For Tomorrow by Shaman

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

God is awake.”

Victor Hugo

La Primavera by Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli was one of the major artists in Florence during the Renaissance, born in 1445, Florence, Italy. 

La Primavera, also known as Allegory of Spring was painted around 1482. It is a tempera on wood panel measuring 203 x 314 cm. 

The history of the painting is not certainly known, though it seems to have been commissioned by Lorenzo de' Medici . It contains elements of Ovid and Lucretius work, they were both Roman poets. May have been inspired by a poem by Poliziano. Since 1919 the painting has been part of the collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Different interpretations have been attributed to this painting, this is how art historian Susan Legouix describes the painting on her book Botticelli (first published in 1979): 

"As in two of the Sistine frescoes the theme (it can hardly be called narrative) reads from right to left. The impetus is given by Zephyr who blows from the right. On the left, Mercury, associated with the month of May, turns as if to indicate the passage of spring towards summer. Zephyr’s breath causes flowers to spring from the mouth of the earth nymph Chloris, who then assumes the richly-clad form of Flora as the next figure in the group. Venus, the personification of April, stands in the centre of the picture gesturing towards her attendant Graces."

Death does not care what season it is ...

Mercury may have been modeled after Giuliano de' Medici

All female figures seem to be pregnant 

Link to the Uffizi Gallery - Google Art Project 

http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/uffizi/la-primavera-spring-67

If anybody could see ...

“Don't rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can't love and respect yourself - no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are - completely; the good and the bad - and make changes as you see fit - not because you think someone else wants you to be different.” 

Stacey Charter

I had to kill some of my most beautiful feelings because they made me weak and vulnerable, they made a person that I could no longer recognize. I had to sacrifice them so I could be myself again ... and the real me is so much better than the image I see reflected in the hostile eyes of the others ... 

Everything in life is relative ...

Bel Canto - Waking Will

Carousel in Paris ...

“A moment may last just a few seconds, but the memory lives on forever.”

Close your eyes and you will find ...

"The most melancholic thing about the human nature, is, that a man may guide others into the path of salvation, without walking in it himself; that he may be a pilot, and yet a castaway."

Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Scorpions - Send me an angel

The truth that life reveals ...

"It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts."

K.T. Jong

The Last Judgment by Michelangelo

“A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.”

 Michelangelo 

The Last Judgment is a fresco by Michelangelo on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. It took four years to be completed and was executed from 1537 to 1541. Michelangelo began working on it three decades after having finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

This powerful work centers on Christ the Judge, who compels the damned to hell with his left hand and lifts up the saved to heaven with his right. Surrounding Christ are the planets, the sun and saints.

Notable among the details is Minos, the Judge of Souls, shown in hell with the ears of a jackass. He is a portrait of the papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, who frequently complained to the Pope about the nudity of the painted figures, saying:

"It was a most dishonest act in such a respectable place to have painted so many naked figures immodestly revealing their shameful parts, that it was not a work for a papal chapel but for a bathhouse or house of ill-fame."

When Biagio complained to the pope about his consignment to hell in Michelangelo's painting, Paul III is said to have replied that he has no jurisdiction in hell.

Michelangelo's self-portrait appears twice in The Last Judgment: in the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew and in the figure in the lower left corner, who is watching the dead rise from their graves.

The Last Judgment offers a concrete example of  controversy,  praised for its display of artistic genius and execution and attacked for its scandalous content.