Speaking Truth to Power

Today being the Memorial of the Beheading of St John the Baptist gives another reason to post a Van der Weyden reproduction, this one borrowed from Olga's Gallery:

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A trip to look forward to

In just a few weeks.
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Feast of the Assumption

Rather than go with "blessed be the breasts which gave suck to Christ our Lord" I thought this might be nice:


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More on Milan

Quite some time back I blogged about being in Milan, and about Newman's remarks on the cathedral. Just lately I happened on this description of the city, by one of the products of Oratorian education:

What a magnificent city is Milan! The great houses are all of stone, and stand regular and in order, along wide straight streets. There are swift cars, drawn by electricity, for such as can afford them. Men are brisk and alert even in the summer heats, and there are shops of a very good kind, though a trifle showy. There are many newspapers to help the Milanese to be better men and to cultivate charity and humility; there are banks full of paper money; there are soldiers, good pavements, and all that man requires to fulfil him, soul and body; cafés, arcades, mutoscopes, and every sign of the perfect state. And the whole centres in a splendid open square, in the midst of which is the cathedral, which is justly the most renowned in the world.

The source is Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome, first published 1902 (7th impression, London, 1949), 294-295.
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Baby Jesus at the breast

For the past week or so I've been busy, in an inefficient and mentally diffuse manner, with translations for the catalogue of a major exhibition about Rogier van der Weyden, kicking off in September.

Van der Weyden was Philip II's favourite old master; well, he was a lot of people's favourite old master. He conveyed the emotions of biblical episodes with a vividness that helped people imagine what it must have been like to be there - a big part of late medieval and early modern devotional practice.

In the course of background work for the translating (that is, actually trying to find the pictures being described) I came across the above picture on wikipedia, which assures me it's out of copyright (and since the original is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, I imagine they're right - it's not one of the thousands of images that somebody "liberated" from behind the National Portrait Gallery's firewall)

The user statistics for this blog show that a fair number of the people who stumble across it do so by googling for pictures of Our Lady either pregnant or breastfeeding - something I blogged about in Advent last year. So I thought I'd add this one, for their benefit.
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A flaw in the system

It's surprising to see that it's been two whole months since I last posted here - I knew I hadn't been giving the blog much attention, but I hadn't realised it had been so very long.

Part of the rationale behind this blog was that it might be a way of building some sort of reflection into the day - what had been done, said, thought, or left undone - and then publicly recording any of that that might conceivably be of interest to others (and while I might be a poor judge of the latter, dear read, nobody is forced to read this stuff!). But one of the first casualties of things left undone has been regular daily reflection. Ho hum.
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Top 100 Hymns

A link from Facebook took me to a blog where I read about a project on another blog to gather a fairly random list of people's favourite hymns. The BBC did this a few years ago and came out with a top 10 of "the nation's favourite hymns" that looked like this:

1. How Great Thou Art
2. Dear Lord and Father of Mankind
3. The Day Thou Gavest
4. Be Thou My Vision
5. Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
6. Be Still, For The Presence Of The Lord
7. Make Me A Channel
8. Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer
9. In Christ Alone
10. Shine, Jesus, Shine

I'm not sure what my own top 10 would be, or the order of them, as thinking about it I can only whittle the list down as far as 12 (including 4 of the BBC's top 10), and that's without putting them in any order of preference:

• At the Cross Her Station Keeping
• The Lord is My Shepherd
• Be Thou My Vision
• Adeste Fideles
• Pange Lingua
• The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended
• Dear Lord and Father of Mankind
• Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer
• O Come, O Come Emmanuel
• Abide With Me
• Praise My Soul the King of Heaven
• Lead, Kindly Light

Still, if I do get round to making a ranked list of 10, I'll be sure to let the lady at the blog know!
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Fishlink

Just back from a four-day-weekend at the seaside (Ascension is a holiday here, and the Friday fell down the crack between that and the weekend proper), to find that one of the blogs I read has put up a link to a BBC report on an archaeologist opining as to when and why Europe's deep-sea fisheries got started (or is it just England's? - always hard to tell with the BBC, on whose website I once saw William Caxton described as an "inventor").
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