A policeman stops traffic to let a mother cat carry her kitten across the road. Circa 1925.
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Bronze sculpture of a boar from Indonesia, 14th century. Around this time, small sculptures of boars or pigs were quite popular in Indonesia. Many of them were, in fact, terracotta piggy banks, with slots for money. This one, however, is not made for holding money and must have been merely decorative.
“Il Marforio,” a first-century Roman statue of a river god – perhaps a representation of the Tiber River, upon which Rome is sited. It was moved several times over the centuries since it was first created; its current home in Rome’s Capitoline Museum is behind a fountain from the 1600s or 1700s.
The headdress of Queen Puabi, a Mesopotamian woman who lived ca. 2500 BCE. Puabi’s burial was incredibly lavish, and the cuneiform tablets found with her body did not name her as the wife of any man, which was the way almost all women were identified. This may indicate that she held power herself.
“The artist’s studio,” one of the earliest daguerreotypes, dating to 1837. An exhibition of early images like these caused painter Paul Delaroche to exclaim, “From today, painting is dead!”
Read more about it here:
As women began to enjoy a higher status in many societies, they began to look back to the myth of the Amazons for inspiration. Some women’s sports teams called themselves the Amazons. I love this picture of the Red Deer, Alberta Amazons hockey club from 1928.
Early modern depictions of the Amazons tended to focus both on a fascination with the ancient world and with the idea of a woman-led society, but also with the civilizations that Europeans were discovering — and often subjugating.
Peter Paul Rubens, the baroque master, took a couple of stabs at an Amazonomachy. Here’s his first, painted with help from Jan Brueghel the Elder, from around 1600:
The Romans seemed just as taken with the Amazons as the Greeks had been. They looted many Greek artworks of the Amazons and copied them; the emperor Nero was said to have been obsessed with a beautiful statue of an Amazon horsewoman that he dubbed “lovely legs.” We don’t have the original, but there were a lot of similar works, like this one, now in Naples:












