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There’s an amazing collaboration between man and insect on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, a cloth woven purely from the silk of over a million Golden Orb spiders. This magnificent textile, naturally golden in color and seemingly imbued with it’s own luminescence, took over four years to make after eighty gatherers spent five years gathering the silk. Such a feat has not been attempted since 1900, when a spider silk textile that disintegrated over time was created for the Paris Exposition Universelle, and it’s not surprising that such a feat is almost never attempted, for the spiders with the best silk can only be found in Madagascar. But is all the effort really worth it for a piece of cloth that isn’t long for this world?
Link Image via John Brown
A plaster cast from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum -
This fig-leaf was hung on the David on the occasion of visits by royal ladies. It was last used in the time of Queen Mary (1867-1953). According to anecdotal information, on her first encounter with the cast of ‘David’, Queen Victoria was so shocked by his nudity that a firm suggestion was made that something has to be done. Consequently, the correctly proportioned fig leaf was created and stored in readiness for any visit the Queen might make, for which occasions it was hung on the figure from two strategically implanted hooks.
The item is presently displayed in a case attached to the back of the pedestal on which the David replica stands.
Link, via A London Salamagundi.
The V&A is, of course, one of the world’s premier museums of design and decorative arts. They have recently announced that over a million items from their collections are now accessible online.
People using Search the Collections… will find images of more than 100,000 objects… The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to more basic inventory information which might include the maker, provenance, production technique and style… Users explore the site by clicking on images that scroll across the screen or by accessing the powerful search engine that identifies objects by type, maker, date, material or location in the V&A. Google maps show places of origin. Text mining technologies also allow searching of all the text associated with an object so for the first time researchers are able to move from one theme to another.
The example shown above is a board game from 1804 – “The New Game of Emulation Designed for The Amusement of Youth of both Sexes and calculated to inspire their Minds with an abhorrence of vice and a love of virtue.” It was marketed as a morality game designed to lead children “to admire and adopt the virtues of Obedience, Truth, Honesty, Gentleness, Industry, Frugality, Forgiveness, Carefulness, Mercy, and Humility; and to view in their real colours the opposite vices of Obstinacy, Falsehood, Robbery, Passion, Sloth, Intemperance, Malice, Neglect, Cruelty and Pride.” It is one of hundreds of games in the “games” category of the online collection.
