Opera As It Used to Be, and Other News

Lodovico Burnacini, Il Pomo d’Oro, Act I, Scene V, Jupiter and His Court at Banquet with Discord Floating in a Cloud above the Table, hand-colored engraving, 1668. Image via the New York Review of Books.

The world’s twenty most stunning libraries. How many have you been shushed in?
Bill Cunningham’s early photographs of New York.
These illustrations from From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging elucidate the finer points of things you didn’t know you cared about, such as stagecraft and lighting techniques in seventeenth-century opera.
The late philosopher Bernard Williams knew what to look for in a role model: “glistening contempt for philosophy … it is only by condescension or to amuse himself that he stays and listens to its arguments at all.”
“Hilma af Klint was an old-school spiritualist who believed that she channeled psychic and esoteric messages from the so-called High Masters—who existed in another dimension—into abstract paintings.”

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Opera As It Used to Be, and Other News

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