‘Man carries all animals within himself’

This article addresses Rubens’s perspective on the human-animal by focusing on the satyr as one of his favourite mythological characters. This profoundly liminal being appears in a variety of roles throughout his oeuvre, including several paintings that remained in his private collection. In some of them, the satyr is primarily a figure for unbridled lustfulness and sensuality. In many others, however, this hybrid creature appears to hold the key to some of the mysteries of nature itself. Another facet of this analysis concerns the long-standing connection between this mythological character and literary satire. Rubens’s satyr-themed images bear a number of salient qualities of this literary genre as one that destabilizes boundaries: between the beautiful and the repulsive, the tragic and the comical, the sublime and the grotesque.

Curation of the John and Phil Palmquist Archaeological Collection

The 2018 SAA statement encouraging collaboration between archaeologists and “responsible and responsive stewards” included recommendations epitomizing decades of established practice at the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA), a research center housing the State Archaeological Repository of Iowa. At the time the SAA statement was published, OSA staff were actively implementing a grant supporting transfer to the State Repository of the John and Phil Palmquist Archaeological Collection. This grant was designed to provide hands-on research experience for undergraduate students interested in archaeology and collections management while recording improved site locational data and artifact specific documentation, including on relatively rare (for the area) red pipestone artifacts. Although modest by some standards, the Palmquist Collection includes 860 artifacts from 26 locations recorded through 40 years of surface survey by the family in a portion of Iowa that is rarely the focus of professional archaeologists. This article provides a case study of responsible archaeological practice implementing SAA recommendations, including treating collector-collaborators with respect, encouraging collector assistance in the recording of finds, capturing research data from a private collection, and facilitating curation of privately owned materials. We include brief consideration of the impact of the Palmquist Collection on the understanding of southwestern Iowa archaeology.

Coptic Papyri of the University History Museum of Perm State University

This article constitutes the editio princeps of the Coptic manuscripts from the private collection of Alexandr Palnikov (1857–1917), presently housed at the University History Museum of Perm State University. All these manuscripts are written on papyrus and can be dated to the second half of the first millennium C. E. The twenty-five fragments with Coptic text come from ten different manuscripts. Of those, two seem to be literary; the rest, documentary. The transcription of the Coptic text is accompanied by a Russian translation and a papyrological commentary.

In Search of Missing Collection: The Case of Artist Albert Rappaport

Summary The artist Albert Rappaport was born in Anykščiai in 1898. In 1911, the family emigrated to New York. Rappaport became an American citizen in 1925 and began to travel widely. He studied fine art in New York, Paris, Dresden and Munich. He visited South America, Africa and traveled extensively through Europe (1925–1927, 1933, 1937–1939), returning to the United States now and again. The artist participated in several dozen exhibitions. He showed his work in Paris, Rome, Florence, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Havana, New York, Calgary and Montreal, in addition to his solo exhibitions in 1937 in Warsaw and Vilnius, and in Kaunas, Riga and Tallinn in 1938. After Rappaport’s death, in March 17, 1969 in Montreal, his collection of artworks disappeared and has thus far not been found. To date, two of his painted portraits are known to exist – one belongs to the private collection of Jonathan C. Rappaport, another is on display at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal.

A Matter of Taste: the Fate of the Archdeacon Smythe Collection of British Watercolours in New Zealand

<p><b>Francis Henry Dumville Smythe, a humble clergyman from England, spent a lifetime amassing his private collection of watercolours. During the 1950s, he decided to gift them to two art institutions in New Zealand – Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the National Art Gallery in Wellington. They were welcomed with open arms and celebrated as “the finest collection of water colour pictures in the Southern Hemisphere.” However, they soon fell out of favour: rarely exhibited, the collection remains poorly understood and unexplored to this day. Was their initial praise simply a matter of taste?</b></p> <p>This project looks at the rise and fall of the Smythe collection and aims to reveal the circumstances that led to its current low profile within its respective institutions. The collection itself will be analysed in depth for the first time, and the impact that changing artistic tastes have had on its status will be examined. In New Zealand’s case, these shifting tastes are symptomatic of the redefinition of national and cultural identity during the 1950s-1980s. How did this redefined national and cultural identity contribute to the continued drop in status of the Smythe collection in New Zealand? This dissertation considers the geographical contexts of both Britain and New Zealand and seeks to explore new ways of engaging with New Zealand’s public art collections, through combining the different research fields of watercolours, taste, and identity. While British watercolours are now mostly considered old fashioned, this thesis will find new ways of making them relevant again.</p>

A Matter of Taste: the Fate of the Archdeacon Smythe Collection of British Watercolours in New Zealand

<p><b>Francis Henry Dumville Smythe, a humble clergyman from England, spent a lifetime amassing his private collection of watercolours. During the 1950s, he decided to gift them to two art institutions in New Zealand – Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the National Art Gallery in Wellington. They were welcomed with open arms and celebrated as “the finest collection of water colour pictures in the Southern Hemisphere.” However, they soon fell out of favour: rarely exhibited, the collection remains poorly understood and unexplored to this day. Was their initial praise simply a matter of taste?</b></p> <p>This project looks at the rise and fall of the Smythe collection and aims to reveal the circumstances that led to its current low profile within its respective institutions. The collection itself will be analysed in depth for the first time, and the impact that changing artistic tastes have had on its status will be examined. In New Zealand’s case, these shifting tastes are symptomatic of the redefinition of national and cultural identity during the 1950s-1980s. How did this redefined national and cultural identity contribute to the continued drop in status of the Smythe collection in New Zealand? This dissertation considers the geographical contexts of both Britain and New Zealand and seeks to explore new ways of engaging with New Zealand’s public art collections, through combining the different research fields of watercolours, taste, and identity. While British watercolours are now mostly considered old fashioned, this thesis will find new ways of making them relevant again.</p>

