Happy Leap Day

It is the belief of the Infinite Art Tournament that Leap Day, by virtue of its uniqueness and its inherent interest as a matter of Earth-Sun geometry, ought to be a international holiday in celebration of our common humanity, our mathematical and scientific achievements as a species, and our eternal connection to the sun and to the seasons.

Mind you, I'm imagining a full-blown festival with its own branded color scheme, civic and family traditions, handful of beloved seasonal songs, spike in air travel fares, and long commercial and media rollout.  I encourage you to get the ball rolling in your own community.

In the meantime, may I be the first to wish you a wonderful Leap Day and a healthy, happy, and prosperous next four years?

Month to Month Resolutions: March 2012

It’s the end of the month! Time to assess progress on our various tasks of human self-improvement!

Categories and Goals for March 2012

Weighing-in: I’ve now spent two months getting into the habit of weighing in every morning. Now comes the interesting part: forcing the number to begin to begin dropping. This will be achieved through sheer force of will, and also perhaps by reducing caloric intake.

• March Goal: Continuing to weigh myself and record my weight every morning in the established manner. Beginning March 25, there will be a financial penalty of 10 cents per tenth of a pound over 200 pounds, daily. To whom this penalty will be paid isn’t worked out yet. But then it doesn’t need to be, for I shall meet this goal.

Push-ups: My February goal of doing two sets of push-ups equal to the date was no problem.

• March Goal: To do sets of 20 push-ups once in the morning, and once in the evening. Also: on Thursdays, extra sets will be added to bring that day’s total to 100 push-ups. Also: once a day, if she so chooses, Mrs.5000 may bark “give me ten!” at which point I will be obligated to perform an immediate set of ten pushups.

Cola: The February goal was bent, but never broken.

• March Goal: Again, to consume no more than twelve units of cola per week.

Veggies: We continue to like this veggie concept, and will expand it further.

• March Goal: To consume no fewer than five units per week. (It might be noted that a “veggie unit” is quite large – essentially a meal of raw vegetables.)

Paper Mail Sent: This continues to be an easy one for me.

• March Goal: Again, an average of at least one item per day over the course of the month.

That Other Blog: Once again, I neglected Michael Reads the Bible. Meanwhile, I’ve been asked to get involved with two other writing projects, so MRTB is back in mothballs. It is replaced by a new category:

Writing Projects:

• March Goal: A minimum of three hours a week spent on them. Oh, and let’s say seven a fortnight, just for grins.

Garden: I failed on this one. I don’t even have a good weather excuse, I’m just out of the garden habit. For the time being, there will be no consequences; we’ll just try again.

• March Goal: At least two days of sustained (2+ hours) yardwork!

Music: Speaking of being out of the habit! I noticed a thick coat of dust on one of my guitars this morning. I failed, too, at this modest goal. Again, for now we’ll just regroup and try again.

• March Goal #1: At least three sessions of 30+ minutes playing the guitar.
• March Goal #2: At least three sessions of 15+ minutes playing brass instruments.

And, another new Category: The Calico Cat has nominated Quilting Goals. This is indeed needful, but it is unlikely to be a primary focus in the next few weeks. Let’s say

• March Goal: Three hours per fortnight spent on quilting tasks, which may be either productive or organizational in nature. Quilting handwork performed in a multitasking context counted at 50%.

Footnote 1: For weekly goals, the first week of March begins Monday, February 27.
Footnote 2: For fortnightly goals, the first fortnight of March begins Monday, March 5.
Footnote 3: For monthly goals, activity as of Monday, February 27 may be counted towards the March total.

As I said in January: I trust, Gentle Reader, that I have your blessing and support in these endeavors. And of course, in your capacity as a Reader of this blog, you have the right to suggest additional goals or to deride the existing ones if you would like me to self-improve in a way more to your liking.

Michael5000 vs. Bollywood

I don’t really know much about Indian "Bollywood" film. I've only been watching it because it's what the kids are into, as far as I can tell. It may be significant that many of the young people I know are Bhutanese, Somali, Ethiopian, or Iraqi by birth. But whatever. I decided to take a look.

