Great exhibit at the Glenbow Museum

The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta has a great exhibit that is just about to close entitled Egypt, Greece and Rome: Art of the Ancient Mediterranean World. There's a nice description and a few photos. The exhibit closes on June 3, 2007. So if you are in Calgary in the coming weeks, I'd recommend you go to the Glenbow and see it.

The Kings of Benin

Interesting exhibit at Vienna's Kunsthistoriches Museum on ivory and bronze sculptures from the West African kingdom of Benin, which is located in modern-day Nigeria. Well worth looking at here.

A round-up of Apollo Magazine

Some great articles have been posted on Apollo Magazine's website, including:

* Stephen Dyson on Greek and Roman art
* Christopher Woodward on saving Britain's gardening heritage
* Andrew Hopkins's review of an exhibition of Tintoretto

All can be accessed here.

Michelangelo in detail

Art Scholar has been recently updated with a link to a series of articles (written by the website's author, Simon Abrahams) on Michelangelo's art and composition. Here's the first part, which discusses Michelangelo's eyes.

Shrek the Third = $122 million

It looks like the third instalment of Shrek is going to break a lot of box office records. For example, it took in $122 million (US) in its opening weekend - a record for animated films. Can you say, "Oscar?"

Disappearance...and re-appearance

My apologies for the lack of posts this month. I'll try to do better...honest! : )

Description de L'Egypte

Beaux Arts, based in Dallas, Texas, has an upcoming exhibit entitled Description de L’Egypte, the story of The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt. It will consist of 87 original prints from this publication, which was well respected by artists and collectors alike. Art Daily has a link.

Hamas and Mickey Mouse

This is one for the ages. Hamas has a children's show on Al Aqsa TV that has a Mickey Mouse-like character teaching children to support Islamic fundamentalism and repudiate the U.S., Israel and other western democratic ideals. A number of links have been eliminated as of late, but here's one that still remains.

A tale of two cities minus one city equals a tale of one city

This is not a good idea. Orion Books is going to reprint some literary classics by Tolstoy, Dickens and Thackeray in slimmed down versions. Called compact editions, Orion Group publisher Malcolm Edwards said, "We realised that life is too short to read all the books you want to and we never were going to read these ones."

Nice try, but that's not the issue.

To understand and appreciate great literature, you have to read the entire book, and not just a Coles Notes-like version. While it may appeal to people who don't have time to read classics like Anna Karenina or War and Peace, you won't get the full flavour of the book or the great writing style inside it.

In other words, I say make the effort and read the original text.

Music in the church...walls?

A father-son team, Stuart and Tommy Mitchell, claim to have discovered a musical code in some carvings in Scotland's Rosslyn Chapel. The 15th century chapel was featured in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," and has attracted many visitors since that time.

The Mitchells said that they discovered a series of figures which they called an "orchestra of angels" among the carvings. According to Tommy Mitchell,

"We were convinced from the position at the top of the pillars of the angels and they are all directly under the arches where the cubes occur that there was music there. We got clues from other books as well. Over the years this became more of an obsession than anything else and we decided we had to find out what was going on. If these patterns and cubes had not contained music anything we turned up would have been purely random and would not have sounded hauntily beautiful."

The music will be performed in May at a concert in the chapel.

It's still too early to accept the validity of the Mitchells' claim. But if it is ultimately verified, it will be an astonishing story. Plus, it will lead people to find out if other churches around the world also carry these types of secret music compositions or inscriptions.