all manner of things shall be well

Ella

Daily comfort

They are some things I learn best at home, such as my authentic workstyle. Many of us are discovering that working at home is great. But it’s not exactly as you might imagine it to be. Yes, its fabulous to be able to work in pyjamas, handy to throw a load of laundry into the washing machine while sending a emails, convenient to start soup or spaghetti….. 🙂

But if you are not carefully, its easy to blur the distance between two spheres- home and work until you have only homework. Be carefully, don’t lose sense of proportion. Someone mentioned that in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed.

They must be fit for it.

They must not do to much of it.

And they must have a sense of success in it.

Stay safe

Ela

🙂

Stay home

#stayhome #teamwork 🤗😷👩🏻‍🎨help each other

No one has ever become poor by giving

Ella

If you ask me what I am doing

Today 17th February 2020 is a day to excite cat lovers around the world. Just because cats can’t officially celebrate with their owners doesn’t mean they should be left out of the many reasons for year-round holiday cheer!

It might be surprising, but there are plenty of cat-themed holidays that cat lovers from all over the globe celebrate on an annual basis. In the age of the Internet, no animal has captivated audiences quite like a cat. The popularity of cat pictures, however, did not start with social media; in fact, such images have been an artistic staple since ancient times. From age-old paintings to more modern graphic design, cats have been stealing the show for centuries.

Cats have been portrayed as favourably animals in Ancient Egypt. Egyptians viewed the animals as sacred, depicting gods and goddesses in their likeness and regularly incorporating them into their relief carvings, papyrus paintings, and tomb decoration. Drawings and engravings of powerful cats were often featured on both ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and the walls that surround them. pet cats were mummified and buried so that they, too, could pass into the afterlife.

Chineses admired cats for their lion-like stalking skills and subsequent contributions to pest control. Domesticated cats have been kept as pets in China for thousands of years. Thus, in most Chinese art, they are typically shown doing what house cats do best: hunting small animals, exploring their surroundings, or curling up for a cat nap. Much like in China, Japanese art has a cat iconography for hundreds of years. 

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In Japanese art also often personified cats dressed and behaving like people, offer a comical twist on both cat art practice. Given the popularity of our cat’s friends, it is no surprise that today’s top artists often opt to incorporate cats in their art. Abraham Teniers’ painted paintings entitled Barbershop with Monkeys and cats where the cats are undeniably the stars, getting coiffed and ready for the weekend, served by their attentive monkey servants. 

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, advertising became increasingly sophisticated and, as has been attested by the popularity of coffee table books and shows such as Mad Men, has become a legitimate art form in and of itself. This poster by the Art Nouveau painter and printmaker Théophile Steinlen is both one of the most famous cat pictures and advertisements from history. He was commissioned to do the poster by befriending the artistic crowd at Le Chat Noir, a popular bohemian entertainment establishment that is widely thought to be the first modern cabaret club. While the club is long gone, the poster remains a mainstay on many a wall, and le chat being a perfect representation of much of 19th-century Paris.

Cats and Cubism, it turns out, result in something that is altogether quite unsettling. While many cats in the art are very much presented as either docile house cats, sitting patiently — or sullenly — on laps, or possibly in slightly odd scenarios,

Picasso’s Cat Devouring A Bird portrays a cat in its natural way of being — as a hunter, devouring its most famous foe. Is this an image of the war in Spain, or a premonition of even worse things to come? During the first three months of 1939, the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia fell into the hands of Franco’s troops, while Hitler was making inroads into Eastern Europe. Picasso’s mother died on 13 January. Political and personal events combined in his imagination to find expression in tormented pictures full of allegorical resonances.

Picasso explained: “I did not paint the war because I am not the kind of painter who sets out looking for subjects, like a photographer. But there is no doubt that the war is present in the paintings that I did at the time. Later, perhaps, a historian will demonstrate that my work changed under the influence of the war.”

