Confucius (551-479 BCE), according to Chinese tradition, was a thinker, political figure, educator, and founder of the Ru School of Chinese thought. His teachings, preserved in the Lunyu or Analects, form the foundation of much of subsequent Chinese speculation on the education and comportment of the ideal man, how such an individual should live his live and interact with others, and the forms of society and government in which he should participate. Fung Yu-lan, one of the great 20th century authorities on the history of Chinese thought, compares Confucius' influence in Chinese history with that of Socrates in the West.
Our best source for understanding Confucius and his thought is the Analects. But the Analects is a problematic and controversial work, having been compiled in variant versions long after Confucius's death by disciples or the disciples of disciples. Some have argued that, because of the text's inconsistencies and incompatibilities of thought, there is much in the Analects that is non-Confucian and should be discarded as a basis for understanding the thought of Confucius.
Quotes:
"Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it."
"Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star."
"Study the past if you would define the future."
Further Reading:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3330
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, revolutionary naturalist painter, was born in Caravaggio near Milan, the son of a mason. He showed his talent early and at the age of sixteen, after a brief apprenticeship in Milan, he was studying with d'Arpino in Rome.
During the period 1592-98 Caravaggio's work was precise in contour, brightly colored, and sculpturesque in form, like the Mannerists, but with an added social and moral consciousness. By 1600 when he had completed his first public commission the St. Matthew paintings for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, he had established himself as an opponent of both classicism and intellectual Mannerism.
Caravaggio chose his models from the common people and set them in ordinary surroundings, yet managed to lose neither poetry nor deep spiritual feeling. His use of chiaroscuro - the contrast of light and dark to create atmosphere, drama, and emotion - was revolutionary. His light is unreal, comes from outside the painting, and creates deep relief and dark shadow. The resulting paintings are as exciting in their effect upon the senses as on the intellect.
Caravaggio's art, strangely enough, was not popular with ordinary people who saw in it a lack of reverence. It was highly appreciated by artists of his time and has become recognized through the centuries for its profoundly religious nature as well as for the new techniques that had changed the art of painting.
Though Caravaggio received many commissions for religious paintings during his short life, he led a wild and bohemian existence. In 1606, after killing a man in a fight, he fled to Naples. Unfortunately, he was soon in trouble again, and so was forced to flee to Malta where, finally, after a series of precipitous adventures, died of malaria at the age of thirty-six. His influence, which was first seen in early seventeenth-century Italian art, eventually spread to France, England, Spain and the Netherlands.
More paintings:
http://caravaggio.com/
Al Capp
Born of Russian Jewish heritage, Capp was the eldest child of Otto Philip and Matilda (Davidson) Caplin. Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to Connecticut in the 1880s. "My mother and father had been brought to this country from Russia when they were infants," wrote Capp. "Their fathers had found that the great promise of America was true—it was no crime to be a Jew." The Caplins were dirt poor, and Capp later recalled stories of his mother going out in the night to sift through ash barrels for reusable bits of coal.
Capp lost his left leg in a trolley accident at the age of nine. This childhood tragedy likely helped shape Capp’s cynical worldview, which, funny as it was, was certainly darker and more sardonic than that of the average newspaper cartoonist "I was indignant as hell about that leg," he would reveal in a November 1950 interview in Time Magazine.
Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School , without receiving a diploma. The cartoonist liked to joke about how he failed geometry for nine straight terms. His formal training came from a series of art schools in the New England area. Attending three of them in rapid succession, the impoverished Capp was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition — the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston — the latter before launching his amazing career. Capp had already decided to become a cartoonist. "I heard that Bud Fisher (creator of Mutt and Jeff) got $3,000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses," Capp said. "I decided that was for me."
Around 1931, Capp hitchhiked to New York City. He lived in "airless rat holes" in Greenwich Village, turned out advertising strips at $2 apiece, and scoured the city hunting for jobs. He eventually found work (in March 1932) drawing Colonel Gilfeather, a one-panel, Associated Press -owned property, created in 1930 by Dick Dorgan. At 22 years old, he was reportedly the youngest syndicated cartoonist in America at the time. Capp changed the focus and title of the panel cartoon to Mister Gilfeather, but soon grew to hate the feature. He left both Gilfeather and the Associated Press after six months, in September 1932. Before leaving, he metMilton Caniff, and the two became lifelong friends. Capp moved to Boston and married Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he had met earlier in art class. She died in 2006 at the age of 96.
Leaving his new wife with her parents in Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. "I was 23, I carried a mass of drawings, and I had nearly five dollars in my pocket. People were sleeping in alleys then, willing to work at anything." There he met Ham Fisher, who hired him to "ghost" on Joe Palooka. During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's Joe Palooka story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named "Big Leviticus," a crude prototype. (Leviticus was actually much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg, than to the much more appealing and innocent Li'l Abner.)
Further reading:
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