The so-called Fayoum portraits, more than 1,000 of them, are the largest body of ancient portable paintings to have survived. They are portraits, painted mostly on wood, of men, women and children, young and old, believed to have been painted in their lifetime, sometimes framed and displayed in the homes, and later sawn to fit just inside the sarcophagus where they were placed on top of the face within the mummy wrappings to preserve the memory of the deceased...

Specialists in Graeco-Roman art regarded them as Egyptian, but Egyptologists considered them to be works of the early years of the Christian era when Egypt was under Roman occupation, and therefore out of their sphere. For too long art historians neglected these masterpieces. Today they are receiving their due, with one startling fact to emerge being the possibility that the portraits inserted into the wrappings of mummies may not be representative of Roman provincial art, as earlier described, but created by Egyptians for Egyptians. In other words, they may not be portraits of the Mediterranean aristocracy who controlled Egypt in Roman times, but of Egyptians themselves.

Some of the panels were painted in encaustic: natural powdered pigments mixed with melted beeswax and applied hot with a scalpel and brush for detail. Others, painted in tempera or a watercolour base, were badly affected by humidity in the soil. Some were on wooden panels, some on linen. Some depicted heads only, others were full- length portraits placed on top of the linen cloth that covered the corpses. There is every indication that the painted portraits served the same purpose and function as the painted cartonnage masks made of layers of linen or papyrus stiffened with plaster and decorated with paint or gilding that were introduced into Egypt in the First Intermediate Period, between 2181 and 2055 BC. These became increasingly popular in the Middle Kingdom, the XVIIIth and the XXVIth dynasties, as well as in the Graeco-Roman period, to assist in the identification of the deceased. In fact, in the Graeco-Roman period hollow, painted plaster heads and painted portraits began to be used alongside cartonnage masks. Continuity can be traced provided one looks at the portraits painted in Roman times from an Egyptian perspective. Looked at from a local angle, foreign influence in these great masterpieces may extend no further than a stylish Roman hairdo or the fashionable drape adopted by aristocratic Egyptian families. [link]

An Ancient Egyptian funerary mask	A sculpted portrait placed on a coffin
A painted portrait of the boy that dates to the early Christian era	A woman wearing jewellery. This and the previous portrait were removed from their mummy wrappings

A gallery of many of these portraits - in French - can be found here. Gallery from an exhibition in Crete titled "from Fayoum to early byzantine icons", here - in Greek! Collections 1-4 are Fayoum portraits, 5-8 are byzantine icons.

Having seen these from up close, I can only describe as haunting.

He had the photographer

Thomas Sutton

photograph a tartan ribbon three times, each time with a different colour filter over the lens. The three images were developed and then projected onto a screen with three different projectors, each equipped with the same colour filter used to take its image. When brought into register, the three images formed a full colour image.

The Buddhabrot Set is a re-visualization of the familiar Mandelbrot Set using a technique invented by Melinda Green. Instead of selecting points on the real-complex plane, initial points are selected at random from the image region. The point is iterated through the function, z = zˆ2 + c, where z has components in both the real and imaginary planes.

If the particle escapes (exits the viewing area with high speed), its path is reiterated, exposing its position onto the image surface with each step. In this fashion, areas of dense particle travel appear bright white. The result is an amazing universe of structure, spirituality, and mathematical intrigue.

Ripa Ladrang Foundation (via Liquito)

Update: PF points out to me that a much clearer explanation of this algorithm can be found at Melinda Green's own fractal website. Furthermore she introduces us to many other variations on this theme including a Buddhabrot generalization in four dimensions.

The Buddha in profile.

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes--he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying--he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person--he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword--he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love--he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void-- he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds--he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni--he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face--and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.

-- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

It seems like I'm really into circular images at the moment...

The Table of the Seven Deadly Sins, Hieronymus Bosch 1504 (Prado Museum, Madrid).
P.O.V. of God looking down at the sinful world including depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins: (starting from the bottom and proceeding anti-clockwise) Anger, Pride, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Avarice and Envy. In the centre appears the risen Christ and the inscription in latin “Beware, Beware, God Sees you". In the corners Bosch depicts the four stages of man: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven.

...what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory?

In 1795, Félix María Calleja, viceroy of New Spain, wrote: “there is a large cave lit by natural skylight; and 200 varas from this cave there is a deep cavity that has a lake with an island.” The lake he was referring to was the

"I myself saw several of these islands in a small lake of sulfurous water not far from the Tiber; they were mostly circular or oval, and rose four or six inches above the water. Their surface is flat and grassy, and at the edges of some of them a few larger plants grow, which act as sails, so that even the slightest breeze pushes the islands from one part of the lake to another. The largest of them are a few yards in diameter, yet nonetheless can sustain several men standing upon them."

I went up to this lake. It is perfectly circular in form, like a wheel lying on the ground; there is not the least curve or projection of the shore, but all is regular, even and just as if it had been hollowed and cut out by the hand of art. The water is of a clear sky-blue, though with somewhat of a greenish tinge; its smell is sulphurous, and its flavour has medicinal properties, and is deemed of great efficacy in all fractures of the limbs, which it is supposed to heal. Though of but moderate extent, yet the winds have a great effect upon it, throwing it into violent agitation. No vessels are suffered to sail here, as its waters are held sacred; but several floating islands swim about it, covered with reeds and rushes, and with whatever other plants the surrounding marshy ground and the edge itself of the lake produce in greater abundance.

Each island has its peculiar shape and size, but the edges of all of them are worn away by their frequent collision with the shore and one another. They are all of the same height and motion; as their respective roots, which are formed like the keel of a boat, may be seen hanging not very far down in the water, and at an equal depth, on whichever side you stand. Sometimes they move in a cluster, and seem to form one entire little continent; sometimes they are dispersed into different quarters by the wind; at other times, when it is calm, they float up and down separately. You may frequently see one of the larger islands sailing along with a lesser joined to it, like a ship with its long boat; or, perhaps, seeming to strive which shall outswim the other: then again they are all driven to the same spot, and by joining themselves to the shore, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, lessen or restore the size of the lake in this part or that, accordingly, till at last, uniting in the centre, they restore it to its usual size.

The sheep which graze upon the borders of this lake frequently go upon these islands to feed, without perceiving that they have left the shore, until they are alarmed by finding themselves surrounded with water; as though they had been forcibly conveyed and placed there. Afterwards, when the wind drives them back again, they as little perceive their return as their departure. This lake empties itself into a river, which, after running a little way, sinks underground, and, if anything is thrown in, it brings it up again where the stream emerges.

—I have given you this account because I imagined it would not be less new, nor less agreeable, to you than it was to me; as I know you take the same pleasure as myself in contemplating the works of nature. Farewell

In a discovery that offers a rare glimpse back to when the universe was just 750 million years old, a team of astrophysicists said they have detected a tiny galaxy that is the farthest known object from Earth.

"We are confident it is the most distant known object," California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis said Sunday of the galaxy, which lies roughly 13 billion light-years from Earth.



The team uncovered the faint galaxy using two of the most powerful telescopes — one in space, the other in Hawaii — aided by the natural magnification provided by a massive cluster of galaxies. The gravitational tug of the cluster, called Abell 2218, deflects the light of the distant galaxy and magnifies it many times over.



The magnification process, first proposed by Albert Einstein and known as "gravitational lensing," produces double images of the galaxy.



"Without the magnification of 25 afforded by the foreground cluster, this early object could simply not have been identified or studied in any detail with presently available telescopes," said astronomer Jean-Paul Kneib, of Caltech and the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees in France.


[link]