Cat and bird are represented in two different versions: “The subject obsessed me, I don’t know why”, the artist later recalled. The cat in this picture is caked with mud-rendered by the admixture of sand to the paint – and holds a bird in its jaws. The neutrality of the background does nothing to relieve the horror of the scene: an image from everyday life blown up to apocalyptic proportions. The cat “stands menacingly on the threshold of the times to come”.One of David Hockney‘s most impressive and renowned pictures is a portrait of his friends, the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell — and their cat Percy. Hockney created the portrait shortly after the couple’s wedding. It is rife with symbolism, and Percy is an important part of this. As he looks aloofly out of the window, more than just representing cat-hood, it alludes to infidelity, envy, and Clark’s bisexual affairs which plagued the marriage and eventually led to its demise in 1974. Hockney commented that the aim of the painting was to “achieve […] the presence of two people in this room [with the main aim being] to paint the relationship of these people.”

Sometimes all you need is to add a cat to speak volumes on relationships.

Now, if you ask me what I am doing on my holiday ……. just sharing my day with others   

Authentic success is living each day with a heart overflowing and creating.

If you have nothing at all to create, then

perhaps you create yourself.

Happy Cat Day !

Ella

The one thousand-millionth of a metre.

Look at picture below, they are just a books, this needs no reward just…… books 🙂 So, in our real life, there are people who read and people who read too little. Reading is the last refuge for addictive personalities; there are no bad side effects from reading to much. Some people think becoming too found of books will turn our brains. I am thinking that our books turn us on to our passions and to pursuing our passions. We are shelved our books as big-and-small, we are organized some of them by colour so that shelves resemble a rainbow.  However, the new trend in home decor is backwards – looking – literally and following modern interior designers advice……. if the books don’t match your decor?  Please, don’t fret … just flip them :), simply turn the spines of your book in, those pages out which can help those who might otherwise find their immediate environment overstimulating.

Until the 18th century, the convention was to display every book with their pages turned out and the author’s name printed across them. Then some bright spark suggested an embossed spine might look better and what became known as “The Great Turnaround” began. Let’s hope a “Grand Flip-over” isn’t upon us. 🙂

Around three months ago, I was thrilled to be asked to design, and produce the exhibits just helped bring the Tiny Treasures: Miniature Books from Scotland and Beyond” story to life curated by Dr Dimitra Fimi.It was one of my biggest challenges in supporting to install a small exhibition with tiny, tiny treasure( without special budget 🙂 )   

dav

dav

I thought that our treasures are tiny but nothing wrong, the spirit and technology to produce much smaller books printed onto a single 5 mm x 5 mm surface. Scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have etched the 1.2 million letters of the Old Testament onto a disk no larger than the tip of a pen. They’re calling it the Nano Bible and reading it would require an electron microscope.  The Nano Bible is a new way to look at history, combining the ancient words that never change with modern technology that is always changing. Using incredible nanotechnology, an Israeli company successfully printed the entire New Testament — all 27 books comprising 180,000 words — on a single silicon chip that’s smaller than your pinky nail. What is the Nano Bible? The term nano derivers its name from the Greek world nanos means dwarf. The unit nanometer measures one-billionth of a meter, a ratio similar to the size of an olive compared to the entire planet earth. The Nano-bible is a gold -plated silicon chip of the size of a pinhead on which the entire Hebrew bible is engraved. the text consisting of more than 1.2 million letters, is carved on the 0.5 mm square chip means of a focused ion beam. the beam dislodges gold atoms from the plating and creates the letters, similar to the way the earliest inscriptions were carved in stone, but the writing process takes only about an hour and a half.

The letters belong to a font unique to this technology and appear darker against their gold background. Today the nano Bibles are not produced individually. Now, it is mass-produced on eight-inch round wafers, each of which contains 1,210 complete copies of the New Testament. A microchip containing the entire New Testament is being marketed as a fashion accessory. The tiny tome, which is less than a fifth of an inch square, can be mounted on a necklace, bracelet but you’ll need a special microscope to read it.  Maybe one day our collections will be enriched by such nanotechnology books, maybe Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from Dr Dimitra Fimi and her colleagues’ project? 

