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Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist,1 famously used the term ‘sharawadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order)2 to describe the layout of Chinese gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’:Among us, the Beau...
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Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist,1 famously used the term ‘sharawadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order)2 to describe the layout of Chinese gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’:Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged so, as to answer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chineses scorn this way of Planting, and say a Boy that can tell an hundred, may plant Walks of Trees in strait Lines, and over against one another, and to what Length and Extent He pleases. But their greatest reach of Imagination, is employed in contriving Figures, where the Beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily observ’d. And though we have hardly any Notion of this sort of Beauty, yet they have a particular Word to express it; and where they find it hit their Eye at first sight, they say the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of Esteem.3
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Interpretation of Natural Deconstruction Trough Pandemic Covid-19 Situation Based on “The Garden of Earthly Prosperity in Ground Zero”

"The Garden of Earthly Prosperity in Ground Zero" is a work of art by Isur Suroso. The painting reflects the story of the Sinom song in the text Babad Diponegoro. This fine art tells the story of Prince Diponegoro when he was raised by his great-grandmother in Tegalrejo Village, Yogyakarta. Tegalrej...
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"The Garden of Earthly Prosperity in Ground Zero" is a work of art by Isur Suroso. The painting reflects the story of the Sinom song in the text Babad Diponegoro. This fine art tells the story of Prince Diponegoro when he was raised by his great-grandmother in Tegalrejo Village, Yogyakarta. Tegalrejo Village has a simple community pattern. The beautiful natural environments in Tegalrejo Village are silent witnesses to Prince Diponegoro's life. This research aims to describe the concept of visual deconstruction with the COVID-19 pandemic situation. This research uses the deconstruction theory of Jacques Derrida. There are forms of deconstruction meaning through the pandemic situation in this painting. The fine art of "The Garden of Earthly Prosperity in Ground Zero" is divided into three parts. These parts in this fine art can reflect normal life conditions before the coronavirus pandemic appeared and reflect life after the coronavirus pandemic hit the world. The middle part of "The Garden of Earthly Prosperity in Ground Zero" interprets normal conditions. Meanwhile, two other parts describe a pandemic situation
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Does pre-infection stress increase the risk of long COVID? Longitudinal associations between adversity worries and experiences in the month prior to COVID-19 infection and the development of long COVID and specific long COVID symptoms

Long COVID is increasingly recognised as public health burden. Demographic and infection-related characteristics have been identified as risk factors, but less research has focused on psychosocial predictors such as stress immediately preceding the index infection. Research on whether stressors pred...
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Long COVID is increasingly recognised as public health burden. Demographic and infection-related characteristics have been identified as risk factors, but less research has focused on psychosocial predictors such as stress immediately preceding the index infection. Research on whether stressors predict the development of specific long COVID symptoms is also lacking. Methods Data from 1,966 UK adults who had previously been infected with COVID-19 and who took part in the UCL COVID-19 Social Study were analysed. The number of adversity experiences (e.g., job loss) and the number of worries about adversity experiences within the month prior to COVID-19 infection were used to predict the development of self-reported long COVID and the presence of three specific long COVID symptoms (difficulty with mobility, cognition, and self-care). The interaction between a three-level index of socio-economic position (SEP; with higher values indicating lower SEP) and the exposure variables in relation to long COVID status was also examined. Analyses controlled for a range of COVID-19 infection characteristics, socio-demographics, and health-related factors. Findings Odds of self-reported long COVID increased by 1.25 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.04 to 1.51) for each additional worry about adversity in the month prior to COVID-19 infection. Although there was no evidence for an interaction between SEP and either exposure variable, individuals in the lowest SEP group were nearly twice as likely to have developed long COVID as those in the highest SEP group (OR: 1.95; 95% CI: 1.19 to 3.19) and worries about adversity experiences remained a predictor of long COVID (OR: 1.43; 95% CI: 1.04 to 1.98). The number of worries about adversity experiences also corresponded with increased odds of certain long COVID symptoms such as difficulty with cognition (e.g., difficulty remembering or concentrating) by 1.46 (95% CI: 1.02 to 2.09) but not with mobility (e.g., walking or climbing steps) or self-care (e.g., washing all over or dressing). Interpretation Results suggest a key role of stress in the time preceding the acute COVID-19 infection for the development of long COVID and for difficulty with cognition specifically. These findings point to the importance of mitigating worries and experiences of adversities during pandemics both to reduce their psychological impact but also help reduce the societal burden of longer-term illness. Funding The Nuffield Foundation [WEL/FR-000022583], the MARCH Mental Health Network funded by the Cross-Disciplinary Mental Health Network Plus initiative supported by UK Research and Innovation [ES/S002588/1], and the Wellcome Trust [221400/Z/20/Z and 205407/Z/16/Z].
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Delta/ Omicron and BA.1/BA.2 co-infections occurring in Immunocompromised hosts

