"Another Nameless Knight". My digital collage inspired by "Portrait of Emperor Charles V", Theodorus van Kessel, 1630 - 1660.

Andulka
Three Goblin Art
Xuebing Du
i don't do bad sauce passes

tannertan36
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AnasAbdin

@theartofmadeline

Love Begins

Janaina Medeiros
Mike Driver
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
d e v o n

Discoholic 🪩
Show & Tell

JVL
Keni
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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@nelclectic
"Another Nameless Knight". My digital collage inspired by "Portrait of Emperor Charles V", Theodorus van Kessel, 1630 - 1660.
Graphic Design is more than my passion project! xP
Birth of Venus (in Capricorn).
Selfies that Botticelli would save on Pinterest >>
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐,
貞志篤終誓穹蒼,
欽所感想妄淫荒,
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心,
荒淫妄想感所欽,
蒼穹誓終篤志貞,
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑,始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖,璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
was tagged by @dreimehrparsec, thank you!!
Last song: 2 towers by lightning bolt. need some decent noise this morning
2. Favorite colors: dark ones... like greenish and violetish shades of the same blue, also grey and black, sometimes white
3. Watching: good question! i've started to watch four movies recently and haven't finished any yet... they are blade runner (by ridley scott), 2nd matrix, die sonnenallee and wings of desire
4. Currently reading: Piranesi by susanna clarke, the city and the city by china mieville... and also i want to read something classic but dunno what exactly
5. Current obsession: not to feel unreasonable sad constantly... im a bit hobbyless rn :\
6. Currently working on: shit 4 uni... and also trying to make myself to write anything
7. Last google search: money by pink floyd and blixa bargeld stole my cowboy shoes i don'c remember which was the latest, also i googled piranesi while making this post for spelling check
8. What’s your current desktop picture/phone wallpaper:
this.
idk which 10 ppl to tag.... ok it'll be @fortythreeninetysix and @amplifierworshipservice, you wasn't tagged yet as i remember :)
Last song: the entirety of monument valley soundtrack in one sitting, the last entry was Ida’s theme. Love listening to the ost of that game series while working and multitasking
Favorite Color: purple
Watching: I don’t like series but I watched I saw the tv glow on youtube for free and I liked it
Currently reading: papers for my uni research….. and it’s actually enjoyable! I like reading scientific non fiction. But when I get free time I would love to read metro 2033
Current obsession: umamusume track blazer career farm
Currently working on: said paper
Last google search: weather
Phone wallpaper: might post on my photography blog soon (here) :)
@vampiresex69 @holywho @jadeddr3amer @crowbarcombat @crustyjpeg @nelclectic @oeing-oeing-clay @12ushba1274 @greetingsfrommadrid
Omgg thank you @fortythreeninetysix for tagging me, I haven't done one of these in years LOL!
Last Song: "Afterglow" by Luna Li
Favorite Color: Periwinkle-Gray (the shades closest to silver!)
Watching: Too tired to make it past the Youtube home screen :(
Currently Reading: Burnout Recovery forums
Current Obsession: Thinking about how much Metallic Cheetah Print is too much metallic cheetah print to wear at once
Currently Working On: Finding the best sleep position and figuring out which passion project I want to pick up again
Last Google Search: "cat bride painting" LOL
Phone Wallpaper: "The Bride" by Joan Brown
Tags (no pressure of course!): @cholgamer @neuroqueerings @plutt-o
"Once-again and Never-once". 🎂
"Hear me out…" 👻
"Self Portrait of a Stroke"
Throwback to my first self-portrait after having a Stroke! :)
Nèl's Content-Only Blog!
Here it is, @nelclectic-art!
Written In Defense of Eve! 🐍
"Adam, you've Misunderstood Me".
"Maybe Dragons Have a Point".
Can you tell that I got a new laptop? xP
"Fatige”, self-explanatory.
Little Soldier with her Amorous Armor. 🌷
After 2 months, 63 pieces, and MANY Canva/Computer crashes later... "Portrait of My Inner Child".
It’s titled, “Portrait of My Inner Child” because I’ve always struggled to explain myself through words. I grew up selectively mute and I learned how to communicate with others through art.
I loved every second spent working on this collage. It took me 15+ years to build up the courage to showcase my art again.
I’m so glad my performance went well, I’m so so so glad that I chose to be brave.
Read More for the Art Analysis.
"My Higher Self is Scared of Heights."