It will be really challenged for future conservators 🙂 how to store and how to share that book to the public 🙂 . Change happens. It can sometimes be exciting, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes even threatening, but it cannot be avoided.

For everything you’ve ever read, loved and remembered

is now part of your consciousness. 

What is once cherished

can never perish.

Ella

Easter 2019

Wishing you and all your loved ones a very Happy Easter.

The spirit of Easter is all about Hope, love, and joyful living.
Those who wish to sing, always find a song.

🙂

Ella

Fat Thursday

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so entwined that we cannot think of one without the other. M.F.K. Fisher

Today Poland celebrates the Fat Thursday (aka Doughnut Day). Perhaps you’ve wondered why Poland celebrates Fat Thursday and what is Poland’s Fat Thursday? As in other Catholic countries that celebrate the last day before the fasting season of Lent begins, Poland has its own version of the French Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), known locally as Tłusty Czwartek, or Fat Thursday. Once a year, this day gives Polish people the chance to overindulge on food, ahead of Lent. Or maybe make people feel good and calm, change brain chemistry by increasing the level of serotonin 🙂 the natural feel-good enzyme. Anyway, it creates a real buzz throughout the country, if only for a day.  On this day, for many Polish people, it is the last day to eat lots of fatty, sugary food and drink alcohol before Lent (the Christian festival). On Wednesday before, and all day on Fat Thursday itself, expect bakeries to be queued out the door. Fat Thursday is celebrated nationwide in Poland and also by Polish people living abroad. Even immigrants and tourists who live in Poland love to celebrate this exciting day. Other countries also celebrate Fat Thursday (or an equivalent), including Germany, Italy, Spain, and Greece. The day is also celebrated by Polish people living abroad, particularly in cities like Chicago and New York. Fat Thursday is similar to the British tradition of Shrove Tuesday, where many Brits eat pancakes on their final Tuesday before Lent. In general, all types of sweet and fatty foods are devoured all over Poland on Fat Thursday, but the two most popular are Pączki and Faworki.

What are they?

Put simply – pączki (singular – pączek) is a Polish version of the doughnut and are the most widely and commonly consumed food on Fat Thursday. The most traditional pączki are filled with rose flavoured jam, but many varieties exist. These scrumptious little doughnuts can be filled with chocolate, raspberry jam, or custard and can be topped with icing, sugar, or almonds.

It is said that you will have bad luck for an entire year if you do not eat at least one pączek on this day!

On Fat Thursday, many big businesses in Warsaw and major Polish cities give pączki away as presents to staff, meaning you will have no easy way to avoid seeing them.

It’s a national phenomenon.

                  So today if you are in Poland on Tłusty Czwartek! 🙂

Please try 🙂

I bought my own in Glasgow

🤪

You taste, use your eyes.

You might think you know how to make a jam cake, but do you?

Ella

 