Concomitant infection of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants has become an increasing concern, as this scenario increases the likelihood of recombinant variants. Detecting co-infection of SARS-CoV-2 variants is difficult to detect by whole genome sequencing approaches, but genotyping methods facilitate det...
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Concomitant infection of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants has become an increasing concern, as this scenario increases the likelihood of recombinant variants. Detecting co-infection of SARS-CoV-2 variants is difficult to detect by whole genome sequencing approaches, but genotyping methods facilitate detection. We describe 2 cases of Delta/Omicron and 2 cases of Omicron sublineage BA.1/ BA.2 co-infection as detected by a multiplex genotyping fragment analysis method. Findings were confirmed by whole genome sequencing. Review of the patient characteristics revealed co-morbidities and conditions which weaken the immune system and may make them more susceptible to harboring SARS-CoV-2 variant co-infections.
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Concrete Violence – Wolf Vostell’s Disasters of War

Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, whichhe preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, an...
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Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, whichhe preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, and ‘demonstrations’, thus blurring the boundary between art and life while affiliating artistic practice with political activism.1 Berlin/100 Ereignisse involved driving around the Western sector of the city in a car and making one hundred stops: to bury a clock in the rubble of Go¨rlitzer train station, meet a naked woman wearing a gas mask, confront a sign prohibiting loitering with ‘der realita¨t einer straße’ (the reality of a street) by wielding posters with current headlines as lowercase slogans – ‘weinender U.S.-soldat im vietnamkrieg!’ (crying US soldier in the Vietnam War), ‘straßenkampf in rhodesien!’ (rioting in Rhodesia), ‘rocker mit motorra¨-dern!’ (bikers with motorcycles) – pour out a bag of sugar near the Berlin Wall, and perform an array of other more ordinary activities like eating and waiting, all for a ‘Zufallspublikum’ (chance public).2 These ‘events’ indicate the ambivalent politics and site-specificity of Vostell’s work, which often explored the topography of post-war Germany
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Man in the Middle: Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin at the Salon of 1833 and the Problem of the Juste Milieu

In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-ridin...
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In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-riding knight who despatches a sea monster prior to rescuing her, but at a plump male figure resolutely oblivious to his neighbour and her peril. The juxtaposition of Bertin’s self-confident gaze and relaxed body with Angelica’s vulnerable nakedness could be read as an exercise in iconographical incongruity, if not a moment of curatorial mischief (Fig. 2). But whatever the explanation for the painting’s current display, it is hard not to regard this as a dramatic fall from grace for a work that had occupied the ‘place of honour’ when first shown at the 1833 Salon, and attracted voluminous coverage in the press. Bertin’s relegation to the upper reaches of the Sully Wing is consistent with the assumption that its standing as a work of art has been compromised by the received idea that it is, above all else, a social document: an archetypal image of the newly dominant bourgeoisie of early nineteenth-century France.2
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Virtual connectedness in times of crisis: Chinese online art exhibitions during the COVID-19 pandemic

When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center...
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When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center, by M WOODS, and by independent curator Yu Minhong – and explores how they communicate ‘being-in-common’ (a concept by Jean-Luc Nancy) in the online realm; it also proposes alternative forms of cosmopolitanism that do not rely on physical mobility. The exhibitions are analyzed using visual and discourse analysis and supported by semi-structured in-depth interviews with the curators. This study shows that a cosmopolitan art world does not need to rely on physical travel if connectedness is understood as being-incommon rather than meeting-in-person, digital technology is mobilized effectively, and cosmopolitanism is grounded in a relocalization. In an era when the global art world is looking for ways to reinvent itself and the mobility system on which it operates, the article contends that it would do well to look to and learn from the example of Chinese online exhibitions.
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IMAGES FOR INSTRUCTION: A MULTILINGUAL ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SULTANATE INDIA

When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa...
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When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa, the Miftāḥ is the only known illustrated Persian dictionary (farhang) in the Islamicate manuscript tradition. For its fifteenth-century makers, the Miftāḥ was a wholly new text, written in 1468–69 by Muhammad ibn Muhammad Da⁠ʾud Shadiyabadi. The Miftāḥ required its artists to search for and codify visual representations of particular words from canonized manuscript genres such as the Islamicate cosmography (ʿajāʾib al-makhlūqāt) or works of belles-lettres (adab). This process of selectively adapting from an array of genres in order to create a new one, namely the illustrated farhang, would have allowed artists to experiment with the Islamicate manuscript tradition in India. By illustrating definitions, the Miftāḥ also became a manual on literary and visual languages for students in the fifteenth century. This article demonstrates that the book was conceived as a didactic work intended to educate members of sultanate society.
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CAMERA, CANVAS, AND QIBLA: LATE OTTOMAN MOBILITIES AND THE FATIH MOSQUE PAINTING

As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featu...
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As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featured in tents, wall paintings, and architectural decorations; new and “neo” architectural styles spread via world expositions and cityscapes; depictions of buildings and landscapes reconfigured wall paintings, tombstones, ceramics, textiles, and cutout paper (ḳāṭʿı) works.1 The long tradition of depicting the Islamic holy cities also responded to these artistic and cultural changes, and images energetically circulated across different regions in shorter periods of time.2 Even though Mecca and Medina are physical places, their depictions—and by extension, the holy cities themselves—effectively traveled to far-flung audiences.
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On Black Affective Forms: A Conversation with Garrett Bradley

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