上海花千坊会所

The 2023 Guilin Festival, came to an end on Sunday in Guilin, a famous tourist destination in South China's Guangxi Province. The ten-day festival had a theme of coexistence, seamlessly integrating art, theater, and the natural splendor of the region, according to a report by the Xinhua News Agency on Thursday.

The event was hosted by the Guilin Municipal People's Government and the Central Academy of Drama. A total of 140 activities and performances, featuring plays, folk music, operas, and monologues in different languages from 14 countries and regions.

While theater remains at the heart of the festival, the 2023 edition transcended traditional boundaries, allowing audiences to immerse themselves in a rich tapestry of experiences. 

From the grand processions of the Classic of Mountains and Seas to exuberant New Zealand Maori dance performances that captivated throngs of enthusiastic spectators, the festival pulsed with energy. 

Over 80 percent of this year's performances took place outdoors, harmoniously blending with Guilin's natural beauty. Unique venues like the "Mountain Theater," "Water Theater," "Cave Theater," "Grass Theater," and "Island Theater" allowed the landscape to become an integral part of the theatrical experience.

The stunning surroundings have inspired artists. The Russian cast of The Cherry Orchard remarked on the picturesque setting, while the German ensemble performing The Threepenny Opera along the Li River reveled in the unique stage, where the sky served as the backdrop, the earth as the stage, the mountains as scenery, and the water as a mirror.

This year's festival was marked by its youthful spirit. Across seven major sections - drama performances, urban arts, academic forums, children's programs, and more - the themes of "youth," "vitality," "diversity," and "innovation" resonated. 

The opening spectacle, Camel Xiangzi, directed by He Nian of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, reimagines a classic work for modern audiences, inviting them to explore the timeless wisdom embedded in literary masterpieces.

Two productions from the "Global Chinese Youth Theatre Directors Talent Program," namely Huang Ying's new adaptation of Journey to the West (2023) and Zhao Miao's physical theater piece Fearless Mother and Her Children, garnered acclaim from international audiences and received multiple awards from the Scottish Asian Arts Foundation.

Director Wang Xiaoying aptly summarized the festival's essence, saying that the future of theater lies in young talent. Guilin Festival's focus on nurturing young theater professionals infuses it with dynamism. These emerging artists carry the cultural legacy forward, embodying the essence of Chinese artistry.

In August, the festival made history by hosting an international press conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, becoming the first Chinese arts festival to venture beyond its borders for a high-profile promotional event. 

The festival has captured the attention of over 200 domestic and international media outlets, as well as social media influencers. 

Topics related to the festival have been read about more than 900 million times on Sina Weibo, Douyin, life-style platform Xiaohongshu, and the Meitu Xiuxiu platform, the Xinhua report said.

Hao Rong, director of the Festival Organizing Committee, chairman of the Art Committee, and president of the Central Academy of Drama, said that the Guilin Festival is not only a response to the call of historical context, but also an inheritance of traditional literary and artistic spirit. It is also a reflection of the development of literature and art in the new era. 

"We hope to build the Guilin Festival into a 'Chinese-style art festival,' an international people's art festival based on diversity, mutual learning, and inclusive public benefit, based on the subjectivity of Chinese culture," he noted.

The Chinese Embassy in Israel confirmed that a Chinese worker was injured in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Saturday, and the embassy has issued an urgent alert to Chinese citizens in Israel to pay close attention to security.

According to the embassy, the Chinese worker was injured by a stray bullet near Ashkelon in southern Israel during Saturday's Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is currently in hospital.

The embassy issued a safety alert on Saturday, saying that Israel had been hit by rocket attacks and armed assaults in multiple areas on the morning of that day, resulting in significant casualties. Hence, the embassy reminded Chinese citizens in Israel to closely monitor the local security situation and follow security measures to ensure their own safety.

The alert also stated that according to the Israeli tourism department's reminder, all types of tourism activities within Israel had been immediately suspended, and foreign tourists who were already in the country were told to stay in their hotel rooms and avoid going out.

Accordingly, the embassy emphasized that Chinese citizens must pay attention to and comply with relevant safety guidelines, especially familiarizing themselves with the locations and distribution of bomb shelters, and in the event of an air raid alarm, they should evacuate to the bomb shelters immediately.

Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched the biggest attack on Israel in years on Saturday, combined gunmen crossing into Israel with a barrage of rockets fired from Gaza, with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring that the country was "at war," according to media reports.

At least 40 people have been killed and over 700 injured, with the death toll expected to rise, the Times of Israel reported, while the Palestinian health officials said that 198 have died and at least 1,610 people had been injured in the strikes.

Cohen Roni, an Israeli citizen, told the Global Times on Saturday that she had never experienced such a large-scale conflict.

"I woke up in the morning to the sound of alarms and rockets. The entire country was in chaos, and my hands trembled with fear while my heart raced. Currently, citizens are all confined to their homes, not leaving under any circumstances. This is extremely dangerous, as if I were to leave my house, I could potentially be kidnapped or killed," Roni said.

Although the scale of this conflict is relatively unusual, some Chinese experts believe that fundamentally it remains a conflict between Israel and Palestine, and will not escalate into a war between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries.

This kind of conflicts have occurred in the past, mostly between Israel and Palestine's hawkish militias groups like Hamas, rather than a total war between the two countries, and normally Israel retaliated by intensifying its strikes on Hamas and the Gaza Strip to make Palestinians pay more bloodsheds, Ma Xiaolin, senior professor and dean of the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean Rim at Zhejiang International Studies University, told the Global Times on Saturday.

Following the strikes, countries that have established diplomatic relations with the Middle East and Israel expressed varying degrees of protest and condemnation, leading to temporary appeasement, Ma added.

Currently, some major Arab or Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Oman are calling for both sides to exercise restraint, Ma said. "This indicates the delicate stance of these countries towards the Israeli-Palestinian issue, as they don't wish to be deeply involved," the expert noted.

The highly anticipated Indonesian cultural festival kicked off in the opera hall of Beijing's Central Conservatory of Music recently to promote cultural exchanges between China and Indonesia and encourage people to learn more about the traditional Indonesian instrument the Kolintang.

Indonesian Ambassador to China Djauhari Oratmangun, delivered a speech saying that the Indonesian cultural performance held in Beijing is particularly important for the promotion of Indonesia's rich and colorful culture and enhancement of civil relations between Indonesia and China. 

Oratmangun also stated that through this event, he hopes that the Kolintang instrument will be recognized by UNESCO in 2024.

Accompanied by the Kolintang, Oratmangun and his wife sang the Chinese song The Moon Represents My Heart, which resonated with the audiences and received thunderous applause.

This event serves as a bridge for cultural exchange between the two countries, enhancing cultural exchange and mutual learning, and strengthening the friendship between the two peoples, while promoting the healthy development of bilateral relations.

Over four millennia ago, in the final days of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, a drought swept over the region, afflicting lands as far away as Greece and what’s now Pakistan. Probably driven by the eruption of a distant volcano, the drying climate devastated local agriculture. A contemporary text, The Curse of Akkad, noted that “the large arable tracts yielded no grain … the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, thick clouds did not rain.”
As once-prosperous farmlands collapsed in the northern part of the empire, people fled to the south. The southern Akkadians’ response? Build a more than 150-kilometer-long wall between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, barring entry to any migrants. Soon after, history’s first empire crumbled, dying of thirst in the cradle of civilization.

Climate systems and civilizations are stable only up to a point. In Our Fragile Moment, climate scientist Michael Mann reminds us that today we are pushing the limits of both.

In the book, Mann looks back at episodes of global climate change over the last 4.5 billion years, from eras of deadly heat to wastelands of widespread ice. With each instance, he draws out lessons about what happens to Earth in periods of changing climate. Sometimes, the result is dramatic mass extinctions or geologic upheavals (SN: 8/28/15). Other times, as with the Akkadians, it’s societal collapse.

Earth’s climate system includes regulating forces that tend to buffer against small shifts in climate; ice caps and low clouds reflect sunlight and help cool the planet, for instance. But pushed too far, regulating forces can be overwhelmed, causing the climate to spiral out of control.