Dabangg ("Fearless"), from 2010, was the first step on my journey. It is an action/adventure/comedy/romance, which sort of introduces my first point: though certainly not without their conventions, Indian films seem a little faster and looser with genre than what I am used to. They are a full-blooded sort of entertainment, and want to make you laugh AND cry AND gasp AND cheer AND leave the theater dancing. But then, they've got more time to work on you -- Dhabangg's 125 minute running time would make it a generous American flick, but it is quite short by Bollywood standards.

The hero here is a stoic cop with strength, skill and agility that are equivalent to Terminator-like superpowers. He is only modestly corrupt (which is as good as a cop seems to get in Indian film and fiction), but he has issues with his stepfather, his half-brother, and his unattainable love object that he must work out between the action scenes. In terms of internal logic, everything that happens is all very preposterous -- I defy anyone who has watched the movie, for instance, to outline a coherent explanation of the wedding scene -- but that is not supposed to bother us. There is, I believe, a reduced expectation of rationality in Bollywood film, as in opera or musical comedy. Think Pirates of Penzance.

Speaking of music, one of the singular features of Indian film is that they are nearly all what we might call "musicals," although American studios haven't much made musicals for some decades. And anyway, the Indian version goes beyond a character suddenly breaking into song and dancing around a lamppost a la Singin' in the Rain. These are big Big BIG showstopper numbers with large dance choruses, multiple settings and costume changes, and lots of showy camera work, color, and effects. They can be quite startling until you begin to recognize the cues or the timing that suggest that a song is coming.

I have come to a working hypothesis that the "songs" are not to be understood as literally happening within the film narrative, but are rather intended to represent the interior emotional state of the characters. The kids love 'em. When they talk about a movie they like, they like to argue about which was the best song.


Tees Maar Khan (2010), an action comedy, was my second stop, and it established that I have bad taste in Indian film. The critical community as a whole loves Dhabangg, and thought Tees Maar Khan stank. I thought it got pretty funny after an admittedly lame first act. The premise is that a team of con men will try to rob a train, and for reasons that escape me now they figure the best way to do this is to pretend to be making a movie in a remote railside village. This makes it into a movie about movies and movie personalities, and I may have liked it more than I ought to have because its overt jokes about Indian movies come along just in time to help me in my studies.

Because of their length, Indian films usually have intermissions. Just before the break in Tees Maar Khan, a dim henchman asks the eponymous criminal mastermind "when will we start the mission?" The boss says "We'll start the mission," and then looks smugly at the camera: "after the intermission!" I thought this was a hoot. I may have been drinking.

My fourth film was Partner, which is perhaps even more preposterous than the other two. It concerns a "love guru" -- a dating coach for shy men -- who must help manage an intensely irritating but heart-of-gold client and then, as you have already guessed, deal with the fact that he himself has fallen in love. This premise probably predates written language in human literature, but in this particular iteration there are many peculiar whistles and bells thrown in. At one point the hero must spend several minutes fleeing a guided missile on a jetski. There is a comically short, megalomanical gangster figure who pushes the plot along during the first half and then disappears once he is no longer needed. I thought it was fun, and liked the title song the best.

An interesting aspect of cross-cultural film watching is trying to decode the style and fashion deployed by the filmmakers. It took me a quite a while to recognize that the lead character in Dhabangg, with his thin mustache, aviation glasses, incongruous dress shirts, and apparent inability to move his facial muscles, was supposed to be attractive. I have since been assured that, in cultural context, he is a pretty hot item. Similarly, the love guru in Partner occasionally makes sartorial choices that even a fashion-indifferent person like myself can immediately see would get him beat up behind the school at recess. Except no, he's actually quite stylish according to the semiotics of the target demographic.

The third Indian film I watched was My Name is Khan. It is a very different kind of Bollywood movie. Set in the United States, it is an odd construction that borrows elements of Rain Man and Forrest Gump and makes an impressive stab at exploring American post-9/11 paranoia and reaction. As you can imagine, it's a complicated beast. The short version is that I thought it was fascinating and fairly well realized. The long version? Eh, maybe later.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Boccioni v. Böcklin

Umberto Boccioni
1882 - 1916
Italian

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Arnold Böcklin
1827 - 1901
German; worked in Italy

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.