The hope of knowing the unknowable

Just as New Year celebrations finish in the West, folks are gearing up to mark Chinese New Year in the East!  5th February  2019 marks the beginning of the Year of the Pig. It is the 4716th Chinese Year with the Chinese zodiac name Brown Pig. This making February the perfect time to ask yourself some questions and find out what you really want out of life and find out what the new year may have in store for us! People have always tried to bring certainty to their lives by trying to foresee what awaits them just around the corner. They have gazed at the stars and the patterns in the clouds, scrutinized droplets of molten wax inspected the entrails of animals. We offered our hands, feet, and faces to elderly soothsayers, and even studied the coagulation of cheese. All in the hope of knowing the unknowable. However, no community is more closely associated with seeing the future than the Gypsy culture community and the Romani people. As with Romani tradition, gipsy fortune-tellers are always female, the fortune-tellers in question known as drabardi. Fortune telling acts a livelihood to some, but one must bear in mind that the Romani only practised divination as a source of income with non-Romani people, that is, the Gadje; they never did so amongst their own people. The image of the drabardi was so well-known and widespread that it becomes synonymous with fortune telling, making its way into popular culture through the paintings, books, films. Like this one painted by Reynolds’s A Fortune Teller in 1777 or others famous painter Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio made in Italy in 1594 or Simon Vouet in France in 1620 or just like this below created by Parker Brothers in 1899. The nomadic Roma were probably also responsible for taking the ancient art of palmistry – the practice of the reading the lines and undulations of the palm of the hand – to every corner of Europe. Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in his painting depicts a floppily-dressed boy getting his palm read by a gypsy girl. What really is interesting about the painting, is that if you look closely, the gypsy girl is smoothly coaxing the boy’s gold ring off his finger as she reads his palm. I think this is self-explanatory – the painting stereotypes the gypsies to be thieves, with even this smiling, nice-looking woman being a thief. Caravaggio creates the scene from his imagination, inspired by popular plays and literature of the time that both romanticized gypsies and warned about their frauds. On seeing one of Caravaggio’s gypsy paintings, a contemporary exclaimed: “I don’t know who is the greater sorcerer: the woman who dissembles, or you, who painted her.”Another widespread form of predicting the future is tasseomancy. Tasseomancy, as any Harry Potter fan will know, is the art of reading tea leaves or coffee grounds in the bottom of a cup.  Some of you may remember; in the third year, during one of the Divination lessons, Professor Trelawney read the tea leaves in Harry Potter’s cup.

Although traditionally associated with gypsy fortune tellers, tasseomancy originated in the Middle East in the medieval period and be traced to the 17th century when tea was brought to Europe by the Dutch. Although traditionally associated with gypsy fortune tellers, tasseomancy originated in the Middle East in the medieval period and be traced to the 17th century when tea was brought to Europe by the Dutch. The first times if you try Tasseomancy, you are just going to see blobs of tea leaves – probably we do need a good imagination to get started with tasseomancy. The most widespread form of predicting the future is playing cards. Playing cards arrived in Europe in the 15^th century, and it wasn’t long before they were being used to tell fortunes. In this 1922 painting below by the Spanish Artist Julio Romero de Torres, the artist tells an ancient story of a young girl having her fortune told. She is in love with a married man, who can be seen abandoning his wife in the background. The teller holds up a card that warns of the dangers ahead.

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Another popular form of cartomancy is Tarot. Historically, tarot cards were first mentioned in the 1440s, in northern Italy. Ancient lore suggests that using tarot for divination purposes started in ancient Europe. History suggests that ancient Egyptian priests invented tarot cards to represent their teachings and secret doctrines. They are thought to have survived the destruction of the Christian era because book burners were unaware of what they were. They were used first for games, much more complicated than the games we are aware of today. Because tarot card typically lacks the numbers, players had to depend upon the imagery on the cards to remember the cards that were the most powerful. Just take a closer look at the tart cards you will be able to find beautiful art with history and mythology secrets.

