Coming Up · Faith · Art · Moscow · Ethnography
In the Russian North, special 'icons' were venerated: three-dimensional wooden figures of saints set in icon cases, sometimes carved at full length and reaching two metres in height. The oldest such icons in Arkhangelsk date from the 16th century. These original sculptural images were known as carved
NB! · Art · Observations · Mores
The badge of the Russian Craft Board of the Hairdressers' and Barbers' Guild, established on 26 April 1785. Tell me, am I the only one who finds it slightly ghoulish that a hairdresser's dummy is rendered as a living body, which looks lopped off and mounted
NB! · Art · Museums · Saint Petersburg · Humour
Knaves of Diamonds in their drawers: Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov (with violin) and Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky (with sheet music). 1910, Mashkov. Painting from the collection of the Russian Museum
Art · Monarchies · Museums · Saint Petersburg
The "Cabinet for Diamond Items" from the Picture House at Oranienbaum is made in the form of an intricate architectural structure with a mirrored finish. Inside the display case itself are all manner of little mirrored drawers with bronze handles, platforms, balconies and arches, which turn the space
NB! · Art · Observations
Faith · Art · Heritage · Society
During the First World War, the parish priest of the village of Monbert, Father Frédéric Thibault, read out the dispatches from the front every week, told of what had befallen the local lads who had been called up, and held services for the wounded and the dead. When the war
NB! · Faith · Art
The Virgin Mary, newly delivered, warms her feet on a lamb. “Holy Night” from Manchester Cathedral, by the English artist Josefina Alice Hermes de Vasconcellos (1904-2005), who completed the sculpture at the age of 87
NB! · Archive · Art · Books · Science
A flayed angel? From Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty's book "General Anatomy of the Internal Organs"
NB! · Art · Mores · Ethnography
A sixteenth-century peasant with his spoon. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, detail from the painting "The Peasant Dance".
NB! · Art · Monarchies · Observations · Humour
Faith · Art · Observations · Rome · Humour
Tired, or simply out of sorts? Saint Jerome (in a crimson cassock) and John the Baptist (bareheaded). Masaccio, 15th century. I could not pass by a depiction of two Church Fathers with such eloquent glances. Curiously, Jerome holds a reliquary or a model of a church resembling the famous Santa
NB! · Archive · Art · Humour
Let them say there is no such thing as female friendship. Not for these witches from a fourteenth-century manuscript: while two of them prepare a brew for the devil, their girlfriends have already stolen a baby for him