Piero della Francesca’s Augustinian Altarpiece

 In 1454, Angelo di Giovanni di Simone d'Angelo commissioned a polyptych from Piero della Francesca for the High Altar of St Agostino in Borgo Sansepolchro. The polyptych was intended to fulfill the wishes of his late brother Simone and his widow Giovanna to procure spiritual benefits for the donor and his forbears.

The structural framework of the altarpiece had a history prior to Piero's storied work. The Franciscans had had the structure built in the early 1430s to support paintings by Antonio d'Anghari and Piero had worked with him to gesso the piece. The effort was abandoned after the Franciscans hired Sassetta to do the work instead.

In 1451 the Franciscans sold the framework to Angelo Giovanni di Simone. It was more than 40 years old when Piero began working on it as the mainstay of the Augustinian High Altar. The piece was completed in 1469 and served as the High Altar until it was disassembled in 1555 when the Augustinians moved. The 30 panels were dispersed, with eight currently housed in institutions in Europe and the US.

Previous attempts  have been made to unite the surviving pieces. The most successful, prior to the Poldi Pozzoli effort, was the Frick exhibition which displayed all of the pieces with the exception of the Poldi holding. When the Frick announced its pending closure for renovation, Poldi Pozzoli reached out to that institution and other holders with hosting requests. Those requests were granted and the pieces were reunited in an exhibition at Poldi Pozzi that ran from March 20 to June 24, 2024.

Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ

 On my visit to the re-opening of the Frick Collection, I encountered their Piero della Francesca pieces and became excited because i will be doing something around this artist later in the year. Further investigation showed that the institution had hosted an exhibition of 7 of his pieces — six of which are based in the US — in 2013 and I dove into the archives to study the work done around that exhibition. This presentation of the artist’s Baptism of Christ is my first offering and draws heavily on the museum’s write-ups plus associated lectures.

The evolution of Large Language Models: From Rule-Based systems to ChatGPT

 Large language models have become a topic of immense interest and discussion in recent years. With the advent of advanced artificial intelligence technologies, we now have the ability to create machines that can process and understand human language at a level never before seen. One such technology that has gained widespread attention is ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI based on the GPT-3.5 architecture.

ChatGPT has been hailed for its ability to generate human-like text and perform a variety of language tasks with high accuracy. But how did we get here? In this foundational blog post, we will explore the history and underlying developments in large language models, tracing their origins from early rule-based systems to the deep learning-powered models of today. We will also examine the key breakthroughs and advancements that have led to the creation of ChatGPT and its predecessors, as well as the potential applications and ethical considerations of these technologies. So join us as we dive into the world of large language models and explore the possibilities they hold for the future of communication and AI.

The development of large language models has come a long way from early rule-based systems that relied on explicit rules to generate text or respond to queries. The advent of statistical language modeling techniques in the 1980s and 1990s led to the development of the Hidden Markov Model, which was used to model the probability of a sequence of words occurring in a given context.

In the 2000s, neural network-based language models began to emerge, which were able to learn more complex patterns and relationships between words than traditional statistical models. The introduction of the recurrent neural network (RNN) was a significant breakthrough in this area, as it was able to model sequential data such as language with great success. The long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) architectures further improved the ability of RNNs to model long-term dependencies in language.

The advent of deep learning in the 2010s led to the development of even more powerful language models, including the Transformer architecture, which was introduced in 2017. The Transformer was able to learn even more complex relationships between words and achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language processing tasks.

Today, large language models like ChatGPT have gained significant attention for their ability to generate human-like text and perform a variety of language tasks with high accuracy. These models are typically trained on massive datasets of text and use self-supervised learning techniques to learn representations of language that can be fine-tuned for specific tasks.

While the potential applications of large language models are vast, there are also ethical considerations and limitations to consider. For example, the potential for bias in training data and the impact of these models on the job market are just a few of the challenges that must be addressed as we continue to develop these technologies.

©EverythingElse238

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century art movements: Rococo, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism

A graphical overview of the three most important art movements of the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

Neolithic-, Chalcolithic-, Bronze-, and Iron-Age civilizations and Art

 

Art of prehistoric and Predynastic Egypt

I have earlier provided an overview of the origins, timeline, and examples of prehistoric art but, due to the importance of Egyptian art in the development of Greek and Roman art, a detour into Egyptian art of this period is warranted.

