Michelangelo\u27s Last Judgement: A Crisis of Conscience

Michelangelo, that fascinating Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, and architect has been a source of wonder and intrigue since his own times. Vasari refers to Michelangelo’s birth as a gift from the gods, and Athos writes “In his own time, it was said that Michelangelo’s work rivaled God’s, and his force and authority are still overwhelming.” Indeed, the power of Michelangelo is still great. People flock from around the globe to marvel at his marbles. The David, the Pieta, the Bacchus, and many others are sculptures so beautiful that the marble seems to breathe, to break out of their marble skins. In painting as well as in sculpture, Michelangelo shines. In the ceiling paintings of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s neo-platonic, graceful, classically-influenced figures, albeit ones reluctantly painted, give us, in Arthos’ words, “the freshness of Earthly Paradise,” as well as clearly understood messages and Biblical stories. Yet, it is in the fresco The Last Judgment, made for the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, from 1534-41, that we see most clearly Michelangelo’s brilliant, conflicted, anguished, arrogant self. Begun approximately twenty years after the completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and nineteen years after Martin Luther’s initiation of the Reformation, Michelangelo’s frameless fresco, The Last Judgment, shows us evidence of the artist’s shifting psychology, a psychology which celebrates all the awe and terror inherent in the sublime, but a side which also admits to the immense strain and tension, as well as the underlying anxiety and restless energy experienced by Michelangelo in the latter part of his life. Michelangelo, in this fresco, gives the viewer a manifesto and a warning. Nobody, not even the highest ranking members of the Church, not even the most gifted artists, can evade the day of reckoning. Moreover, Michelangelo makes a clear point that not only people’s actions but their characters that determine their ultimate fate. The impassive Christ, the seemingly impotent Mary, and the shock of the skin of Bartholomew, on which it seems Michelangelo painted his own face, all add to the general effect of hope and fear, anxiety and unrest, doubt and faith all juxtaposed in the fresco

Doorways to Divinity and Function in the Form: Icons and Ecclesiastical Enforcement

It is always fascinating to explore the development of cultures and cultural art and to see how one evolves from and into the next. In classical antiquity, the veneration of the cult statue was common; the cult statue occupied a niche in the temple to which only priests and guests of the priests had direct access. The statues were not simply symbolic· they were instead holy objects, manifesting a direct path the the cult deity they depicted. The image itself, in other words, was the authority; the image itself had power. The forms and authority of the cult deities and of their priests merged· to anger a priest was to risk angering the deity. In the later Byzantine era, through Caesaropapism we see the same pattern. The spiritual becomes the temporal and the temporal becomes the spiritual. Art, including iconic art, becomes a way by which viewers and worshippers expe1ience and explore the conditional c-0ncem and care of the Church and of the temporal authorities who acted in its name. Before and after the iconoclastic dispute, icons were not simply viewed as decorations. Rather, they were holistically experienced as divine instruments and were, as Bisser V Pentcheva notes, meant to be physically experienced because the icon itself was matter imbued with charis or divine grace_\u27 1 The representation and veneration of icons, particularly icons of the saints Christ and the Christ Pantocrator, and the Virgin Hodegetria, served several ecclesiastical functions; specifically they spread the word of the emergent faith they reinforced ecclesiastical. authority, and they provided an individualized and therefore more committed and fervent faith

The Poetry of Prompts: The Collaborative Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Creation of Poetry and the Anxiety of Machine Influence

2022 has been heralded as the year of generative artificial intelligence AI Generative AI like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion along with a host of others launched late in the year and immediately disrupted the status quo of the literary and artworlds leading to outcries to ban AI Art and spawning an entirely new market of NFTs Fears over the death of the artist and the death of college composition however are unfounded when considering the historical adoption of emerging technologies by creatives and the reconsideration of authorship that began with poststructuralism and the Foucauldian Death of the Author in 196

The Poetry of Prompts: The Collaborative Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Creation of Poetry and the Anxiety of Machine Influence

2022 has been heralded as the year of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, along with a host of others, launched late in the year and immediately disrupted the status quo of the literary and art worlds, leading to outcries to ban “AI Art” and spawning an entirely new market of NFTs. Fears over the “death of the artist” and the “death of college composition,” however, are unfounded when considering the historical adoption of emerging technologies by creatives and the reconsideration of authorship that began with post structuralism and the Foucauldian Death of the Author in 1967. Contemporary scholarship has faced challenges in reconciling the function of the human author in conjunction with artificial intelligence (AI) due to the progressive sophistication and selfsufficiency of generative code. Nonetheless, it is erroneous to establish the threshold for authorship based on the development or advancement of AI or robotics, as it falls within the realm of ontology. Instead, assertions of AI authorship stem from a romanticized perception of both authorship and AI during a period in which neither holds significance. A new discussion on the role of the human agent in the writing process, particularly in the creative process like poetry, should prioritize the practical aspects of what an author does. This study examines how AI is increasingly becoming involved in collaborative efforts to create poetry and aims to explore the potential of this trend. Furthermore, the study seeks to provide empirical evidence on the boundaries of AI\u27s ability to replicate human thought and experience. Through generating content in the creative written arts using ChatGPT-3, poetry analysis revealed that, in fact, such new generative models can imitate the vocabulary, language choices, style, and even rhythm of famous poets such as Keats, it is unable to generate emotions that it has not experienced. The questions that will continue to be raised on the nature of humanity, existence, and creative capabilities should be reframed with the concept of fear fore grounded to assist in understanding the uniquely human anxiety and drive to create in an attempt to communicate across the gulf what it “feels” like to be human as a phenomenology of experience

15,000 Years of mass-movement history in Lake Lucerne: Implications for seismic and tsunami hazards

Abstract.: A chronological catalogue of Late Glacial and Holocene mass-movement deposits in Chrüztrichter and Vitznau Basins of Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstättersee) reveals a complex history of natural hazards affecting the lake and its shores. Ninety-one mass-flow and six megaturbidite deposits have been identified and mapped out with a grid of more than 300 km high-resolution seismic profiles. An age model based on the analyses of 10 long piston cores, 2 tephra layers and 32 AMS-14C ages allowed building up a chronological event catalogue covering the last 15,000 years. Most of the identified mass-flow deposits relate to subaqueous sliding and subaerial rockfalling, as indicated by slide scars and rockfall cones on the lake floor. Deposits related to subaqueous sliding occur at the toe of slopes with inclinations >10° and reach their largest extents below slopes with inclinations between 10 and 20°. On subaqueous slopes >25° there is hardly any sediment accumulation. Rockfall cones and related mass-flow deposits in the northeastern and southern part of Vitznau basin evidence repeated rockfall activity, particularly along two zones on the northern face of Bürgenstock Mountain. Historic examples indicate that such rockfalls, as well as large subaqueous slides, can induce considerable tsunami waves in the lake. All of the 91 identified mass-flow deposits are associated with 19 seismic- stratigraphic event horizons. One of them comprises 13 mass-flow deposits and 2 megaturbidites and relates to the 1601 A.D. Mw ~ 6.2 earthquake. By analogy, five older multiple mass-movement horizons, each including six or more coeval deposits, are interpreted to result from strong prehistoric earthquake