The Greek assembly had passed the death sentence on Socrates.

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The painting is  in public domain according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:David_-_The_Death_of_Socrates.jpg

Before he died, in prison, he spoke to his friends. They would have liked to free him by bribing the guards, but he refused. He did not believe in death as a final thing.

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He explained that in his view things on Earth and Earth itself were only blurred images reflected from a more perfect world.

And that perfect world is visible to our soul, but not to our senses.

This idea was later developed by Socrates’ most famous student, Plato, and also by Christian theology. And it still rules our way of judging things when we say: this is not real beauty or this is not a democracy or somebody is not a real leader.

The idea is that we carry the model inside us, for instance in our brain or heart, and judge things accordingly.

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Socrates accepted the death sentence and carried it out by drinking the hemlock tea that he was offered, but still he warned his friends not to take his theories as the last word:

“No sensible man would think it proper to rely on things of this kind being just as I have described them, but…..”

And then he added : ” but ……..that this is so seems to me proper and worthy of the risk of believing; for the risk is noble.” Below is the context :

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Socrates never wrote. Most of what is known about him was written by his student, Plato.

It was also Plato who wrote down how Socrates died :

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For some reason painters always liked to dramatize the scene of Socrates receiving the poison.

Socrates rather explicitly rejected dramatization as nuisance, and when his wife came weeping to say good bye to him he simply told one of his friends to take her home. –

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The shepherd is from North Africa; this is hard work; have to milk them one by one.

There are almond trees and genista. Last year’s thistles are still taller than the almond trees.

On the right, in the sky, there are some white lines. Those are not clouds, but  contrails. This is south of Madrid, and in the vicinity there are two or three airports.

Titulcia is on that ridge. Below is the Jarama river.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Jarama_Titulcia.jpg bajo la licencia CC Genérica de Atribución/Compartir-Igual 2.5.
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Look how neat the shepherd and his sheep, when none tries to buck the line.

The sheep seem to understand the idea of a road and that you should not step on freshly ploughed ground!

:)

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Added later:

It isn’t as I thought. The sheep do not keep to the road. They follow the shepherd, but if that shepherd is new to his job, look what happens:

He has to go after them!

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Fresh lime mixed with sand was orignally used as mortar. A thinner mix is used to paint the walls. When the paint dries, the surface looks like that of an egg, but mostly more luminous, brightly white.

Lime is mined and sold in big chunks. The chunks have to be dissolved in water to create a soft mass that looks like freshly fallen snow. This mass is mixed with sand  and allowed to rest for a day or two.

Once painted on a wall, the mix sets and gets hard in a few hours. You have to do your painting while it is still fresh and wet. This is why the painting technique is called

f r e s c o .

Above is Cervantes’ house in Esquivias,  now open to visitors. Though it belongs to Toledo, it is south of Madrid, between Madrid and Aranjuez,  off the highway.

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Casa encalada en Albarreal de Tajo

A little house typical of the pueblos in central Spain. It is so typical that it was difficult to find a photo. Nobody would ever think of taking a picture of such an old everyday thing with its base painted to hide the mould left by rain because the house does not have any foundations.

Lime also kills or holds off all kinds of insects, ants, spiders. And since the lime and sand mix works also as a mortar, while painting a wall you fix many little or big cracks and holes.

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So it occurred to people a few thousand years ago to mix the lime with marble dust to get a glittering surface or to add clay or ground  stones or colours made of plants like Indigo. Soon they also had the idea to paint pictures on the freshly rendered walls.

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The great frescos

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling

The chapel is called Sistine because it had been built under Pope Sixtus IV. However, the story book pope who ordered Michelangelo to paint that ceiling is Julius II.

These are probably the most famous frescoes in the world:

There is a five star interactive video published by the Vatican where you can direct the camera with your mouse at http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html. Since there are always crowds of tourists trying to get in, there are people willing and able to pay several hundred dollars for a private visit to the chapel, but they cannot see it as well as you now with your tablet, your computer, or even your phone :-D.