Finite Flag Tournament: Round 1, Left Bracket

Israel v. France

Vietnam v. Namibia

Austria v. China

North Korea v. Mauritania

Finland v. Laos

Denmark v. Botswana

Somalia v. the Netherlands

Japan v. Estonia

Polls close at noon Leap Day: Wednesday, Feb. 29. Vote in the comments.

Finite Flag Tournament: Round 1, Right Bracket

Pakistan v. Albania

South Africa v. Greece

Iceland v. Slovakia

Turkey v. Hungary

Canada v. Suriname

Norway v. United Kingdom

Sweden v. Sierra Leone

Gambia v. Cuba

Polls close at noon Leap Day: Wednesday, Feb. 29.  Vote in the comments.

The left bracket will appear in tomorrow's post.

The Wednesday Post

Lots of Highly Dubious 1970s-era "Stamps" from Highly Dubious "Countries."
Ebay item number #310381487579

More than 100 "stamps" from, mostly, the component states of the United Arab Emirates, dated to the early and mid 1970s. None of these suckers ever saw a post office, of course; they were made to be sold to gullible children such as myself. One of the lessons of stamp collecting was the gradual realization that not everything that looked like a stamp, and that was sold to you as a stamp, was really a "stamp" in any meaningful sense.

Well, here it is 30+ years later, I'm interested in stamps again, and I find that I've had this batch of not-stamps in storage the whole time. I have read, with some skepticism, that there are people out there that are actually interested in such "Cinderellas." If that's you, I would be delighted to sell you this batch at a very low, low price. I would be even more delighted to sell them to you at a very high price, but I am not holding my breath.

Other reasons to bid on this auction would be if you want exotic stamp-like objects for a crafts project! Or distinctive confetti! Or, perhaps you are browsing the stamp auctions on Ebay after having had a little bit to drink, and you're thinking "Aw, man, I should bid on this, just as a gag!" If so, I encourage you to indulge that whim. Remember, the higher the sale price would be, the funnier the gag would be!

As you can seen in the image, these "stamps" are from such notorious "stamp" producers as "Manama," "Umm-Al-Qiwain," "Sharjah and Dependences," "Ras al Khaima," and "Ajman State," as well as a few bona fide countries like Dubai and Oman. There's some space themes, some car themes, some airplane themes, etc. The sheets are in pretty good shape but ungummed. A few of the stamps are curled; few were ever gummed.

Why not make a bid on Ebay item number #310381487579!?  Auction closes Monday, February 27!

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 2: Bazille v. Beckmann

Frederic Bazille
1841 - 1870
French

Defeated Willi Baumeister in Round 1.

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Max Beckmann
1884 - 1950
German; worked in Netherlands and U.S.


Defeated Gentile Bellini in Round 1.

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[It's Baumeister v. G. Bellini in the M5K personal tourney.]
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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.

Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare: The Tempest (Oxford Shakespeare, 1987)

The Play: The Tempest
Edition: The Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Orgel, 1987.

Genre & Setting: The Tempest is, like Cymbeline, one of the “Romances.” When I wrote up that odd play, I offered a definition for “Romance” as “one of the ones that are hard to classify as either Tragedy, Comedy, or History.” The Cymbeline editor, J.M. Nosworthy, was having none of that, though. According to him, Romance:

is not merely a vague substitute for something more specific, but is exact in the restricted and historical sense of the word. These plays belong in matter and tone to a [particular] literature of love and love-making….

But my man Stephen Orgel has this to say about that:

We have invented the category of romance because we believe that certain kinds of seriousness are inappropriate to comedy and because we are made uncomfortable by the late plays’ commitment to non-realistic modes. We have, thereby, unquestionably, shed light on the relations between The Tempest and three other late plays, but we have also therby obscured The Tempest’s relation to the rest of Shakespearian comedy. And in our imposition of exclusiveness on Renaissance concepts of genre, we have obscured the plays’ relation to Shakespearian tragedy as well.

Oh, snap!

The Gist, which will obviously involve spoilers: Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, has washed up on a desert island with his beautiful daughter Miranda, enslaved the local supernatural beings, and boned up on the magical arts. When a ship with his treasonous brother chances by, he calls up a mighty tempest – hence the name – to shipwreck them. The rest of the play is basically Prospero messing with the minds of his unintentional guests, before revealing himself late in the play and effecting what may, or may not, be a happy reconciliation.

