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The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua (better known as simply Pantagruel) was the first in a series of five satirical books by the Franciscan monk and physician François Rabelais chronicling the outrageous adventures of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel and friends. Published around 1532, Pantagruel is rife with vulgarity, scatological humor, and violence. In spite (or possibly because) of being condemned by the church and deemed obscene by the censors of the Sorbonne, the books proved very popular. In testimony to the author’s continuing influence, Merriam-Webster defines Rabelaisian as “marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism.”

Happy 87th birthday to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch from ARTstor and artist Dmitry Borshch!

Mayor Koch recently posed for this portrait, which is now included in the Catalog of American Portraits maintained by The National Portrait Gallery. View more of Dmitry Borsch’s work in the ARTstor Digital Library.

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted that we often reserve rich foods for celebrations: “These are some of the delicacies which one would not buy and consume alone without a vague feeling of guilt.” And guilty we would feel if we were to celebrate the passing of another year without sharing some of the morsels found in the Artstor Digital Library.

“I’m trying to capture the architecture, the play of light on stone, and the beauty of the church. I try to find a way to express the spirit of the church. Sometimes I’m just moved by the shapes and the patterns.”

PJ McKey

“I’m trying to find hints of what moved the people who built the churches. And then I’m amazed by the genius of the builders.”

Dennis Aubrey

To celebrate the release of  Via Lucis: Romanesque Art and Architecture in Artstor, we invited photographer Dennis Aubrey to share a history of the project.

At the core of this project to document and explore the great Romanesque and Gothic churches of France and Spain lies a mystery. At the turn of the first millennium, the French monk Raoul Glaber wrote that it seemed that “the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.” Our question is “Who were the builders?” Who were the people who, uncompelled, built their thousands of shrines that have lasted a thousand years? Their archives have disappeared, so often we don’t even know their names. But merely knowing their names would not tell us anything about who they were and how they came to perform such tasks. What kind of belief impelled and motivated them? This is the mystery we explore.

As the 11^thCentury dawned in France, the world seemed under attack from all directions. The Carolingian stability had disappeared in a wave of invasions – the Norsemen raided the rivers and coasts from the North, the Saracens ranged over the South as they crossed the Pyrenees and swept up the Mediterranean, and the Magyar horsemen invaded from Hungary and the east. Cities were pillaged, churches destroyed, and society disintegrated. The invaders actually fought battles against each other over the spoils of France. But a new society began to emerge, one led by a religious movement of profound importance.

The Christian monastic orders emerged as the mortar of society, the bond that kept it together. Through these orders, Christian Europe began to defend itself, not just in arms but philosophically. The Church needed to restate its very identity. That restatement was powerful and profound. The Christian identity was re-imagined completely, not merely rediscovered. The Church incorporated the new learning of the day – the sciences of logic and philosophy. In doing so, Christian Europe managed two monumental feats; they united faith and intellect and created a completely new architecture.

The great Abbe Angelico Surcamp of the monastery of La Pierre Qui Vire near Vezelay, recently described to us that Romanesque architecture is fundamentally monastic – inward-looking and contemplative. Gothic, he suggested, was directed outwards as a public display of faith. Yet both combined to create an architectural vocabulary that transmuted stone into an expression of man’s Belief. Our project at Via Lucis is to explore this great achievement, that of sending stone soaring to the heavens.

The Artstor staff is hurrying to wrap up projects before the long Thanksgiving weekend that starts this Thursday. The holiday is officially celebrated in the United States every year on the fourth Thursday of November.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, widely known as the father of photography, was born on November 18, 1787, France. Dauguerre, also a painter and theatrical designer, was already a celebrated figure for his invention of the Diorama, a spectacle featuring in-the-round theatrical painting and lighting effects. He eventually partnered with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce to make lasting images using light and chemistry. Niépce had produced the world’s first permanent photograph, but the result was extremely fragile and required an eight-hour exposure. It was not until 1839, six years after Niépce’s death, that Daguerre was able to announce the perfection of the daguerreotype, a relatively permanent, one-of-a-kind photographic image made on a silver-coated sheet of copper exposed to iodine, developed in heated mercury fumes, and fixed with salt water. That same year, the patent for the daguerreotype was acquired by the French Government, which pronounced the invention a gift “Free to the World.”

Search for “Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre” as creator in the Digital Library’s Advanced Search to find many samples of his surviving daguerreotypes, as well as paintings and a drawing of his Diorama, or search for daguerreotype to see dozens of images of photographs created using Daguerre’s method.

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a brief, powerful speech at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He addressed the country’s civil war, reminding weary Americans of the values they were fighting for. Its closing words were: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The Gettsyburg Address is now inscribed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

A simple search for Abraham Lincoln in the Artstor Digital Library will result in hundreds of photographs, sculptures, murals, and political cartoons of the American President from collections as varied as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Carnegie Arts of the United States Collection, The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and George Eastman House. Search using the terms Lincoln and Gettysburg to see vibrant images by folk artists William H. Johnson and Malcah Zeldis.

Many countries throughout the world celebrate Armistice Day on November 11 to commemorate the effective end of World War I on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918. A common custom dictates a two-minute moment of silence at 11:00 AM as a sign of respect for those lost in the war.

In 1938, November 11 became an official national holiday in the United States to pay tribute to all American veterans. After World War II, the name of the holiday became Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day in countries of the British Commonwealth of Nations, which began to hold most Armistice Day events on the nearest Sunday to commemorate both World Wars. It retains its name in nations such as France and Belgium.

The George Benjamin Luks painting illustrating this post comes from Carnegie Arts of the United States, and the uniforms from the The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes. Other pertinent collections in the ARTstor Digital Library include World War I and II Posters and Postcards (University of Minnesota Libraries); The Schlesinger History of Women in America Collection; and George Eastman House. Tip: narrow your searches by date to 1914 to 1918 to find World War I-era images.

Continuing our spooky Day of the Dead/Halloween theme, we now present you with a slide show of the Danse Macabre. The Dance of Death was an allegory that began in the Middle Ages (possibly in response to the ravages of the black plague) in which death dances with people from all walks of life; it was meant to remind us that no matter our social station, life is fleeting and death inevitable.

The etchings in this slide show were made in the mid-18th century by Jacques-Antony Chovin based on prints by Matthäus Merian from a century before. They come to us from the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin). Search for Chovin’s name in the Artstor Digital Library to see the accompanying text, which includes dialogues between death and her victims.

Looking for more creepy stuff? Try these posts:

• New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts
• Day of the Dead, Halloween, and the scary side of Artstor
• Vanitas: a very literal nature morte
• Restless spirits and hungry mouths
• On this day: Friday the 13th
• Holding dolls at arm’s length
• Unwinding mummies

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a three-year grant of $413,378 to support a project investigating and evaluating ways of improving library and museum searching and social tagging by presenting users with thesauri, taxonomies, and other structured vocabularies as a way to discover relevant content. The results will ultimately be useful to a wide range of museum and library users and can be directly applied by library and museum service providers and search engine designers. The project consists of lead applicant Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology as well as Artstor, University at Buffalo, Getty Research Institute, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Visit the IMLS website for more details.