Riding out of Spain (Back to the UK, and then off to home)

Riding out of Spain (Back to the UK, and then off to home)

Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.

Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.

Ciao!

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Mirages as both science and art

Particolari della superficie di Marte, 1890 Giovanni Schiaparelli

If you’re never been over to BibliOdyssey I highly recommend a visit. The sub-title for the blog is “Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart” which, well, sums it all up rather nicely. Lots of neat old illustrations, often (but not always) on scientific themes. The themes are interesting, the background info excellent, and the images are frequently just too cool.

The image above is from some of the earliest high quality mapping of Mars in the late 1800’s by Giovanni Schiaparelli, and is part of a really neat set of early modern maps of the red planet. Peacay (BibliOdyssey’s curator) has once again pulled together some great images that are really wonderful to look at in and of themselves, as well as being really cool historic and scientific documents.

Schiaparelli’s (in)famous ‘canali’ turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet’s surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn’t really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.

I concur.

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