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The earliest decks of playing cards were hand-coloured with stencils. Consequently, they were extremely expensive to produce and were owned almost exclusively by the very wealthy. Cheaper products were also produced, but it is likely that they deteriorated quickly with use. With the advent of new printing processes, production volumes of cards were increased. During the fifteenth century, a method of producing cards using wooden blocks as printing templates was introduced in Germany. These decks were quickly exported throughout Europe. The next significant advance in card manufacture was the replacement of wood blocking and hand colouring with copperplate engraving during the sixteenth century. When colour lithography was developed in the early 1800s, the production of playing cards was revolutionized. From the picture above, we learn that several types of blocks were used for printing cards. There were pasting brushes and painting brushes. Also, cutting machines were used, probably similar to the big scissors apparatus which can be seen in the illustration and it is possible to reconstruct the processes that went into the making of cards of that time, including the pigments for the colours. Now cards are produced by the modern printing processes of lithography, photolithography, or gravure. In the future probably, more computerized methods will likely be adopted promising to generate a substantial increase in the playing card manufacturing industry. Take a close close-up view of the edges of two packs of cards. The left-hand cards are manufactured around 1880, the right-hand cards are from c.1990. In both cases, the 3-ply composition of the cardboard is discernible, with a thick, opaque layer inside two surface papers. This prevents the cards from being transparent and also gives the necessary strength and firmness to be used for play. Consider the manufacture of a three-sheet card. The arranging of the paper for this is called mingling. That is, a ream of white demy paper is spread open, and between every two sheets one sheet of cartridge paper is placed; and the pile when complete is called a head, consisting, of course, of a ream and a half of paper. What was the past like? It was a man who stands at a bench with a mahogany slab before him, the head of paper on his left hand and a large tub of paste on his right. Pulling the first sheet from the head upon the mahogany slab with his left hand, the paster with his large brush saturated with thin smooth paste covers it with a layer by two or three skilful movements of the arm and hand. He then pulls down upon this pasted surface a sheet of cartridge paper, the top surface of which is in like manner pasted. He next pulls down upon the pasted cartridge surface two sheets of white paper and covers the upper surface only with paste. One sheet of cartridge paper is pulled down upon this and pasted; then two sheets of white paper, and so on until the whole head has been pasted. Now it is obvious that by pulling down two sheets of white paper with no paste between them the boundary between two sheets of cardboard is made. From one side he has a  fortune; he had a job to do:). Not all forms of fortune telling have medieval or ancient roots. In February 1891 “Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board ” boomed a Pittsburgh toy, answered questions “about the past, present and future was produced. This mysterious talking, a flat board with the letters of the alphabet arrayed in two semi-circles above the numbers 0 through 9; the words “yes” and “no” in the uppermost corners, “goodbye” at the bottom; accompanied by a “planchette,” creative idea for two or more people was advertised. The idea was that people would sit around the board, place their fingertips on the planchette, pose a question, and watch, dumbfounded, as the planchette moved from letter to letter, spelling out the answers seemingly of its own accord.

The 1st May 1920, Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell entitled The Ouija Board

Details of the 1st May 1920, Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell entitled The Ouija Board

Now the fortune telling isn’t about to die out any time soon. It seems that old habits die hard. Even today, we’re still trying to find ways to bring certainty to our uncertain futures by finding new and ever more creatives ways to read it, from fortunes cookies to clairvoyant signs. Today is important whether you believe in it or not—you can come up with a way to test your ideas, cut through your initial bias and get a nice, clean answer.

So what is the future of the fortune – telling now … in the UK ….in Europe?

Only time will tell……

Could you deliberately turn away from the worlds?

Don’t read newspapers or watch the nightly news for a week.

Wean yourself away from the opinions of others-however talented, creative and celebrated they may be.

Listen carefully spirit’s playing your song.

                                        Ella

Gold stars for Christmas

 

 

Gold stars……………….for  Christmas! Maybe Christmas is one of these days You will be able to give yourself a gold star for being ordinary, and maybe  Christmas day is one of these days you will give yourself a gold star for being extraordinary.  And maybe Xmas is one of these days You want not need to have a star at all.

I have not yet gotten to the point where I need the gold stars.

Sometimes the greatest beauty of the Xmas emerges from a deep tragedy.

Surely the forgotten Christmas Truce was one of history’s most beautiful moments, made all the more beautiful in December 1914, in the light of the Great War carnage that followed it. Demonstrates that peace can be more fragile than war, but also that ordinary men can bond with one another despite all efforts of politicians and generals to the contrary. It was one of history’s most powerful, yet forgotten, Christmas stories.

Most accounts suggest the truce began with carol singing. It began when German soldiers lit candles on small Christmas trees, and British, French, Belgian and German troops serenaded each other on Christmas Eve. Soon they were gathering and burying the dead, in an age-old custom of truces. But as the power of Christmas grew among them, they broke bread, exchanged addresses and letters and expressed deep admiration for one another. Gentle tunes and soothing words of the Silent Night still touch the soul. The magic of “Silent Night” has remained uninterrupted for 200 years. A song that promises consolation and gives hope. Over and over again. For centuries, the song has crossed borders and overcome crises. It connects people no matter their origin, age or religion, and provides a link back to the time during which it was created. 