This was the case 55 million years ago. As a steady set of volcanic eruptions spewed carbon dioxide into the air, Earth warmed. The heat may have contributed to thinner and less reflective clouds. This in turn would have made the planet even hotter. Eventually, the low-lying clouds disappeared, and average global temperatures soared to 32° Celsius (90° Fahrenheit) in what is referred to as a Hothouse Earth (SN: 11/3/15).

Today, with unchecked greenhouse gas emissions, we may face a similar, though less sweltering, spiral with the disappearance of our reflective ice caps (SN: 11/9/22).

But what makes current climate change different is its source — humankind — and our ability to stop it. This is a benefit that is unique to our changing climate. It comes with blame, but it also comes with agency.

That agency is an important source of hope for Mann. Melting ice caps could raise sea levels and displace some 40 percent of the global population. Rising heat could make swaths of the planet uninhabitable (SN: 5/8/20). But if we act, we can preserve a world that looks much like ours. The limit is not geologic or even technological, Mann argues; it is political.

Despite the far-reaching themes Mann weaves throughout the book, it may not be for everyone. There is a strong academic bend to the writing, which leans heavily on jargon. The book also features a dizzying parade of researchers, and Mann often emphasizes his connection to climate researchers and events, at one point reminiscing about how he “was known as a bit of a statistics guru.” The technical terms, acronyms, initialisms and self-referential tangents can distract from the book’s broader arguments and message.

Even though Mann’s dedication to precise academic language comes at the expense of some clarity, climate buffs will appreciate the deep dives into the scientific process. Many of the dense sections reward the reader with a satisfying tidbit of fascinating information or an illuminating insight. On occasion, I laughed out loud at Mann’s puns, jokes and barbs. (A reference to The Princess Bride’s ROUSs — Rodents of Unusual Size — landed particularly well.)
After journeying through the past, Mann brings us to the present and looks toward the future. Though past climates may offer lessons, those lessons only go so far. We are unlikely to bring about another Hothouse Earth, but the climate is warming faster than it has in millennia, thanks to human actions. If current climate policy holds, the best scientific predictions show things will be painful, but civilization won’t end. But climate scientists are not oracles. They can’t be sure.

That uncertainty, rather than being a cause for complacency, should spur us to action, Mann argues. “The impacts of climate change, no doubt, constitute an existential threat if we fail to act,” Mann concludes. “But we can act. Our fragile moment can still be preserved.”

With the help of a neural prosthesis, a quadriplegic man used his paralyzed right hand to grab a bottle, swipe a credit card and play a guitar video game. Bypassing his damaged spinal cord, the system restored his ability to use his thoughts to command his hand to move.

Other neural prosthetic systems have allowed paralyzed people to use their brain activity to move computer cursors, robotic limbs and wheelchairs (SN: 11/16/13, p. 22). But the new approach, described online April 13 in Nature, is the first to use brain activity to control a person’s own limb. “We literally are reconnecting the brain to the body,” study coauthor Chad Bouton of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., said April 12 in a news briefing.
Decoding brain signals and correctly stimulating muscles are “really hard things to do individually,” says biomedical engineer Levi Hargrove of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Putting those together in a human subject is “very impressive,” he says. “There’s more work to be done, of course, but this is very positive and should excite people.”

In 2010, college student Ian Burkhart dived into a shallow wave and struck sand. The accident severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down. Burkhart volunteered to undergo brain surgery in which doctors implanted a patch of electrodes directly into his brain. These electrodes eavesdropped on the activity of nerve cells that control hand movements.

Scientists listened to these cells’ behavior as Burkhart watched a range of hand and finger movements on a screen and attempted to copy the motions. A computer system then learned to recognize the neural signals that accompanied each type of movement, and an algorithm translated those signals into movement commands.
A flexible sleeve of electrodes strapped to Burkhart’s forearm delivered those instructions directly by stimulating hand muscles. In 2014, Bouton and colleagues announced that Burkhart could open and close his hand using the system. Since then, Burkhart has been able to command more complex hand movements, such as wiggling his thumb in and out and flexing his wrist. The Nature paper describes how this bypass system now allows him to pick up a cup, pour and even pinch his thumb and forefinger together to pluck a skinny stir stick.
“The first time when I was able to open and close my hand, it really kind of gave me that sense of hope again for the future,” Burkhart said in the briefing.