According to metmuseum.org, "In Egypt, millenia before the advent of powerful dynasties and wealth-laden tombs, early settlements are known from modest scatters of stone tools and animal bones at such sites as Wadi Kubbaniya."

"The Predynastic Period of Ancient Egypt corresponds to the late Neolithic and covers the cultural and social changes which occurred between the late Paleothic period and the early Pharonic era" (thoughtco.com). Prior to the Predynastic, however, there were Paleolithic and Neolithic groups stretching back thousands of years. Both the prehistoric and Predynastic periods are divided into cultural eras, each named after the place where a certain type of Egyptian settlement was first discovered. The chart below shows the various cultures that are included in the two periods.

"During the Predynastic Period, Egyptians developed a written language ... and institutionalized religion. They developed  a settled agricultural civilization along the fertile dark soils of the Nile (which involved the revolutionary use of the plough) during a period in which Northern Africa was becoming arider and the edges of the Western (and Saharan) desert spread" (thoughtco.com). Also during this period, "ceramic figurines, mace heads, and other artifacts such as slate palettes used for grinding pigments, begin to appear, as does imagery that will become iconic during the Pharonic era ... " (Calvert, et al., Smarthistory guide to Ancient Egyptian art, Smarthistory, 2019.)

Examples of art of this period are depicted in the chart below.

@Everythingelse238

Piet Mondrian: The factors influencing his move from Amsterdam to Paris

The paintings Piet Mondrian executed upon his return to Amsterdam from Brabant in 1905 differed from contemporary Netherlands art in that it had "a pronounced rythmic framework and a compositional structure rather than toward the traditional picturesque values of light and shade," but between 1905 and 1911, he would be subjected to a number of experiences that would further influence his painterly direction and eventually lead to his relocation to Paris to pursue what he saw as the future of art.

The first of these experiences was a 1905 Vincent van Gogh exhibition organized by Jo, the sister-in-law of the deceased artist. Jo had been married to Theo for only two years when he died "leaving Jo with a baby and an apartment filled with Vincent's artwork." Theo's goal had been to elevate the visibility of his brother's artwork; with his passing, Jo took on that task. One of her most ambitious efforts was the largest ever retrospective of Vincent's work held at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum in 1905. The exhibition, which featured 480 pieces of van Gogh's work, made an enormous impression on Mondrian.

The second experience was the Quadrennial Exhibition held in Amsterdam in 1907 and featuring the Post-Impressionist works of Kees van Dongen, Otto van Rees, and Jan Sluijters. "The forceful expression and use of color inherent in Post-Impressionism are apparent in such works of the period as Red Cloud and Woods near Oele ..."

Red Cloud, 1907
Piet Mondrian

Woods near Oele, 1908
Piet Mondrian

Mondrian adopted several traits of Post-Impressionism and Pointilism as shown in two of his works from the period: Windmill in Sunlight and The Red Tree. For example, he reduced his palette to the basic hues, with Windmill in Sunlight created mainly in yellow, red, and blue.

Mill in Sunlight: The Winkel Mill, 1908
Piet Mondrian

The Red Tree, 1908 - 1910
Piet Mondrian

In 1909 Piet organized an exhibition with Cornelis Spoor and Jan Sleijters at Stedelijk Museum where this type of work was shown. The exhibition featured 250 of Mondrian's works and juxtaposed his early efforts with the later, more modern ones. This show "firmly established the artist as part of the Dutch avant-garde" (prabook.com).

In 1910, his modern works received good reviews at the St Lucas Exhibition in Amsterdam and in 1911 one of his more abstract works was accepted by the Salon des Indépendants.

In 1910 Mondrian co-founded a progressive artists club called Moderne Kunstkring with Jan Sluijters and Conrad Kickert. One of the intentions of the club was the curation of an exhibition of Dutch and foreign artists in Amsterdam. In preparation for the first such exhibition, Mondrian traveled to Paris in 1911 to see the latest artistic trends. 

The group's first exhibition was held at the Stedelijk Museum in 1911 and was the first ever museum presentation of Cubism. It featured artists such as Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Le Fauconnais, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck. Mondrian was deeply impressed with the Cubist works and decided to move to Paris, the home of Cubism.

@EverythingElse23e