The Edition: I like. Orgel’s supporting text is among the most lucid, informative, and interesting I’ve ever read. Well – keep in mind that this is probably the fourth or fifth time that I’ve read the supporting material in a Shakespeare edition. But I’ve read a hell of a lot of academic prose, and this is definitely top-notch stuff.

Adaptation: The most interesting thing for me about reading Tempest is that the text does not support some of my strongest impressions of the play. The most significant example concerns the nature of Prospero. I’ve always thought of him as entirely benevolent and wise, haven’t you? Kind of a Gandolf-in-exile? Well, it turns out that the text could allow him to be almost anything but that. He contradicts himself left and right, he is manipulative and occasionally mean, he has quite clearly abused his power over his servants – nice Ariel and nasty but loveable Caliban – and he encourages the bad behavior of others so he can scold them for it later. Even the fact of his exile is not really so very unreasonable; he was too interested in his studies, he freely admits, to put any energy into doing any actual administration back in Milan.

Caliban

This isn’t to say that Prospero is evil, although I think you could legitimately stage the play that way. But the textual Prospero is certainly complex and ambiguous. And by the way, sweet little Miranda isn’t quite as sweet and innocent as you thought, either. Or at least she’s not as sweet and innocent as I thought.

A very specific surprise was Prospero’s speech that ends the play. I had somehow got it in my head that it was his pledge to give up magic, to forgive and forget, and to be a good Christian from now on. But that’s not it at all, and in fact there’s not much evidence that he has any serious intention of forgiving and forgetting or of being an especially good Christian, and although he mentions giving up magic a couple of times I don’t think I would want to take him at his word about it. What he really says in the closing speech is that, since the play is over, we as members of the audience are going to have to do the work of continuing the story. Only we can get him back to Milan and figure out what happens to him there. It’s kind of like the “O for a muse of fire” speech that opens, I think, Henry V, except spoken by a character instead of an actor. Very fourth-wall breaking, and kind of charming as well.

Prognosis: Great story, great script for a play, tough text to get excited about. If one got to direct or act in these things, there would be a million interesting decisions to be made about the personalities of the characters, depending on what one wanted to say and, of course, how one wanted to entertain. It is heavy going for a reader because, for one thing, there are a clutch of similarly named characters thrown at you all in a mass, and it’s difficult to disentangle who is who and what their various games are. In performance, that’s not an issue; you dress the characters in different colors and give ‘em different mannerisms, and that’s that. Second, there are a number of scenes (including the opener) that are designed as special effects spectaculars, and those make thin reading. Lastly, there’s a lot of expository text; much of “the story” happened a long time ago, and we only know about it because we hear Prospero telling Miranda about it. In performance, this part of the play is also “about” Prospero establishing his character and his relationship with Miranda and his supernatural lackeys. On the page, it’s a little on the dull side.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: P. Blake v. W. Blake

Sir Peter Blake
born 1932
English

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William Blake
1757 - 1827
English

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.

The Flag Feature That Would Not Die

In the Flag Friday March Madness Tournament Play-In, Cuba garnered the most votes and claims the 29th seed. It will kick off next week against #4 Gambia.

Estonia and Albania ended up tied one vote behind Cuba. Estonia's Most Favored Nation Status breaks the tie to give it the 30th seed, scheduled to face off versus #3 Japan. Albania will take on #2 Pakistan.

A few votes further back, France ended up deadlocked with Barbados. Since neither country has a special relationship with the IAT(fL&TM5K), flag critic Niece #2 was brought in as a special consultant to resolve the deadlock. France's classic tricolor was awarded the 32nd seed and the perhaps dubious privilege of facing of against top-ranked Israel next week as Infinite Art Tournament presents:

Finite Flag Tournament

March Madness 2012

Bookish: The Western Front

Goodbye to All That
Robert Graves, 1929

It's hard to keep your appraisal of a book separate from your prior expectations. Goodbye to All That, for much of its length, is a simply amazing document of a junior officer's experience of World War I. Since junior officers didn't tend to survive that war, a lucid, frank, and articulate account of life in the trenches -- literally -- is a very valuable document.