This diagram explains  what Bible stories are represented.

Right in the center of it all is the most celebrated of the frescos: there is God giving the divine light of reason to man:

The ceiling is eleven thousand square feet, and Michelangelo was new to the technique. He had to learn it on the job. And he had to work high up on a wriggly scaffolding. It was a lonely and gigantic effort, something that cannot be imagined now anymore.

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Giotto’s Last Judgment

Satan is eating up all the souls that are dragged down to him and eternal Hell. It is a fragment of a large painting in a chapel in Italy.
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A Roman fresco: Sappho, the Greek poet

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In public domain according to
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/Herkulaneischer_Meister_002.jpg/768px-Herkulaneischer_Meister_002.jpg

The painting is in Pompeii, Italy. A young woman is shown with a pen, a stylus used to write on wax tablets. The net in her hair is made of golden threads.

Even now there are artists who can do a portrait in fresco. It is a great technique to prevent the painter from focusing on irrelevant detail. And there is something special in the colours too: they are not sweet like pastels, and yet there is some of that typical luster or transparency of colour reflected by cristals.

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A Greek fresco: Bull leaping

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Leaping bull photo made by Saskia Ltd, Thomson Wadsworth in public domain according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Knossos_bull.jpg The fresco is from a palace in Knossos on Crete in Greece.

Bull leaping  still exists. I have never seen it, but while looking for information found a video showing young men leaping over a raging bull: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1L-8xLI_5c

Two kids boxing, also from Greece, but I have not yet found the reference.

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How to do a fresco

1. You need lime and colours that can be dissolved in water.

2. Dissolve the lime in water. Be careful: use a metal container: begin by doing little at a time to learn how it reacts. At first the solution gets extremely hot, starts to bubble, might splash or explode. Protect your eyes. I knew about that, but not about the metal container, took a plastic bucket, watched it, nothing happened. But the lime burnt through the bottom of the pale and ran out.

3. Mix the solution with fine sand  to make a  malleable creamy mix of 8 parts sand to 5 parts  lime.

4. Apply a layer of the mix on a hard surface. Let it set for 20 minutes and start to paint. You have only a few hours to paint. It  must be painted while it is still wet.

Maybe you can learn from watching a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-prAIz0urTE

Even a great painter like Giotto could do a fresco only in sections, so that now, a few hundred years later, you can still clearly see the seams defining a day’s work:
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That is spring about 20 miles south of Madrid.

The ground is all limestone and may even be salty. What can you do with land of this kind?  The tiny shrubs on  those ridges are thyme.

There are shepherds with their sheep. There used to be hunters, too. Some years ago somebody bought up and enclosed a lot of land.

He thought he could make a fortune turning it into a golf course and a residential area.

He could not sell his 1000 flats because the demand collapsed, and he would be a fool to set up a golf course because water is scarce; you’d have to have artificial irrigation working day and night from early spring till late in autumn, but in the height of summer even that would not be enough to keep the grass from turning brown.

Those large shrubs are genista, also called broom. In spring they bend under a load of small yellow flowers:

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Would you know what those white things are ?

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There was a hand-written sign: “Precaución: Abejas; Warning: Bees”.

Beside the sign there is a wild almond tree with big almonds hanging from its branches though this is still early in spring. These almonds are bitter, really bitter, the best thing to try if you are not sure what bitter  means.

Having bees, apiculture, in this part of Spain is probably just  a hobby, not an income. A jarful of honey is worth only a few dollars and lasts for a long time. I don’t know why that is so. In Machado’s  ballad about the land of Alvargonzalez, beehives are mentioned as assets just like sheep and cattle and  olive trees.

Yet remember that there are times and places where “a few dollars” will make all the difference.

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Along the train tracks  there are  wild almond trees.

Couldn’t they be grafted to produce sweet almonds? Sweet almonds still fetch good money anywhere.

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