HAROLD-AS-AENEAS? THE INFLUENCE OF THE AENEID ON A RESCUE SCENE IN THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-229
Author(s):  
Nikki K. Rollason ◽  
Michael J. Lewis

A scene in the Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1072–7 ce) shows Earl Harold ‘Godwinson’ of Wessex (c. 1022–66), future king of the English (r. 1066), rescuing two Normans from drowning in the quicksand of the River Couesnon as they cross into Brittany on military campaign (see figure 1; Bayeux Tapestry Scene 17). Harold (Bayeux Tapestry Figure 152) is depicted standing more or less upright, upon embroidered lines that represent the waters of the Couesnon. As is typical for the representation of Anglo-Saxons in this, the earlier part of the embroidery, he has a ‘pudding-bowl’ haircut and is moustached. These features distinguish Harold from the Normans he saves, who have the backs of their heads shaven and are without facial hair. Harold carries one of the men ‘piggyback’ and drags the other, who has almost fallen on his back, up by his right hand. The Latin inscription above this scene is brief, but nonetheless tells us most of what we need to know to understand the imagery beneath: hIC VVILLEM DVX ET EXERCITVS EIVS VENERVNT AD MONTE[M] MIChAELIS ET hIC TRANSIERVNT FLVMEN COSNONIS. hIC hARLOLD DVX TRAhEBAT EOS DE ARENA (‘Here Duke William and his army came to Mont St Michel, and here they crossed the River Couesnon. Here Duke Harold pulled them out of the sand’).

Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.


2018 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 729-740 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Woytowicz ◽  
Kelly P. Westlake ◽  
Jill Whitall ◽  
Robert L. Sainburg

Two contrasting views of handedness can be described as 1) complementary dominance, in which each hemisphere is specialized for different aspects of motor control, and 2) global dominance, in which the hemisphere contralateral to the dominant arm is specialized for all aspects of motor control. The present study sought to determine which motor lateralization hypothesis best predicts motor performance during common bilateral task of stabilizing an object (e.g., bread) with one hand while applying forces to the object (e.g., slicing) using the other hand. We designed an experimental equivalent of this task, performed in a virtual environment with the unseen arms supported by frictionless air-sleds. The hands were connected by a spring, and the task was to maintain the position of one hand while moving the other hand to a target. Thus the reaching hand was required to take account of the spring load to make smooth and accurate trajectories, while the stabilizer hand was required to impede the spring load to keep a constant position. Right-handed subjects performed two task sessions (right-hand reach and left-hand stabilize; left-hand reach and right-hand stabilize) with the order of the sessions counterbalanced between groups. Our results indicate a hand by task-component interaction such that the right hand showed straighter reaching performance whereas the left hand showed more stable holding performance. These findings provide support for the complementary dominance hypothesis and suggest that the specializations of each cerebral hemisphere for impedance and dynamic control mechanisms are expressed during bilateral interactive tasks. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We provide evidence for interlimb differences in bilateral coordination of reaching and stabilizing functions, demonstrating an advantage for the dominant and nondominant arms for distinct features of control. These results provide the first evidence for complementary specializations of each limb-hemisphere system for different aspects of control within the context of a complementary bilateral task.


Tempo ◽  
1991 ◽  
pp. 18-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Montague

In the early 1920s and 30s a strange electronic instrument found its way from Russia into some of the more fashionable ballrooms, night clubs, and concert halls in Europe and America. This exotic new invention, called the ‘theremin’ or ‘thereminvox’, caused a considerable stir. Part of the interest was its unusual sound (like a musical saw mated with a light soprano), but its most dramatic feature was that the performer never actually touched the instrument. He or she simply waved graceful hands near the two antennae (one set vertically, the other looped horizontally) to coax out seamless, melifluous melodies. The proximity of the right hand to the vertical antenna changed the ultrasonic electromagnetic field, thus changing the pitch over about a six-octave range. The left hand (or sometimes a foot pedal) controlled the volume. By gently shaking the right hand at the antenna a vibrato could be achieved, giving performances a little more musical (not to mention choreographic) interest. Fashionable women dressed in long gowns seemed to be favourite photographic subjects of the period as performers, as well as the inventor himself, poised ‘playing the rods’ in full dress tails, arms outstretched like a great conductor–or perhaps sorcerer.