The Hummingbird Collection of the Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto (MHNC-UP), Portugal

The Hummingbird (Family Trochilidae) Collection of the Natural History and Science Museum of the University of Porto (MHNC-UP) is one of the oldest collections of this family harboured in European museums. Almost 2,000 specimens, that encompass most of the taxonomic diversity of this family, were collected in the late 19th Century. The collection is relevant due its antiquity and because all specimens were bought from the same provider, mainly as mounted specimens, for a Portuguese private collection of Neotropical fauna. In the early 20th Century, it was donated to the Museum that is now the MHNC-UP. The information about the majority of these specimens is now available for consultation on the GBIF platform after curation of all specimens and digital cleaning of the associated metadata. In the process, hundreds of non-catalogued specimens were found and taxonomic and spatial information was updated for many of the specimens.

Frequency estimation under local differential privacy

Private collection of statistics from a large distributed population is an important problem, and has led to large scale deployments from several leading technology companies. The dominant approach requires each user to randomly perturb their input, leading to guarantees in the local differential privacy model. In this paper, we place the various approaches that have been suggested into a common framework, and perform an extensive series of experiments to understand the tradeoffs between different implementation choices. Our conclusion is that for the core problems of frequency estimation and heavy hitter identification, careful choice of algorithms can lead to very effective solutions that scale to millions of users.

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION OF CARICATURES OF PEOPLE'S ARTIST HUSEYNGULU ALIYEV

In Huseyngulu Aliyev's works, we always see the successful expression of harsh color transitions, tonal spots, light effects, instant glare in the formation of dynamism, as well as the artist's unique creative position with different compositional structures in the more exciting presentation of these effects. In his work "Molla Nasreddin", which is currently preserved in a private collection in Norway, the artist expressed the deep expression of dynamism in the composition, both in the intensity of movements, sudden jumps, hymns of speed, and the contrasting transition of colors from light to dark or vice versa. It is interesting to recreate the artistic solution of the instantaneous plot in which the fruit of the old man, sitting on a fast-running donkey, spreads in the air and begins to scatter in the air. The clear language of caricatures created by Huseyngulu Aliyev, which combines both matte and bright tones of colors such as green, yellow and brown, is very thought-provoking due to their mobility and dynamism. Created in 1993, the interesting language of expression of the works, which is a vivid example of the idea mentioned in the cartoons with ink and pen, attracts attention. In "Unsuccesfull" the intention of a thief in a black mask to plunder the country, but before that the looting of these places ended in the failure of his plan. The astonishment of the robber looking at the empty baskets and glasses scattered on the ground makes it possible to imagine the facial features he covers. The clear language of caricatures created by Huseyngulu Aliyev is also very thought-provoking due to their mobility and dynamism. Created in 1993, the interesting language of expression of the works, which is a vivid example of the idea mentioned in the cartoons with ink and pen, attracts attention. In "Unsuccesfull" the intention of a thief in a black mask to plunder the country, but before that the looting of these places ended in the failure of his plan.The astonishment of the robber looking at the empty baskets and glasses scattered on the ground makes it possible to imagine the facial features he covers. Among the graphic examples created in the mentioned period, the unique composition of the work "Roads" attracts the attention of the audience with its interesting composition, which has a great meaning. The artist sang the song of a long way with the movement of crowded people in the same direction. The march of people who join the movement on an empty background expresses their common thinking and will. Here, the artist has successfully implemented mass thinking, not where and why the roads go. It is well-known that art, which came to art by chance, but managed to introduce itself in any way, has gained popularity in our time. The artist's very interesting and humorous composition in his caricature "Patriot of art" created about 20 years ago is dedicated to this type of "artists". The stage hymn of the performance of a long-eared man holding his tambourine in his hands in an artistic form clearly expresses the artist's purpose. The solution of the symbolic meaning given to some scenes of life by the artist using folk sayings in the unique compositional structure gives the basis to evaluate the artist's creativity by presenting it in a different form in each work. For example, in his 2001 work, “They Make the Old Moon a Star”, he praised an astrologer sitting on his back with his head cut off and turning the old moon into a star in the sky. The artist was referring to people who were ungrateful and apostate (Figure 2.91). In Huseyngulu Aliyev's caricatures, artistic exaggerations, different assessments of events or directing them in accordance with the content of the work are of interest as creative extraordinary creative discoveries. For example, the artist, who turned a fragment from the world-famous sculptor Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" into the content of the painting, watched the two snakes collide, fight, and try to poison each other, thinking deeply about world events. Here, the sharpness of the artistic generalization in such a difficult scene as the destruction of the same sex makes the viewer think (Figure 2.96).

Preserving a family’s photographic history: the private collection of Michina Pope

Photographs can provide a pictorial testimony of a familial history; yet, each time objects are moved and handled the risk of loss and deterioration increases. However, to date, little guidance has been available to private collectors on how to organize and preserve their photographic collections. My practical thesis focuses on the unique challenges of organizing, preserving and digitizing a private collection of approximately 250 glass plate negatives and four corresponding albums, belonging to Michina Pope in Toronto, Canada. Using this specific collection, I have summarized my research with the intention of creating an illustrated manual with clear guidelines as a resource to help guide private collectors in caring for their photographic collection. In lieu of a specifically purposed manual, this thesis paper an act, in the time being, as a guide for collectors and/or those working with private collections of photographic materials.