Two Miles High

Sacred Prostitute

Mary Magdalene in the History of Art

Mary Magdalene has been one of the most popular subjects for painters and sculptors, and their works reflect the tastes and predilections of their time and place. First is an example of Mary the penitent or hermit: Donatello's extraordinary anguished figure of 1453-55 (above), where Mary resembles

Life as Opera

Mata Hari as Manon Lascaut?

What happens to the lead female characters in 19th century opera is depressing - how could audiences approve of the (frequently violent) deaths of Carmen, Violetta, Manon, Isolde, Tosca and countless others? At best, these librettos were critiques of awful men and wonderful women and a rigid class system under tremendous

Life as Opera

Mata Hari's Execution at Vincennes

This was once thought of as a photo of the execution, but it is now said to be a film reconstruction in 1920. They seem to have captured the horror of the moment. She was executed by firing squad on 15 October 1917 at the age of 41. The location

Life as Opera

Max Ophuls

Lola Montès was Max Ophuls' last film (in 1955) and though some critics love it, I don't think it compares well with his earlier masterpieces, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and La Ronde (1950). The biggest problem is that there is no sense of the erotic

Life as Opera

'Mazeppa'

Wild and wonderful women... Mazeppa began its career as an epic poem by Byron in 1819, based on existing legends, the story of a page caught in an affair with a married woman from a higher class. When the affair is discovered, the outraged husband has him tied to the

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

Medieval Timeline

* 1095 Pope Urban II preaches the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont (the massacre of Jews in Mainz and other cities follows...) * 1099 Capture of Jerusalem and massacre of its Muslim inhabitants * 1140-44 St. Denis Cathedral * 1147 Second Crusade begins (till 1149) * 1153 Death of St. Bernard of

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Mormon / Melville - Timeline

* 1805 Birth of Joseph Smith * 1809 Birth of Abraham Lincoln * 1814 The Golden Pot. A Modern Fairytale by E.T.A. Hoffmann published * 1819 Birth of Herman Melville * 1820 Joseph Smith’s first vision; further visions through the 1820s * 1823 Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews published, reflecting widely

Life as Opera

Mérimée's 'Carmen'

Bizet's Carmen is based on Prosper Mérimée's novella of 1845. So what is the novella based on, other than Cervantes' influential and wonderful La Gitanilla (1613), which breaks down cross-cultural stereotypes and actually has a happy ending! Mérimée chose to go the other path.

Angel Incarnate

Michelangelo and Platonic Love

Passion will not be denied. For Michelangelo the "fire that burned" got the better of him throughout his life and people noticed. It was key to his passion and his fire, which is why his writing is all about suffering and struggle and martyrdom: "I live to

Angel Incarnate

Michelangelo vs Leonardo

Michelangelo and the older Leonardo did not like each other. There was a famous encounter in Florence in 1503 when Leonardo voted for Michelangelo's statue David to be placed inside, instead of outside, and this reportedly enraged Michelangelo. The statue did go on display outside in 1504 replete

Loki's Children

'Midvinterblot'

Sweden’s most famous painting, Carl Larsson’s Midvinterblot (1915), created controversy by celebrating the sacrifice of a pagan Swedish king who died to save his people – an explicit act of seiðr. Its power, of course, was that it reminded everyone that Christ’s death was a sacrifice, echoing the

From Russia with Love

Mikhail Vrubel's 'Demon Seated in a Garden'

Did you start here? Vrubel's paintings are dark, possessed, hallucinations - this was from 1890 and it is his most famous painting. We live in a fallen world, a world for pessimists. Art fans are drawn to the innovative use of color and the iridescent sheen, as a precursor

Homer's Women

Miyazaki’s 'Nausicaa' and Nintendo's 'Wind Waker'

The best remakes of the Odyssey are from Japan. Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has written: “I have been fascinated by (Nausicaa) ever since I first read about her in Bernard Evslin’s Japanese translation of a small dictionary of Greek mythology. Later, when I actually read the Odyssey, I was disappointed

Kama Sutra

Moksha

Following the conflagration of World War I, Western philosophers struggled to come up with a prescription for spiritual resurrection in the West. Virility was very much on their minds and it's hard to avoid the sexual metaphors in their books. The most pessimistic, Oswald Spengler's Decline

Angel Incarnate

'Mona Lisa'

Trompe l'œil means a trick of the eye - art that deceives the eye - and it became popular from the 15th century. Leonardo is not really associated with it in any formal sense, aside from The Last Supper, but how else can we debate the Mona Lisa smile? People

Precious Bodily Fluids

Montaigne on the body, sex, marriage and everything else

Reading Montaigne is not for everyone, but one of its pleasures is stumbling across the many witty insights about the "rebellious and tyrannical" penis, women's dildos, huge codpieces, impotence and the like. As many have said, he seems strikingly contemporary. It is best to simply quote

Kama Sutra

Monte Verità

It all seemed to make sense... Old Europe’s empires were imploding and Christianity had lost its grip, industrialization soiled the landscape and people fled for the hills or for America. From around 1902 and for decades to come, Ascona in Switzerland near the Italian border would lure Carl Jung,

Voices and Saints

Mont-Saint-Michel

The reality is something else these days: this amazing place is overrun by thousands of tourists at all times, like it's Disneyland. This postcard image of a hundred years ago is somehow more evocative of the medieval abbey. There is really no way that Mont-Saint-Michel could

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Mormonism

Mormonism - the religion of the Latter Day Saints - truly does have a claim to being the Great American Religion. Its success in the 1830s and 1840s means, after all, that imported Christianity was deemed insufficient. For Melville it was the Dutch Calvinism of his mother and the Unitarianism of his

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Mormons, Muslims and Harems

Americans made connections early on between polygamists in the U.S. and the Ottoman rulers of Istanbul and their harems. The Mormons weren't the first polygamists, but after the revelations of the 1840's, they became the most prominent ones. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that

Splendour in the Grass

Mount Peel Station

The Mt. Peel Station homestead was built between 1865 and 1867, becoming the first of the Canterbury high country sheep stations. It remains privately owned. Nearby is the Church of the Holy Innocents (below), which was completed in 1869. It can be visited but it was badly damaged by the

Voices and Saints

Mucha's 'Maude Adams as Joan of Arc'

Czech painter Alphonse Mucha designed this poster when he was living in Chicago in 1909. It depicts American actress Maude Adams playing Joan in a stage version of Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans. The idea is that Joan is terrified of the vision behind her shoulder, encouraging Joan

Women in Trousers

Mulan

China has its own androgynous figure with the legend of Hua Mulan (木蘭詩) from the 4th-6th centuries CE. She is famous for disguising herself as a man and for fighting in many bloody campaigns before returning home and being outed as a woman at her home near Luoyang in

Life as Opera

The Music of Decline

Hermann Hesse is covered more fully here but his ideas about the futility of art and literature after the catastrophe of World War I can be found in Klingsor’s Last Summer (1919) and again later in The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943). Here he could have been talking

Poison Pen Letters

My Favorite Agatha Christie Mysteries

When I first read Agatha Christie's mysteries, I most enjoyed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and Ten Little Niggers/And Then There Were None, which are without doubt her masterpieces, but I think you can only read them once. And yes, that was