On the Christmas Eve night, 200 years ago in 1818, Joseph Mohr, a priest from Salzburg, and Franz Xaver Gruber, a teacher from Upper Austria, sang the song for the very first time at the St. Nikola Church in Oberndorf near Salzburg. The original poem was authored by Joseph Mohr, whereas Franz Xaver Gruber added the melody on his request. Only a few years later, singing families from the Zillertal valley carried the song from Austria into Europe and the rest of the world and today, the song is performed in over 300 languages and dialects.

“Silent Night” music was composed by a musician who was not known outside his village. Perhaps this is part of the miracle of “Silent Night.”

There was no celebrity to sing at its world premiere in 1818. Yet its powerful message of heavenly peace has crossed all borders and language barriers, conquering the hearts of people everywhere.

Now I know the extraordinary day’s don’t need gold stars.

But ordinary days 🙂 sure can be brighter with a shiny, five-pointed pat on the back.

Find your star. Follow its light.

Each day new stars are discovered.

Celebrate how far you have come, how much you have learned and how the glorious person you really are.

Happy Xmas and Merry New Year!

Silent Night……

Stille Nacht……Douce nuit……..Noche de paz….Cicha noc……Ticha noc…..Тихая ночь

🙂

Ella

The place where it all began

I was visiting Barcelona, I was visiting the first Gaudi house, I was looking at a flea market searching for the Holy Grail,

I was walking in the drizzle, I was looking for joy, happiness and the sky. Someone said: take what you want, say the Good God, but be prepared to pay for it. Dreams cost money, sweet, frustration, tears, courage, choices and extraordinary penitence.

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However, birthing a dream requires more one thing, love.

In 1883, Manel Vicens I Montaner commissioned his dream summer house “Casa Vicens” with his art love for his beloved wife where they could escape the suffocating heat of summer in the Barcelona. He was a resident of Barcelona, a stockbroker and currency dealer and art lover.  He built his house between 1883 and 1885, in Barcelona’s Gràcia district, which was then that time a village with his dream. On 30 January 1883, Manuel Vicens i Montaner applied for a permit from Vila de Gràcia Town Council to demolish the house inherited from his mother. A few days after receiving approval from the Town Council, on 20 February 1883, Mr Vicens filed a new application as expected, he requested a permit to build a new house according to the project signed by the young architect Antoni Gaudí. The set of plans was attached to the application and sent to the Town Council. But Casa Vicens the project does not start until 1883. It is, therefore, possible that several years passed after Mr Vicens commissioned the work from Gaudí before the procedures to carry it out began. This house designed by Antoni Gaudí is known as a first Gaudi house and it is known as better for his unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia. During my visit, I was asking myself what makes a house a home? It seems like a simple question, but the answer is a little more complex. In many ways, homes symbolise how we live and see ourselves. Moreover, these spaces evolve when we focus on what makes us happy. This is sometimes easier said than done, though. It requires reflection and thoughtful choices, but it is a rewarding process. When we create a place that meets our needs and expresses our character, we enrich our lives. When we walk into some homes, they instantly feel welcome. In addition, it is not just, it’s not just because you enjoy the company or admire the decor – although both help. There is something else. Space feels authentic, a genuine reflection of the person or people who live there. Before we pick up a hammer, a paintbrush, we need to daydream. We need to walk through the different rooms where we eat, sleep and live. We need to realize that the home of our dreams dwells within. We must find it in the secrets sanctuary of your heart today before you can cross the threshold of tomorrow.