The technology isn’t ready for life outside of the lab. In its current form, the system must be calibrated each time Burkhart uses it, and the electrodes in the brain may not perform as well with time. And bulky cables connect the brain electrodes to the computer system and forearm sleeve. Scientists are working on making the technology smaller, wireless and easier to use, study coauthor Nick Annetta of Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, said in the briefing.

Neural engineer José Contreras-Vidal of the University of Houston points out that technology that can translate neural activity into electrical impulses may ultimately restore other types of muscle activity, such as walking. “What we need to do is provide solutions and options,” he says.

COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. — When breast cancer spreads, it moves in gangs of ready-to-rumble tumor cells, a small genetic study suggests. Most of the mutations that drive recurrent tumors when they pop up elsewhere in the body were present in the original tumor, geneticist Elaine Mardis reported May 9 at the Biology of Genomes meeting.

For many types of cancer, it is the spread, or metastasis, of tumor cells that kills people. Because cancer that comes back and spreads after initial treatment is often deadlier than the original tumors, researchers thought most of the mutations in recurrent tumors happened after they spread. But the new findings contradict this assumption and may indicate ways to stop metastasis.
Mardis, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and colleagues collected recurrent breast tumors from 16 women who died after their cancer had spread to other parts of the body. Comparing the metastasized tumors with the original breast tumors, the researchers were surprised to learn that multiple, slightly genetically different cells from the original site had broken away together and established the new tumors.

Researchers used to think cancer spread when single cells slipped away and set up shop elsewhere. But recent research in mice suggested cancer cells migrate in groups (SN: 1/10/15, p. 9). The new study doesn’t provide direct evidence of this group migration in human cancer. But genetic similarities between metastasized and original tumors suggest that multiple cells move together to remote sites.

Only two women in the study had cancer-driving mutations — both in an estrogen receptor gene called ESR1 — in their recurrent tumors not seen in the original. All of the tumors that metastasized contained mutations in the TP53 gene. Such mutations could be a warning sign that a breast cancer is prone to spread, Mardis said.

A genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease is a double, make that triple, whammy.

In addition to speeding up the development of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer’s, a gene variant known as APOE4 also makes tau tangles — another signature of the disease — worse, researchers report online September 20 in Nature. APOE4 protein also ramps up brain inflammation that kills brain cells, neuroscientist David Holtzman of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and colleagues have discovered.
“This paper is a tour de force,” says Robert Vassar, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “It’s a seminal study that’s going to be a landmark in the field” of Alzheimer’s research, Vassar predicts.

For more than 20 years, researchers have known that people who carry the E4 version of the APOE gene are at increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s. A version of the gene called APOE3 has no effect on Alzheimer’s risk, whereas the APOE2 version protects against the disease. Molecular details for how APOE protein, which helps clear cholesterol from the body, affects brain cells are not understood.

But Holtzman and other researchers previously demonstrated that plaques of amyloid-beta protein build up faster in the brains of APOE4 carriers (SN: 7/30/11, p. 9). Having A-beta plaques isn’t enough to cause the disease, Holtzman says. Tangles of another protein called tau are also required. Once tau tangles accumulate, brain cells begin to die and people develop dementia. In a series of new experiments, Holtzman and colleagues now show, for the first time, that there’s also a link between APOE4 and tau tangles.
In one experiment, mice that had no A-beta in their brains developed more tau tangles if they carried the human version of APOE4 than if they had the human APOE3 gene, Holtzman and colleagues found. That finding indicates APOE4 affects tau independently of A-beta.
Brains of people who died from various diseases caused by tangled tau had more dead and damaged cells if the people carried APOE4. The researchers also tracked 592 people who had low levels of A-beta in their cerebral spinal fluid — a clue that plaques have formed in the brain — and who showed symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Over a five- to 10-year period, the disease progressed 14 percent faster in people with one copy of APOE4 and 23 percent faster in people with two copies than in people who didn’t have that version of the gene, the researchers found. Those worsening symptoms are presumed to be caused by more rapid buildup of tau tangles in the APOE4 carriers.

