Differential diagnosis of a thyroid mass, facial malar rash and ptosis on the flora in the primavera by Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510)

Purpose The Primavera is considered amongst the greatest and controversial artistic masterpieces worldwide painted by renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli. The aim was to identify any underlying medical foundations for the painting. Methods Observational study. Results The painting reveals, a ‘butterfly’ malar rash, bilateral ptosis and a clear neck swelling consistent with a goitre in the figure of Flora. This could be explained by concomitant Graves’ disease and systemic lupus erythematosus, or other presentations of multiple autoimmune syndrome. Conclusion These findings highlight the likely presentation of the earliest pictorial depictions of thyroid disease with systemic lupus erythematosus and emphasize the exactitude of depiction demonstrated by Botticelli in renaissance era.

MARGARITA ZELENAIA: "THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN" BASED ON EL GRECO Musical interpretation of the Gospel story

Individualization in music art at the turn of the XXth – XXIst centuries affected not only the concept of the composer's opus, but also the style, manner of writing, and composition of performers. At the same time, the focus on novelty coexists with the actualization of artistic experience of the near and distant past. In addition, the junction of these trends includes "excursions" to other art forms. In this sense, particularly interesting are the works by the composers at the intersection of cultures, epochs and languages. Such examples include the poem for viola and piano "The Agony in the Garden" (based on El Greco's painting) by Margarita Zelenaia (born 1954) — composer, pianist, teacher, organizer, uniting the traditions of Russian and Western schools. The article deals with the specifics of the musical implementation of the eternal Gospel story depicted in the painting "The Agony in the Garden" by the Renaissance artist El Greco. The concept of Margarita Zelenaia's unique programme work is born at the "crossroads" of various types of art and the Gospel word, modernity and Baroque. Her dramaturgy is based on a system of symbolically loaded leitentonations — the author's reinterpretation of the rhetorical figures of the Baroque.

Performing Custom

Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship between writing and authority within common law. It argues that Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia reflects on debates about whether to codify England’s unwritten customs that were taking place during this period. He makes use of the tension those debates generate to explore the nature of Renaissance authorship. From the idea of unwritten custom, rooted in practice and performance rather than code and decree, Sidney develops an authorial persona that runs counter to our usual association of the Renaissance artist with loss and melancholy: the aporia or doubt that Sidney’s narrator creates throughout the prose romance and within its pastoral poetry allows him to construct a notion of authorship based on custom and rooted in a connection to an inaccessible past that, ironically, he has no desire to recuperate.

On Freud's Forgetting of “Signorelli”

Between 1960 and 1980, American art-historian Meyer Schapiro's thoughts returned frequently to the first page of Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which the author discusses forgetting the name of Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli. In his conclusions on the subject, unpublished until now, Schapiro considers how Freud's explanation of his lapse of memory may have itself suffered from a repression of sexual anxieties.