How 33-year-old Gaudí after graduating from the Regional School of Architecture made this house space into a summer homely space? What the Gaudi looked for? What the  Manel Vicens I Montaner looked for? What we are looking for? How Vicens contacted Gaudi? As of yet, I can not find the definite answer to these questions since nobody has yet found any documentary source showing a direct link between Gaudí and his client, such as a conserved record of correspondence between both men, for example. One hypothesis is that Vicens and Gaudí frequented certain associations and organisations in Barcelona in the final quarter of the 19th century and met in that environment. This was the time of La Renaixensa, the Centre Català, the Ateneu Barcelonès and the Associació Catalanista d’Excursions Científiques, where major businessmen like Eusebi Güell gathered with writers, architects and artists such as Francesc Torrescassana and Heribert Mariezcurrezna, all later connected to Gaudí’s work and to the history of Casa Vicens. The second one that that Manuel Vicens, was an uncle of one of the great Catalan sculptors, Ismael Smith Marí, born in 1886  and he knows architects and just connected to young Gaudí.  Followed one of Gaudí’s few surviving writings, we know a testimony of his thoughts on the house and the family. The title of the text is La Casa pairal (The Manor House) and is found in the notebook called Manuscript de Reus (The Manuscript of Reus), where the architect wrote down accounts and different thoughts about architecture and ornamentation. Throughout his writings, we can clearly make out Gaudí’s idea of the house in a specific socio-cultural context, although he specifies that ‘the manor house is not only needed by a certain era or family, it is needed by everyone always’. Thus, the young architect reflects on the dimensions of the site, the way the rooms of the homes are used and other subjects. This article also sketches out the features of the ideal house, which finally take shape in Casa Vicens. He defends the concept of the manor house, an isolated home and the space of the family, which provides much better conditions than urban dwellings.

In that time, probably the main point of reference to Barcelona, a city that at that time still had more people living in the unhealthy spaces within its old walls than in the new example, whose construction was then in full swing.

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In brief, the house has two objectives: first are its hygienic conditions, which make those who grow and develop in it into strong and robust beings; and second are its artistic conditions, with the constructive simplicity inherent to the techniques rooted in the Catalan tradition. Nevertheless, nature was always Gaudi’s chief inspiration, particularly Mediterranean flora and fauna. We find ivy leaves represented in the sgraffito. The dining room ceiling is full of olive leaves made with paper-mâché from the factory of Hermenegildo Miralles. On the covered porch I find sgraffito representing pomegranates and hydrangeas and a tempera painting showing palm leaves.  Bramble, fern leaves, reeds and passionflower decoration of these rooms are complemented by the ceramic coffers of the beam fillings.  I find yellow sunflowers and the passionflowers or passifloras. He uses all these natural elements as an architectural language at Casa Vicens and maybe beyond this possible is some iconographic interpretation linked to the cycle of the passion of Christ.

Gaudi designed a summer house divided into four levels: the basement for storage; the ground floor to house the living room, dining room and kitchen; the first floor, which was meant for the bedrooms; and the top floor for the servants. At first, the house only had three facades since it was attached to the neighbouring construction on the northeast side; the Southwest served as the main facade open to the extensive gardens surrounding the house. This orientation guaranteed sunlight and favourable climatic conditions during the different seasons of the year. After passing through the ground floor welcome area, you can see one of the most important spaces in the construction- the ground-floor gallery. It was planned as a semi-open space (with central dining room, smoking room and porch with a marble fountain)  to connect the indoors with the outdoors, and it allowed the nature in the garden to visually enter the living room.

Also, the garden featured a large waterfall nestled within a parabolic arch which helped to cool off the house’s gallery. On the first floor houses are the bedrooms, full of exuberant leafy decor, and a covered porch from which to contemplate the garden. Follow museum information, apart from the fountain on the terrace, another element directly related to the water was the exposed brick waterfall, formed by a catenary arch that was located in the garden. Above the arch, there were two rows of thin brick pillars crowned by a capital with two water tanks at the ends that enabled the water to fall continuously like a fine rain into a broad basin in the archway. The spandrels of the arch were adorned with a series of terracotta bas-reliefs by the sculptor Antoni Riba.