APOE4 also seems to make Alzheimer’s worse by causing inflammation, the researchers found. Two kinds of mouse glial brain cells, microglia and astrocytes, making different versions of the APOE protein were grown with brain nerve cells, or neurons, that make disease-causing forms of tau. Mouse neurons grown with glia making no APOE grew well, even though they were making abnormal tau. But neurons grown with glia making APOE4 often died. APOE4 provoked inflammation responses in the normally friendly astrocytes and microglia, leading those cells to kill neurons, the researchers found. Such inflammation can make brain degeneration worse.

The data linking the APOE4 gene to tau tangles and brain inflammation is “super tight,” says molecular neurobiologist Sangram Sisodia of the University of Chicago. But the molecular details behind how APOE4 protein causes those effects are still vexingly absent, he says. Much more work is needed to uncover which molecules APOE4 interacts with, so that researchers can devise ways to counteract its negative effects in the brain.

Any therapies that decrease or eliminate APOE4 will need to be limited to the brain, because the protein is needed in the rest of the body to maintain healthy cholesterol levels, Vassar says. “You don’t want to give a person heart disease to cure Alzheimer’s disease.”

The reappearance of a long-lost meteor shower has finally explained what happened to a missing comet named 289P/Blanpain.

That comet was spotted only once in 1819 and never again, unusual for a body orbiting the sun. But in 2003, astronomers found a small asteroid moving along the Blanpain orbit, suggesting the space rock might be the comet (or a piece of it) after it ejected much of its cometary dust.

Some of that dust may have been what Japanese researchers saw in 1956 when they observed a meteor shower from the constellation Phoenix. Meteor showers occur when dust left behind by a comet burns up as it hits Earth’s atmosphere. Those “Phoenicid” meteors hadn’t been seen before — or since.
Astronomer Jun-ichi Watanabe of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo and colleagues traced the meteors to where the comet’s dust trail should have been. In 2010, the group predicted that the remaining dust would create another shower in 2014.

Team members traveled to North Carolina and Spain’s Canary Islands to test their prediction, and on the first two days of December, 2014, they saw Phoenicids streak across the sky. But there were about 90 percent fewer meteors than expected; Blanpain may have lost its dust more quickly than previously thought, the team reports in the Sept. 1 Planetary and Space Science. The astronomers will get a second chance to check — another shower is expected in 2019.

Self-driving vehicles passed a major milestone in November when Waymo’s minivans hit the streets of Phoenix without backup human drivers — reportedly making them the first fleet of fully autonomous cars on public roadways. Over the next few months, people will get a chance to take these streetwise vehicles for a free spin as the company tries to drum up excitement — and a customer base — for its launch of a driverless taxi service.

But even as these cars are ditching human supervisors, many people doubt the safety of machine motorists. A whopping 85 percent of baby boomers and even 73 percent of millennials confess to being afraid to ride in self-driving cars, according to a recent AAA survey. And while Waymo claims its vehicles are designed to be the world’s most experienced drivers — based on road tests as well as clocking millions of virtual miles — there’s still no consensus among experts about how safe is “safe enough” when it comes to street-smart cars.
It’s especially difficult to tell whether self-driving cars have earned their licenses when scientists are still writing the driver’s test.

Besides the sheer convenience of being able to take your hands off the wheel, the major appeal of self-driving cars is safer roadways. After all, mechanical chauffeurs can’t get drunk or distracted — factors involved in 29 and 10 percent of fatal accidents, respectively. But the only surefire way to evaluate autonomous cars’ reliability is test-driving them in real traffic, explains Nidhi Kalra, an information scientist at the RAND Corporation in San Francisco. “I think a lot of people were thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll just wait until the companies do enough test-driving,’” she says. “You could wait until the next millennium until that happens.”

In a 2016 study, Kalra and a colleague showed that self-driving cars would have to trek hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of miles to demonstrate with comfortable certainty that they caused fewer fatalities than the average person (about 1.1 per 100 million miles driven). Based on the current number of self-driving cars, that task could take decades or centuries to complete.

