Tea at Trianon: The Puzzle of Neanderthal Aesthetics

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, May 11, 2023

The Puzzle of Neanderthal Aesthetics

From the BBC:

Getting into the minds of ancient people, never mind those of a different kind of human altogether, is one of the great challenges of archaeology. Ever since the first Neanderthal remains were identified in the 19th Century, how they lived and what they thought has been a fundamental and evocative question motivating those who study them. Yet despite immense leaps in archaeology over the past 160 years, the answer remains complicated and sometimes problematic, partly because of our own preconceptions.

Neanderthals have always represented a philosophical foil to Homo sapiens – that is, to us. Initially they were the only other sort of human that we knew had existed on Earth, and even as other ancient hominin species have been discovered, they retained a special place as "the other", a kind of mirror with which to compare ourselves. (Read more.)