John Dee painting originally had circle of human skulls, x-ray imaging reveals | Hacker News Reader

John Dee painting originally had circle of human skulls, x-ray imaging reveals

theguardian.com

32 pointsHooke11 comments

"should we remember him as brilliant pioneering scientist, or as an occultist who thought he could talk to angels?" I don't understand why it's a problem to say that he was both.

Because some of his methods would not be considered scientific. For example, his beliefs have a significant streak of Platonism, trusting acients texts without a testable hypothesis. Sometimes he would try to improve upon rituals. On the other hand, Angels and magic arent real, so he probably made some stuff up. On the other hanx he destinguished himself with knowledge that today we associtae with scientists. The debate concerns the essense of the scientific method and its evolution.

Angels and Magick are not real to the uninitiated.

found the Golden Dawn/O.T.O./A.O. member.

Maybe it's an 18th century version of: "Just Remove the Duck" (https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/)

I don't think this is shocking. A lot of painter do something like this because it's somehow easier to draw the form of skulls than the form of a face. So the skull is there as a framework for painting the face.

There are also a lot of painters who start with naked people and then dress them. This also helps with 'transparent' clothing.

And when you learn to draw comics most of the time you start with a 'skull' of the character.

Your comment would make sense if the skulls were painted under the faces of the audience. But from the x-ray (and the description in the article), it looks like it was a circle of skulls laying on the floor, used as props by the performer.

There are no people in the final version where the skulls were, and they were around his feet.

Also, if that were the case, then we would expect the court characters to also have painted over skulls.

With all the art that's created digitally, I wonder what this sort of art research will look like in 200 years. Finding an original photoshop file on a hard drive, reverse engineering the .psd spec and discovering hidden layers they were turned off in the final image?

For those of you who don't know, John Dee was also the original 007, was probably a spy for the queen, and had the largest library in the kindom at the time. He also heavily influenced Bacon... A very interesting man indeed.

Canadians are told that William Stephenson[0] was the original 007.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stephenson

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