Tech developers hardly have that kind of time, so companies like Waymo assess their vehicles’ safety by pairing real driving time with practice on a private track and millions of miles a day in computer simulations.
Still, simulations can’t replace the value of actual road experience, says Philip Koopman, an electrical and computer engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “What about the scenarios they didn’t know [to simulate]?” he says. “Weird, weird, weird stuff happens out on the roadways.”

Since current self-driving safety assurances aren’t exactly airtight, Koopman argues that self-driving cars should be held to a way higher standard than human drivers — say, 10 times safer than the average human — before they’re given the green light. That would provide enough wiggle room in the margin of error to assume that the driverless car actually is safer, Koopman reasons.

But getting to that point could take a long time, and miss the opportunity to save many lives, Kalra says. She’s confident because her team forecast a future — actually lots of different futures — where self-driving cars hit the road when they were 10, 75 or 90 percent safer than the average human driver. At 10 percent, fatalities drop to one death per 100 million miles. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot, but with those cars much closer to being ready to roll, some 500,000 lives could be saved between 2020 and 2050, the team forecasts, compared with the imagined futures where people hold out for way higher safety standards.

But just aiming for 10 percent safer doesn’t provide much margin for error, Koopman argues. “You’re cutting it pretty close.”

And a lower safety standard could mean more accidents at first — and a public backlash, says Azim Shariff, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. People may be less inclined to accept mistakes made by machines than humans, and research has shown that people are more risk-averse when it comes to risks that they can’t control.

“What happens when a 4-year-old in the back of a car that’s operated by her mother gets killed by an autonomous car?” Shariff asks.

Success depends on buy-in. “So public opinion is really going to matter,” Shariff says.

Right now, most Americans may not be lining up to hop aboard fully autonomous cars. But “once people start knowing people who have been in them and lived to tell the tale, so to speak, I think it will change quickly,” says David Groves, a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.

Kalra also suspects that people will fear autonomous cars less when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration establishes a self-driving car safety rating, like its crash test ratings for traditional cars. That kind of rating system “will probably come after the technology is on the road, just as it did for regular cars,” she says. “We didn’t have a safety rating system when the Model T came out. It sounds like it’s the cart before the horse to have cars before safety ratings, but that’s often how it happens.”

Death: A Graveside Companion makes for an unusual coffee-table book, with its coppery etched Grim Reaper on the cover. Yet you may be surprised by how much fun it is to pore through the book’s lavish artwork of skulls, cadavers and fanciful imaginings of the afterlife.

There is, after all, a reason for the term “morbid curiosity.” It’s only natural for people to try to understand and come to terms with their inevitable demise, and as the book reveals, it is only in modern Western society that the topic of death has become so taboo. Even as recently as Victorian times, the book notes, the dead were laid out in the family parlor, their hair cut off and twisted to make decorative mementos to hang on the wall.
As a founder of New York City’s now-closed Morbid Anatomy Museum, Joanna Ebenstein has set out to help change modern attitudes, by giving us permission to let our morbid curiosity loose. “It is my hope that this book might act as a gesture towards redeeming death, to invite it back into our world in some small way,” she writes. “It is precisely by keeping death close at hand and coming to terms with its inevitability that we are able to lead full rich lives.”
She brings together 1,000 images of historical artwork, illustrations and artifacts showcasing humankind’s ongoing quest to imagine and find meaning in death, along with 19 essays by a diverse set of writers, art experts and scientific thinkers. The writings cover spiritual and symbolic aspects of death, such as the origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and the surprising variety of death-themed amusements over the years. An early Coney Island attraction, for instance, re-created the experience of being buried alive. Some essays delve into scientific history, such as miniature crime scenes used in forensic science and the history of cadavers in the study of anatomy.
While the essays are illuminating, the illustrations and photographs, along with informative captions, provide most of the book’s substantial heft, as well as its heart. Only by browsing through still life paintings called vanitas, popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, for instance, will you truly grasp what these symbolic masterpieces are meant to convey: the transience of beauty and earthly pursuits.
If I have any quibble with this compendium, it’s that the essays (but thankfully not captions) are printed in sepia tones that make them hard to read without good lighting. But given the subject, this book may be best read while sitting next to a sunny window anyway.