“The artist behind a new, much debated portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales, probably knew she was wading into touchy territory when she took up a commission to paint one of the most closely watched people on the planet. In an interview with Tatler magazine, which commissioned the portrait for its July cover, artist Hannah Uzor… Her portraits aim to capture ‘the soul of the person,’ Uzor said. But for many, the portrait resulting from that close study depicted neither the princess’s soul, nor even her physical characteristics. In response to the painting — showing a calm-looking figure in a fluid white gown against a buoyant blue backdrop — several commenters asked, ‘Who is this?’ ‘The painting is beautiful but does not look like the princess,’ one noted. Others were more direct in their criticism, calling the piece ‘an insult’ and ‘terrible.’… Uzor’s portrait comes just days after a portrait of King Charles III drew its own round of criticism. It also recalls public fury at Amy Sherald’s Michelle Obama portrait in 2018, which viewers similarly argued did not look like her. But with so much public critique centered on resemblance, it’s worth asking if likeness is the right metric for evaluating portraiture. When we have seemingly endless photographic representations of people such as the princess, some say portraits can — and even should — have wider aspirations. ‘Portraiture can be representational or abstract. There are no boundaries or limits,’ Bree Pickering, the director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, said in an email. ‘Likeness is often something that audiences look for, but as we’ve seen recently, it can be the conversation that happens around the artwork that tells us the most about the times we live in.’ Pickering also notes that ‘portraiture shares a story from an artist’s point of view,’ meaning that it tells viewers about the subject — but can also reveal the ‘broader social context in which it was created.’ Lisa Mansfield, an art historian who studies portraiture at the University of Adelaide, draws a parallel between Uzor’s portrait and Paul Emsley’s official portrait of the then-Duchess of Cambridge, ‘which was unveiled in 2013 to a disparaging chorus of disapproval.’ Such clashes between ‘artistic intention and audience perception reveal the disconnect between what a portrait is and what the world at large thinks a portrait of a princess should look like,’ Mansfield wrote in an email, adding that in an age of social media and selfies, it’s ‘easy to overlook that a portrait is fundamentally a work of artful fiction’ and ‘not a facsimile of the face or body.’ Contemporary artists have long taken creative liberties in depicting leaders….Cherine Fahd, an artist and professor of visual communication at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote in an email that when looking at the Princess Kate portrait, questions like ‘Does the portrait provoke dialogue?’ and ‘Does it reflect or challenge societal contexts?’ are ‘better than “Does it look her?”‘”

Washington Post May 23, 2024

“That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’. Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [re Gratian and the Decretum and the resulting intellectual and procedural revolution]

“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Figuratively, at least, people do die of oversedation; fumbling about fearfully, blindly, they grasp the sweet-smelling potions handed them with never a look at the label, and suddenly they are dead. They died ‘natural’ deaths, then.”

Jim Thompson in Edward Gorman, ed., The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction

“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.”

Proverbs XXIV:10 [KJV].

“Over many hundreds of pages, the claim that empires in the remote past had regarded as perfectly legitimate customs that under the influence of Christianity had come to be regarded as crimes was rehearsed in painstaking detail. Provocatively, it was even suggested that a relish for displays of suffering – such as in ancient Rome had been staged as public entertainments in the very heart of the city – had been a civic good. ‘Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts.’ This reflection was not altogether an original one: the thesis that Christianity had contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was popular among historically minded philosophes. In other ways, though, the author had indeed pushed originality to an extreme. So shocking was his book that it was published without any hint of his name. The New Justine was not a work of history at all, but of fiction. Its observations on the character of ancient civilizations formed merely one strand in a vast tapestry, woven to demonstrate a disorienting proposition: that ‘virtue is not a world of priceless worth, it is just a way of behaving that varies according to climate and consequently is nothing real about it’. To think otherwise was imbecility.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [The author in question is the Marquis de Sade, who Holland takes very seriously as a philosopher and not in a good way.]

“Why are you making that noise with your face?”

Me March 27 2006 [listening to someone drone on].

“1492, the year of Granada’s fall and of Columbus’ first voyage, had witnessed another fateful step in the preparation of Spain for its mission to bring the gospel to the world. The Jews, whose conversion was destined to presage Christ’s return, had been given the choice of becoming Christian or going into exile. Many had opted to leave Spain; more, including the chief rabbi of Castile himself, had accepted baptism. It was hardly to be expected, then, three decades on, that agents of the Spanish monarchy would spare the altars of the people who knew nothing of the God of Israel. Traveling to Mexico in Cortés’ wake, Franciscans were revolted by the demands of sacrifice imposed by the Mexicans gods. None doubted they were demons. There was Huitzilopochtli, the great patron of the Mexican who is temple in Tenochtitlan, it was said, had been consecrated with the blood of eighty thousand victims; Xipe Totec, ‘the flayed one’, whose devotees wore the skins of those offered to their patron, and stabbed their penises with cactus thorns; Tlaloc, the god of the rains, whose favors could be won only by the sacrifice of small children who had first been made to weep. Such cruelties cried out to the heavens. ‘It was the clamor of so many souls, and so much bloodshed is an affront to their Creator,’ wrote one Franciscan, that had inspired God to send Cortez to the Indies – ‘like another Moses in Egypt.’ Yet even Cortés himself had lamented the cost.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World