Unfortunately, I was pointed towards the book by its reputation as a bitingly funny attack on and rejection of the entire British, or European, class system as it existed before The Great War. This reputation is, however, weirdly off the mark. Graves is, first of all, not bitingly funny. He gets an occasional good line off, but he is on the whole a workmanlike and rather spare prose craftsman. His wit is dry, but not abundant. And although he is perhaps a bit Bohemian, fancies himself blunt-spoken, and reports himself as able to get on well with the lower classes, Graves is through and through a member of the "ruling class" from start to finish. He doesn't even really try to tell us otherwise; his decision to say "good-bye to all that" and exile himself in Malta is by his own account mostly about his failed marriage. In a forward written decades later, Graves frankly admits that he wrote his memoirs to a formula he thought would sell, in order that he could make some money. That is charmingly cynical, perhaps, but it's not a very convincing rejection of the social order.

Readers hoping for a broadside against The Establishment will be disappointed to find that the post-War chapters of the book are downright cluttered with name-dropping, alternating between unremarkable stories of family life and detailed reports of everything Thomas Hardy, T.E. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and other literary notables said on the occasions that he rubbed elbows with them. They didn't say much of interest, really.

Very highly recommended indeed for those interested in the First World War. Skim the pre-War and post-War chapters unless you are related to Robert Graves and are interested in family history.


The Amazing Interlude
Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1918

Mary Roberts Rinehart is best known for her mystery novels. I have read the most famous of these, The Circular Staircase, and although it was a big hit in its day (1907) it is certainly nothing to write home about. Its success, however, established Rinehart as a professional writer who could more or less pick her assignments. Having a taste for adventure, she became a war correspondent on the Belgian front during the First World War. Her experiences in this singular situation, her earlier education as a nurse, and a lot of thought about the costs a person pays to challenge gender roles all come together in The Amazing Interlude.

Here’s the premise: a very naïve American girl is sent by a very naïve church group to try to “do something” to help out in the corner of Belgium that is not under German occupation. Everyone in Europe can see that her plan is preposterous, but an intelligence officer assists her in setting up a behind-the-lines mercy station as a front for his own activities. She ends up having a significant impact on morale. There is a love interest that may be a bit too good to be true, and some incredible events that may indeed stretch credibility. But then, stories have to stretch the bounds of probability at least a little; that is after all what makes them noteworthy enough to merit the telling.

The Amazing Interlude is a hidden gem that deserves to be much better known. As a book about the First World War, it makes an important counterpoint to the trench horrors of Goodbye to All That and, say, All Quiet on the Western Front. The action of Rinehart’s novel takes place not on the front lines but just behind them, where we can see the impact of war on not only the soldiers but also the civilian and support population. Unlike in most war literature, the main character remains tied to the rest of her existence; her family and social ties do not cease to exist and exert their influence because she is in the war zone. Rinehart is also ahead of her time, I think, in writing well about the difficulties faced by people returning from the extremes of war to homes that no longer feel comfortable or meaningful, and to expectations that no longer feel possible to fulfill.

There is a quietness and gentleness to The Amazing Interlude that makes the entire story true to its title. Some readers might find the occasional heroism of its soldiers, their bashfulness around the unexpected young woman in their midst, and their general good manners a gross idealization. But part of the value of this book is its suggestion that war, for as much as it has the power to dehumanize, does not always or continuously do so. Even in the extremes of the First World War the soldiers were perhaps not, or not always, as reduced to animal survival as we might expect. Nor is the horror of war glossed over by Rinehart; it is merely seen at second remove by a well-rendered point-of-view character who has a limited imagination. Much less cynical, much softer of edge, Rinehart’s novel is nevertheless quite compatible with Graves’ memoir and other accounts of trench warfare.

Rinehart's simple, straightforward prose in The Amazing Interlude has great clarity and cleanness of line. It is a simple story about people with simple motivations, but it treats with real moral quandaries about the individual’s loyalty to family, to received morality, to country, commitment, and the greater good. It is a terrific surprise of a book.

Element of the Month: Curium!

February's Element of the Month:

Curium!
Cm
96

Atomic Mass: 247.070  amu
Melting Point: 1345 °C
Boiling Point: 3110 °C

With Curium, we return to the fakey elements that, so far as we know, have only been made through the manipulations of brainy human physicists. Like several of the "transuranic" elements, it was first brought into being by the University of California Golden Bears, in 1944. At least, that's the first time it was brought into being on purpose; it's generally assumed that Curium was brought into being more or less accidentally during previous experiments, but that nobody was able to get a good photo.

