Codex Rotundus “266 Almost Perfectly Circular Pages Of Parchment Have Been Bound Together To Build

Ruined Monastery of Eldena near Greifswald by Caspar David Friedrich

Claude Paradin, Devises Heroïques, 1567

Fred Appleyard (British, 1874-1963) St Cecilia, exhibited 1903

La visión del Coloseo. El último mártir

“I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.”

— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

One of my favorite historical tidbits is that Arab traders, for centuries, fooled Europeans into thinking cinnamon came from a rare, vicious and fearsome cinnamon bird.

The belief was so prevalent, in fact, that the mythical cinnamon bird shows up in the writings of Herodotus and Aristotle, all the way into medieval European manuscripts where it’s illustrated in all its fierce, cinnamony glory:

Pliny the Elder expressed skepticism of the bird in his writings, rightly assuming that it was a tale invented to keep control on the trade and prices by reducing competition, but the belief was already so widespread that it persisted in many areas into the early 1300’s.

Winter Full Moon Night over the Ruins of a Gothic Chapel (Felix Kreutzer, 1835 - 1876)

Circa mid-1500’s

Bronze helmet, Crete, 630-600 BC

from The Heraklion Museum

Темные духи Алтая. Фотограф Кулакова Екатерина. Россия  (Санкт-Петербург).

Dark spirits of Altai. Photographer Ekaterina Kulakova. Russia (Saint Petersburg).

Источник:/35photo.pro/diamanda/profile, /35photo.pro/photo_ 4631100/#author/4631100.