NB! · Architecture · Observations · Humour
The Grodno Mona Lisa on the façade of an early twentieth-century fire tower. It is not the uniform that makes the man, but the man the uniform.
The East · Art · Moscow · Observations
It turns out a week has already passed since the close of the sixth "Art Russia" contemporary art fair at Gostiny Dvor. We are told that the fair gathered a record number of participants and guests: more than 50,000 people attended. Interestingly, this year the fair presented
Faith · Moscow · Observations · Mores · Society
I have a question, addressed perhaps not even to the rectors of Moscow's churches so much as to observant citizens at large. What, exactly, is so difficult about bringing in pussy willow for parishioners and setting up stalls with it on the grounds near the church? Candles are
NB! · Archive · Faith · Moscow · Observations · Ethnography
Palm Sunday celebrations on Red Square in 1896 and in the 1910s. Trading stalls were set up on Red Square, with festive revelry and Palm Sunday sleigh rides. And today?
London · Monarchies · Observations · Mores · Humour
A Footnote on the Popular Anecdote of Yury Gagarin, the Queen and the Slice of Lemon. It probably could indeed have happened, but the man drinking tea was not Gagarin at all. It was Captain-Lieutenant Vetoshkin, who fished out a piece of lemon with his fingers and ate the
Architecture · Art · Observations
Our Milan walk continues. The magnificent interior in the photographs is the decor of one of the apartments of the designer Alberta Ferretti, used as a working space and closed to visitors on ordinary days. For Design Week, however, the celebrated studio Artemest furnished this remarkable space, and it was
Art · London · Museums · Observations
Titian, Allegory of Prudence. The painting is customarily read as a depiction of the three ages of man and the three tenses: past, present and future, a token of the prudence that comes with the years. But who, in that case, are the dog, the lion and the wolf meant
NB! · Archive · Books · Observations · Nature
Futuristic beehives from an eighteenth-century book. Whenever I look at pictures like these, I have the feeling that some two hundred and fifty years ago humanity took a wrong turning somewhere, and I look at pictures like these constantly
NB! · Faith · Art · Observations · Humour
NB! · Observations
Art · Observations · Nature · Humour
I came across an account by the artist Maria Katkova of how she once made several works using mushroom ink. What is that, you ask? The artist explains the recipe: if you pick an ink cap (a dung-loving one, to be precise), place it on a saucer and watch,
Art · Observations
An unexpectedly Impressionist Repin! Ilya Repin painted A Walk with Lanterns in 1879, during his five years in Moscow, but the picture was created not in Moscow but at Abramtsevo. In the painting we see Elizaveta Grigoryevna Mamontova, the mistress of the Abramtsevo house, surrounded by children on an avenue