A cute little anecdote has it that the brainy physicists in question -- Glenn T. Seaborg being the biggest name -- were having a hell of a time trying to distinguish Curium from a neighboring element, Americium, that they were also working on. In a lighthearted admission of their bafflement, they gave their elusive quarry the nicknames "delirium" and "pandemonium." By the standards of the Manhattan Project era of Physics, that's pretty charming stuff, right up there with Oppenheimer's money line "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Anyway, there is a relative lot of Curium about. This is not one of those "three atoms have been spotted" sort of elements. Used nuclear fuel, for instance, is about 1/50000 Curium, so since there is an awful lot of the former lying around there is obviously an awful lot of the later. It tarnishes, apparently, and the mere existence of this piece of knowledge suggests that fairly sizable chunks of it have been kept on the shelf over the years. Despite all this, oddly, good quality pictures of the element seem to be absent from the internet. Or at least from the obvious places on the internet.

The Centerfold!

Finnish rockers "Enter My Silence" in full swing at
Helsinki's "Curium III Metal Fest," 2008.

Curium is not one of the mayfly elements; its least stable isotope has a half-life of months, and its more stable isotopes will be around for millions of years. It is of course hella radioactive, albeit less deadly than other transuranic elements we could name, what with its radiation being the relatively mild alpha variety. Now, although that "millions of years" lifespan is a little unsettling from a human perspective, from a planetary perspective it's no biggie. So that's why I threw in the weasely little "as far as we know" in the opening sentence. It is theoretically possible that Earth was laced with great seams of Curium back during the time when our lovely home planet was first coalescing. After "millions of years" went by, though, no more Curium! How things change. (There is a minority opinion, I infer, that there might be trace amounts of Curium yet in concentrations of Uranium, but I don't feel qualified to adjudicate on this hypothesis.)

Curium is, incidentally, a silvery metal. It's hard and brittle. That's kind of boring, but if you turn off the lights you'll see it's glowing purple from sheer radioactivity, and that is kind of cool. Its uses for humans are mostly as a starting point to cook up other radioactive compounds, and as nuclear fuel for spacecraft.

I haven't been able to figure out what, if anything, the Curium Palace Hotel -- the premier hotel (if it does say so itself) of the second largest city in Cyprus -- has to do with Curium. If it were actually a palace sculpted of pure Curium, that would be awesome in a way. But I wouldn't want to stay there.

The Wednesday Post

Six Postcards from the Family5000 Archives
Gifts of Mom & Dad5000, Christmas 2011

BONNEVILLE DAM
Oregon and Washington

View shows open Spillway with fish ladders in foreground.




WHERE ENERGY BEGINS

Here, on the plains oil and corn production operate harmoniously.




ONTARIO, OREGON

Located in Eastern, Oregon on the Snake River.




"AUNT NELLIE"
Knott's Berry Farm, Ghost Town, California

Aunt Nellie at the dulcimer on the porch of her log cabin near the gold mine.




#4811

Monarch Crest House at the summit of Monarch Pass (alt. 11,312 ft)  Highway U.S. 50, Colorado.




Too Busy to Write

Punctuation rendered exactly as printed on captions.  Honest!


If you would like "Where Energy Begins," "Aunt Nellie," or "Monarch Crest Pass" sent to you, complete with anachronistic postage and a cheerful personal greeting from Michael5000, indicate as much in the comments.  

The Infinite Art Tournament, Loser's Bracket First Round #1/125

Faceoff #1: Albers v. Allston

Josef Albers
1888-1976
German; worked in the United States

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Washington Allston
1779-1843
American

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Faceoff #2: Alma-Tadema v. Amigoni

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
1836-1912
Dutch; worked in England

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Jacopo Amigoni
1685-1752
Spanish

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Vote for the two artists of your choice!  Votes generally go in the comments, but have been known to arrive by email, by postcard, or in a sealed envelope.  


Please note that you may vote only once in each face-off.  Opining that both of the artists in one of the two face-offs is superior to the other is fine, but casting your votes for two artists in the same face-off is not permissible.