Author(s):  
K. B. E. E. Eimeleus

This chapter looks at turns on the move with the right or left shoulder aligned with the corresponding ski. It distinguishes three important techniques that have gained currency in the world of sport. One of them pertains only to running skis while the other two require mountain skis with stable bindings. The first is the method for turning in place, used while descending from a mountain or over flat terrain on running skis, or on any skis that lack a stable binding and have a posterior center of balance. The next is the Christiania turn, which is carried out on the inner ski, that is, on the right ski when the turn is done to the right-hand side. Finally, the Telemark turn allows a skier to make a sudden stop as they are descending.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yves Guiard

An experiment compared the ability of classical pianists to sing, during keyboard performance, the right- and the left-hand part of the score being played. Upon instructions requiring them to "sing" one or the other voice of the score, the subjects spontaneously chose to sing and name the notes simultaneously, in keeping with the French traditional way of reading music, thus producing a two- dimensional tonal and verbal vocal act in response to each visual stimulus. Singing the right-hand part of the music, whether in unison with or in place of the right hand, while concurrently playing the left-hand part was judged easy by all subjects, and performance, typically, was correct in all respects. The other task, consisting of singing the left-hand part of the music, was judged more difficult by all subjects, and performance, more often than not, was poor. Careful inspection of the many errors that were recorded in the latter task revealed a few clear-cut regularities. Failures were vocal, but not manual. More specifically, vocal failures took place on the tonal dimension of the vocal response, but not on its verbal dimension: The song, but not the naming of the notes, was prone to fail, with either a loss of the pitch, or a systematic trend toward singing unduly—albeit accurately—the notes of the right-hand part. A number of subjects were found to display this intriguing tonal/verbal dissociation—naming a note at a pitch corresponding to another note—in a continuous regime. It is emphasized that this phenomenon amounts to the spontaneous production of musical events that belong to the Stroop category.


The structure of the walls of vesicles of Valonia ventricosa and, to a less extent of other species, has been re-examined by the methods of X-ray analysis and electronmicroscopy, with particular reference to the criticism by Steward & Muhlethaler of the earlier statements of Preston & Astbury. It is shown that the cellulose microfibrils are present in three orientations, in separate lamellae. The third orientation, noted occasionally by Preston & Astbury but not recorded in their model, corresponds to microfibrils which are much less abundant than are those of the other two orientations both because the lamellae with this orientation are less frequent and because the microfibrils are more loosely packed in each lamella. The two ‘major’ directions ( A and B ) lie on an average at rather less than at right-angles to each other; the third direction ( x ) forms a bisector of this angle. The repeat from one lamella to the next can be . . . ABAB . . . or . . . AxB . . ., i.e. an interrupted two-lamella repeat, and not a three-lamella repeat as proposed by Steward & Muhlethaler. The structures of the walls of two whole vesicles have been worked out and give identical models. These are strictly equivalent to the model proposed by Preston & Astbury except that the third microfibril direction is present, making a rather steep right-hand spiral around the vesicle.


2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 491-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinya Fujii ◽  
Masaya Hirashima ◽  
Kazutoshi Kudo ◽  
Tatsuyuki Ohtsuki ◽  
Yoshihiko Nakamura ◽  
...  

the present study examined the synchronization error (SE) of drum kit playing by professional drummers with an auditory metronome, focusing on the effects of motor effectors and tempi. Fifteen professional drummers attempted to synchronize a basic drumming pattern with a metronome as precisely as possible at tempi of 60, 120, and 200 beats per minute (bpm). In the 60 and 120 bpm conditions, the right hand (high-hat cymbals) showed small mean SE (∼2 ms), whereas the left hand (snare drum) and right foot (bass drum) preceded the metronome by about 10 ms. In the 200 bpm condition, the right hand was delayed by about 10 ms relative to the metronome, whereas the left hand and right foot showed small SE (∼1 ms). The absolute values of SE were smaller than those reported in previous tapping studies. In addition, the time series of SE were significantly correlated across the motor effectors, suggesting that each limb synchronized in relation to the other limbs rather than independently with the metronome.


1936 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-236
Author(s):  
A. D. Trendall

Of the recent acquisitions to the Classical Collection of the Otago Museum (Dunedin, New Zealand) the most noteworthy is a particularly fine Attic white ground lekythos of about the middle of the fifth century (Plate XIV). It stands 38 cm. high and is in an excellent state of preservation, having been most carefully repaired with a minimum of repainting, which has affected only the breast of the woman, the right hand of the warrior, and some details of the small figure on top of the stele.The design represents a stele scene of the sort so popular with lekythos artists of this period. To the left stands a woman wearing a sleeved chiton, so thin that it clearly allows her bowed legs to be seen through it; with her left hand she points downward to the base of the stele, which is adorned with a fillet and a wreath. On the other side stands a hoplite with his shield and spear;


Perception ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (9) ◽  
pp. 1153-1155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Lewin Altschuler

I have noticed a striking effect that vision can have on movement: when a person makes circular motions with both hands, clockwise with the left hand, counterclockwise with the right hand, while watching the reflection of one hand in a parasagitally placed mirror, if one arm makes a vertical excursion, the other arm tends to make the same vertical excursion, but not typically if the excursing arm is viewed in plain vision. This observation may help in understanding how visual feedback via a mirror may be beneficial for rehabilitation of some patients with movement deficits secondary to certain neurologic conditions, and illustrates that the traditional division of neural processes into sensory input and motor output is somewhat arbitrary.


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