At first, the waterfall was part of the garden fence. In addition to bringing a cool environment, it helped to protect the neighbouring building, thereby providing more privacy. The project to build the waterfall was submitted to Vila de Gràcia Town Council to obtain the building permit on 1 September 1883, when work on Casa Vicens had already begun. During the expansion of Casa Vicens and the garden in 1925, this waterfall was transformed into a free-standing structure, like a triumphal arch, and as usually happens it was demolished in 1946 when part of the property was sold.  

In the autumn of 26 October 1898, Casa Vicens was the scene of an unfortunate incident that was documented by newspapers such as La Publicidad, La Vanguardia, La Campana de Gràcia and others. The incident was the death of Ramona Domènech i Tarragó, just a 22 months old, who accidentally drowned in the garden waterfall, which has since been removed. La Publicidad describes the property owned by Dolores Giralt, the widow of Manuel Vicens i Montaner and article mentions also the original style of the building, “a mixture of all the architectures that distinguishes it from the other buildings”, and describes it as a house “almost surrounded by gardens, deserted for several years”. As the newspaper explains, Mrs Giralt, Manuel Vicens’ widow, stopped living in the house after he died and went to live in the house of the rector of the church of Sant Joan de Gràcia, Francisco Llanas Viñas.

As such, it seems that Casa Vicens was a recurring topic of conversation among the residents of Gràcia in the autumn of 1898. Despite the unfortunate incident, the public opinion of the building is evident from the newspaper articles. According to one interesting passage, “as seen from Carrer de Sant Gervasi, the house has a sad appearance but seen from the gardens, it offers a gorgeous silhouette, including its daring towers, its original arches, its galleries, its beautiful parterres, etc.”

In 1925, when Manel Vicens’s widow sold the property to Doctor Antonio Jover i Puig, who converted the summer house into a permanent multi-family residence. Although the Jover family spent the next few years enlarging the house and property, the estate was divided in half in 1946. Unfortunately, at the time, Gaudí was too busy building the Sagrada Família to take part in the project, so his friend Joan Baptista Serra de Martínez designed the project with Gaudí’s approval.

Joan Baptista Serra de Martínez turned the single-family home into a three-family residence, removing Gaudí’s original staircase to construct a new staircase that would reach all three floors of the residence. He also increased the size of the gardens. Following this transaction, the freestanding arch containing the mechanics of a curtain waterfall situated at the centre of the patio was dismantled and the house was cut off from the chapel and mineral spring devoted to St. Rita so long associated with the property.

In 2005 Casa Vicens received UNESCO World Heritage Site status and two years later, the Herrero-Jover family decided to sell the property. The asking price of €35 million ($39,242,000) was dropped after months had passed and no buyer was found until the Andorran bank MoraBanc bought the property in 2014 for an undisclosed sum, the Art Newspaper reports. MoraBanc purchased the historic building in 2014 with the intention (for which I thank you:) ) now a house museum is opening to the public 🙂

Maybe someone will ask what happened with Antoni Gaudí, it was the afternoon of the 7th of June 1926, Gaudi was walking along Barcelona’s Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes on his way from the Sagrada Familia to the church of Sant Felip Neri where he often stopped by in the evening to make a confession. As he attempted to cross the wide boulevard between called Girona and called Bailén he was struck by a streetcar. Taken for a beggar due to his humble and somewhat shabby appearance, Gaudí lay unconscious in the midst of the busy thoroughfare until a policeman hailed a taxi and instructed the driver to transport him to the Hospital de la Santa Creu. As the architect had not been carrying any identification documents, no one there one realized who he was. When Gil Parés, the chaplain of the Sagrada Familia, recognized him the following morning ……… ……….but that is another story and shall be told another time.

In life, a person will come and go from many homes.

We may leave a house, a town, a room,

but that does not mean those places leave us.

Once entered,

we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves

in the world.

They follow us,

like shadows,

until we come upon them again,

waiting for us in the mist.

I was visiting, I was waking,

I was looking for my daughter joy, happiness and the sky.

Ella