Mean flower by Joe Henry

How beautiful you’ve made yourself
How cruel you’ve become,
How so much like another
That it’s no surprise
That I don’t recognize you now so
Beautiful and cruel

You’re the meanest flower…

You raise me off the ground
To see how far there is to fall,
As if I don’t remember
How we passed the time,
As if I don’t remember how
Your face fell into mine

Oh, you’re the meanest flower…

Notice how I vanish
And your world remains,
You show your head above it
For spite, nothing more,
Like you thought just living
Was somehow its own reward

You’re the meanest flower…

The wing ...

"We are, each of us angels with only one wing; and we can only fly by embracing one another."

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer

The painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of the masterpieces of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's and as the name implies, uses a pearl earring for a focal point. It is sometimes referred to as "the Mona Lisa of the North" or "the Dutch Mona Lisa".

Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work

The girl with a Pearl earring was painted around 1665. 

Love and etc ...

“Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends.”

Timing ...

“Life is all about timing... the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable... attainable. Have the patience, wait it out It's all about timing.”

The Musicians by Caravaggio

"The Musicians" (c. 1595). 

Caravaggio entered the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte sometime in 1595. His biographer, the painter Baglione, says he "painted for the Cardinal youths playing music very well drawn from nature and also a youth playing a lute," the latter presumably being "The Lute Player", which seems to form a companion-piece to "The Musicians". The picture shows four boys in quasi-Classical costume, three playing various musical instruments or singing, the fourth dressed as Cupid and reaching towards a bunch of grapes.The central figure with the lute has been identified as Caravaggio's companion Mario Minniti, and the individual next to him and facing the viewer has been recognised as a self-portrait of the artist. The cupid bears a strong resemblance to the boy in "Boy Peeling Fruit", done a few years before, and also to the angel in "Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy".

Scenes showing musicians were a popular theme at the time - the Church was supporting a revival of music and new styles and forms were being tried, especially by educated and progressive prelates such as Del Monte. This scene, however, is clearly secular rather than religious. The manuscripts show that the boys are practicing madrigals celebrating love, and the eyes of the lutanist, the principal figure, are moist with tears - presumably the songs are of the sorrow of love rather than its pleasures. The violin in the foreground suggests a fifth participant, implicitly including the viewer in the tableau.

 

Courage to succeed ...

“Dream anything that you want to dream. That's the beauty of the human mind. To do anything that you want to do. That is the strength of the human will. To trust yourself to test your limits. That is the courage to succeed.”

That is the way it works ...

“I have had dreams, and I have had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.”

Nostalgia ...

“Nostalgia is a seductive liar.”

Paradise - Tease

Taking of Christ by Caravaggio

There are seven figures in the painting, from left to right: St John, Jesus, Judas, two soldiers, a man (a self-portrait of Caravaggio), and a soldier. They are standing, and only the upper three-quarters of their bodies are depicted. The figures are arrayed before a very dark background, in which the setting is disguised. The main light source is not evident in the painting but comes from the upper left. There is a lantern being held by the man at the right (Caravaggio). At the far left, a man (St John) is fleeing; his arms are raised, his mouth is open in a gasp, his cloak is flying and being snatched back by a soldier.

This masterpiece is currently located in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. The painting was lost for 200 years and its rediscovery was published in 1993.

Studiolo of Francesco de' Medici

The Studiolo was a small painting-encrusted barrel-vaulted room in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It was completed for the duke from 1570-1572, by teams of artists under the supervision of Giorgio Vasari and the scholars Giovanni Batista Adrianiand Vincenzo Borghini. This small room was part-office, part-laboratory, part-hiding place, and part-cabinet of curiosities. Here the prince tinkered with alchemy and fingered his collection of small, precious, unusual or rare objects, under the organizing vista of thematic canvases, which are rather larger than most cabinet paintings.

The late-Mannerist decorative program of paintings and sculpture was based on items encompassed by the collection. The object collection itself was stored in 20 cabinets. In the center is a fresco of Prometheus receiving jewels from nature, commenting on the interplay of divine, nature, and humanity, that is the goal of both artistic and scientific interests.

The walls were also covered with 34 paintings that were emblematic, some distantly, of the objects in the cabinets below. The themes of the paintings were mythologic, religious, or representing trades. For example, Mirabello Cavalori's Wool Factory would have abutted the wall under the fresco of fire. A number of the pictures related to sea and ocean activities. Ultimately, the exact wall arrangement of the extant paintings and the contents of the collection are partially speculative. The painting by Giovanni Battista Naldini of the House of the Dreams emphasized the relationship with the adjacent bedroom of the Prince. The Studiolo is arrayed and visible through an arched opening and lacks cabinets, which fails to accurately recreate the claustrophobic feel of the original. In addition, originally a portrait of Francesco's mother, Eleonora of Toledo by Bronzino.

While the Studiolo employed many of the best of contemporary Florentine painters; for most, this likely does not represent their individual best efforts. The paintings and the room itself are now more interesting as an example of monarchic eccentricity. The pseudo-allegiance to the sciences couple with the sense that they illuminated the educated monarch, suggest a prescient hint of the encyclopedic philosophy of Enlightenment. However, Francesco ultimately was a poor representative of the inquisitive mind; at best this room served as a place for this personally awkward monarch to remain secluded from his wife and family. Not long after the death of the Grand Duke, it was neglected and dismantled by 1590, only to be partially reconstructed in the twentieth century as an Renaissance oddity within the medieval palace.

One more time

Of course the sun will come back tomorrow
One more time ... I know
Darkness ... I have seen worse ...
That makes sane people go crazy ....
Wait, because the sun is coming
There are people that are the same side as you ...
But they should be on the other side
There are people that hurt others ...
There are people that don't know how to love
There are people deceiving us
See how our life is
But I know that one day we will learn
If you want someone to trust
Trust on yourself, the ones who believe always get there
Don't let anyone tell you it is not worth to believe in your dream
Or that your plans will never work out
Or that you will never be somebody

There are people that hurt others ... 

There are people that don't know how to love 

Same old story ...

I have seen this movie before ... life is a sequence of repeated acts ...
I am tired of trying. Tired of making the same mistakes. Tired of believing in words.
I walk and walk .... and I go don't go anywhere.
Always back to zero ...
I will not push, not this time.
I will always carry you inside of me ... like the ones that carry a dead child in their arms.
We are free to be whoever we want to be.

Moving on ...

Letting go doesn't mean giving up... it means moving on. It is one of the hardest things a person can do. Starting at birth, we grasp on to anything we can get our hands on, and hold on as if we will cease to exist when we let go. We feel that letting go is giving up, quitting, and that as we all know is cowardly. But as we grow older we are forced to change our way of thinking. We are forced to realize that letting go means accepting things that cannot be. It means maturing and moving on, no matter how hard you have to fight yourself to do so."