From Out of a Featureless Crowd By KAREN WILKIN New York Victoria and Albert Museum, on long-term loan to The National Gallery, London ‘Fra Teodoro of Urbino as St. Dominic’ (1515), by Giovanni Bellini. Portraits, from gritty Lucian Freuds to the fatuous kitsch perpetrated by street artists, are such a constant presence in our visual landscape that it’s hard to remember that the genre’s history is far from continuous. For centuries, throughout the ancient world—in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece—human beings were depicted according to strict, near-abstract conventions, except for a short-lived period of relative naturalism during the reign of the renegade monotheist pharaoh, Akhenaten. The Romans, of course, excelled at memorial…

Roman Bonzon http://aesthetics-online.org/ Iris Murdoch, British novelist and philosopher, died on February 8, 1999, in Oxford, England, at the age of seventy-nine. She had suffered from Alzheimers disease since the mid-1990s, and died at a nursing home with her husband by her side. “She is not sailing into the dark”, he wrote in the moving account of her illness and their life together published in the United States early this year as Elegy for Iris. “The voyage is over and, under the dark escort of Alzheimers, she has arrived somewhere.” The last of her novels, Jacksons Dilemma, appeared in 1995, and a collection of her essays on philosophy and literature,…

First Groundhog Day. (2012). The History Channel website. Retrieved 9:18, February 1, 2012, from http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-groundhog-day. On this day in 1887, Groundhog Day, featuring a rodent meteorologist, is celebrated for the first time at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its hole on this day and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring. Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept…