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The Cultural Tutor

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Feb 13

Victor Hugo is most famous for writing beloved novels like Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But he was also one of the greatest painters of the 19th century.

And Hugo's art, kept secret until after his death, is unlike anything you've seen before...

When Victor Hugo died in 1885 more than two million people attended his funeral, part of which involved a procession beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

And his legacy has not dimished - Hugo is still regarded as one of the greatest writers in history.

Less well-known is that he was also an artist, largely because Hugo kept his art private.

Why? He wanted to be seen, first and foremost, as a writer, and his paintings might detract from that.

But, more tellingly, he thought it might change the way people saw him.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Feb 12

This two thousand year old statue is called Laocoön and His Sons.

And it's one of the most divisive works of art in history...

It depicts a scene from the life of Laocoön, a legendary priest who foresaw that the Trojan horse was a trap.

The gods sent giant serpents to devour him and his sons as punishment for warning his fellow citizens about the deception of the Greeks.

Nobody is quite sure when Laocoön and His Sons was made.

Some have speculated that it dates to the 2nd century BC, while others believe it could be as late as the middle of the 1st century AD.

On top of that, it isn't clear if Laocoön is original or a copy of an older statue.

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The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Feb 10

This is a sewage pumping station from 1865.

Why did the Victorians build things like that? Were they just confused? Or did they have the right idea?

The Victorians built everything: churches and train stations, theatres and public baths, banks and bridges, courts and town halls, museums and castles.

But there was no single Victorian style - they mixed together what had come before and transformed it into something new.

The best place to begin is with their most famous style: Victorian Neo-Gothic.

After centuries of slumber the architecture of the Middle Ages was revived by the Victorians, who filled their town halls with pointed arches, clustered columns, ribbed vaults, and stained glass.

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The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Feb 9

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted by Pablo Picasso in 1907, is probably the most influential work of modern art.

But he didn't come up with it all himself.

Picasso borrowed from the art of West Africa, ancient Iberian sculpture, an obscure Medieval architect, and El Greco...

In the first years of the 20th century Pablo Picasso's art looked like this, far from the cubes, the abstraction, the vivid colours, and the strangeness of his most famous paintings.

So what changed?

In 1907 Picasso, then aged 26, visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.

It was filled with art and other objects taken there by the French Empire, among them some ceremonial masks of the Fang from West Africa.

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The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Feb 8

Bluetooth is named after a one thousand year old Danish king with rotten teeth, and its logo is based on the Viking runes for his initials.

But that's all an accident - it was originally supposed to be called Personal Area Networking...

The wireless technology we now call Bluetooth was invented in the 1990s.

During its emergence three major companies - Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia - met to discuss cross-product standardisation, so that mobile devices and PCs could both connect with it.

That was in 1996.

A placeholder name was needed during the development of this standardised technology, and an engineer from Intel called Jim Kardach suggested Bluetooth as a temporary name.

Everybody agreed it would work until, at some point in the future, a better name could be found.

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The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

Feb 6

Have you ever noticed that the save icon is a floppy disk, even though they became obsolete twenty years ago?

That's called a "skeuomorph" - when something new takes on the appearance of what it replaced.

And once you start to look, they're everywhere...

Another example is phone cameras. Even though they don't have mechanical shutters, they make a clicking sound like physical cameras do.

And the phone icon itself looks like an old corded telephone:

Or the various logos for email providers, like that of Gmail, which imitates the appearance of an envelope despite there being no paper or postage involved:

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