”Eye lashes are the beautiful decoration of the eyes. Sprouting from the eyelids, and helping to protect the eyes, they also suggestively frame them. They give them an intention, an expression, they transmit the meaning of our deep insight. That is the reason why, since the most remote antiquity, eyelashes have been the concern for the beauty of the facial expression”

www.eyelashesinhistory.com is a strange website set out as a fake book of which you can turn the pages chronologically through the many different meanings that the eyelash has portrayed through time. The home page plays a very nice song as well as telling you about different kinds of infections that eyelashes can endure.

My favourite page in the book is the one that explaining the significance of the eyeash in the middle ages:

During the Medieval period, and even in the Renaissance and until the 18th century, eyelashes were not styled.Women, in general, removed eyelashes and eyebrows in order to give more importance to the forehead, which was the most important feature in females’ faces at that time. 

 Women were not supposed to exhibit their hair in public, and through several ecclesiastical edicts, the Catholic Church condemned that practice as an offense to God and the church, and a sin. It obviously included eyebrows and eyelashes. In general, the use of make up in women’s face was left only for prostitutes.

Hair, in women, was regarded as an erotic feature. During the Middle Ages, more prohibitions were issued and less hair was revealed.

Which made me think of this detail from the painting by  Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Young Woman (detail), Netherlandish, c. 1470.

“I made this animation film based on Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione prints as a walk through these amazing spaces.
I used camera mapping (Projection Man) and camera animation with Maxon’s Cinema4D, building 6 different scenes that were merged together in a single continuous animation.
The film was made and produced by myself for Factum Arte (Madrid) who supported me in making this film and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venezia) who provided scans of their own print collection, for an exhibition about Piranesi that took place in San Giorgio Maggiore, Venezia, in 2010/2011. The exhibition will be showing in Spain, Madrid and Barcelona, in 2012 before going to the US, and beyond.
Gregoire DUPOND”

The Lithographs of Peter Fendi are well know for their hedonistic, entertaining and humorous takes on idealised sexual encounters, from the mind of a 18th century gentleman. Peter Fendi who was born in and trained as a prodigical court painter in Austria, was a master of watercolours, oil paints and lithrographs; his multicoloured use of which was of a fairly notable merit for the time period.

His renowned series of forty erotic lithographs all appear deliberately explicit and created from his own fantasies and day-dreams, as opposed to the likes of Avril or Schiele, who sought to convey more seriousness  in the reception of the figures; positions, expressions and scenarios. Being somewhere between traditional art and cartoons, they served as a quasi-realistic insight into the sexuality present in 18th century.

VIRTUAL 3D TOUR OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL

Jan Saenenredam 1665-1607. Taken from the 7 Planetary Gods series.

The artwork of George Catlin bears as much significance aesthetically as it does anthropologically for its time. Known for his predominant realism-inspired approach, he documented extensively the Native Peoples of Northern, Southern and Central America during the early 19th century. From initiation rites to animal studies, hunting scenes to landscapes, Catlin witnessed it all and re-interpreted it with as much grace as genuine interest. His love for the then declining and relatively untouched Native world has allowed these lost cultures to be preserved and catalogued within his art: in many cases acting as a sole reference to some of the rarest sights witnessed by an outsider. Many of those he depicted were deeply rooted around traditional means of adornment and modification of the body for ritual, beauty and religious appeasement. Body suspensions, multiple piercings, stretchings, body painting and tattooing were all commonplace and staple aspects of which is now a diminishing or in some cases, a lost Native life.

www.georgecatlin.org