Posts on Baroque Potion

Houdini at the Goodspeed Opera House

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Sun, 20 Aug 2017 14:18:22 -0400

Mentor

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 05:00:25 -0500

On Seeing John Waterhouse's My Sweet Rose

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 05:02:33 -0500

A Jingle from the Lockheed Skunk Works

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:59:25 -0400

Nazism

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 07:24:31 -0400

So, if you’re a grammar Nazi, then feats of form and usage that strike you as “wrong” (or inferior, or jarring) fairly leap off the page or screen at you in just the same way that my use of “so” at the start of this sentence irks all who are by now fed up with hearing that word abused that way.

The French have an expression for obvious things and especially for things obviously wrong: ça saute aux yeux! That leaps out at the eyes! Like an eye-attacking deathfrog of death. Or blindness. Or blinding obviousness.

Many folks notice deviations from canonical grammar and usage; the Nazi is the one who sees most or all, all the time, until she’s fed up. She feels welling up within her an urgent, primal cry in behalf of the norms she has embraced, the quirky irrationales of the tongues to which she’s wedded. The Nazi is the one for whom, involuntarily, *cela saute aux yeux. *Finally, with eggshell sensitivity to the descriptivists and positivists, she pipes up: “perhaps you should reconsider using ‘begs the question’ in that way.” Then she ducks.

Have you been watching the newish BBC series Sherlock? I enjoyed the Holmes stories as a child but wasn’t passionate about them. I enjoyed them again as an adult with the same result, but with an admixture of pity and contempt for the racism, sexism, inconsistency, and lack of complexity. I enjoyed them (despite these and other flaws) because they project a world and an ill-fitting inhabitant of that world, and they spark the imagination to consider how that combination might play out– a worthwhile exercise (especially for the logically inclined).

The Hand of Isaac Fawkes: Quicker than Hogarth’s Eye?

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 26 May 2014 17:29:22 -0400

This article originally appeared in The Mandala Magazine (2:1), July 2011

The Hand of Isaac Fawkes:
Quicker than Hogarth’s Eye?

Isaac Fawkes is the earliest professional magician about whom we know anything substantial, and the sparse historical record is top-heavy with praise. He is “the famous” Mr. Fawkes, who “performs… most surprizing Tricks by Dexterity of Hand.” He undertakes “Curiosities no Person in the Kingdom can pretend to show like himself.” He has “had the Honour to perform before his present Majesty King George” and other high-falutin’ types, and has done so to “great Applause.”

Isaac Fawkes

For those who know the business, it perhaps comes as no surprise that the reviewer who authored most of this praise was… Isaac Fawkes. As the research of Ricky Jay, Edwin Dawes, and especially Richard H. Evans has shown, Fawkes was a relentless self-promoter who issued a flood of publicity. Newspapers were fresh and abundant in the early 18th century, and people high and low would gather in London’s countless coffee houses to read the daily news, bicker over the issues, and click the occasional AdSense link. What were these ads like? In a typical one, Fawkes trumpets his own success at the box office and defies other magicians to match his fiscal feat: “The famous Mr. Fawks, as he modestly stiles himself, has since Bartholomew and Southwark-Fairs, put seven hundred Pounds into the Bank” and he “may certainly challenge any Conjuror of the Age to do the like” (Paulson 80).

Rearrangements, part two: A Passover/Easter Exhortation

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 23:38:25 -0400

Houdini Now and Then – Caught on the Web

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 12:25:38 -0400

This article originally appeared in The Mandala Magazine (2:5), April 2012
**
Houdini Now and Then**:
Caught on the Web

It’s tough being a fan of the Great Houdini. Your non-magician friends quickly grow tired of hearing you say “Watch me escape from this” or “Tie me up! Tighter!” The patience of your significant other wears thin as you beckon “Look at this photo of the fourth milk can!” And your magician friends who are not fans of HH (a defect we fans describe with the phrase “just doesn’t get it”) are likely to respond with “You know, he wasn’t really much of a magician” or “You know, Vernon fooled him with a double” or “You know, he was sort of an arrogant bastard to… well… everyone.”

Houdini, Germany, ca. 1902 (John Cox Collection)

OK. Yes, we know. Even so, there’s just something about Houdini the man and the myth. And being a fan is no longer about becoming Houdini (though for some it once was). Nor is it about defending Houdini. (Well, maybe a bit.) It’s about appreciating two interwoven themes in the life of Ehrich Weiss: a tragically imperfect pursuit of the American Dream and a splendidly perfect example of magical theatrics. The actor lived a life, not always well, but the character he played projected a fiction, always magnificent.

Weiss came as close as anyone to embodying the formula that Drive plus Opportunity plus Intelligence plus a dash of Charisma equals Success. Ehrich is the little guy, the underdog, the undereducated middle child of an impoverished immigrant family with no advantages. Unpolished, unsophisticated, and unpromising, he falls in love with magic (as each of us has done) and with the stage (as many of us have also done). He tolerates his miserable life in a New York sweatshop by dreaming big dreams and harboring unlikely ambitions. Finally, against all good judgment, he goes for broke and pursues a life in show business. And hundreds of odd engagements and thousands of days later, broke and broken is precisely where he ends up. Then, on the brink of failure and defeat, he’s discovered, coached, funded, and placed on a short path to unparalleled fortune and glory. By cultivating his uniqueness, working hard, and never giving up, Ehrich Weiss becomes the Great Houdini.

Rearrangements, part one: A Christmas Prayer

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 22:45:20 -0500

An Ode from Ur-Dad

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 21:04:40 -0400

On Sapiosexuality

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 03:42:16 -0400

A philosophical turn of mind

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:23:14 -0400

Discerning - A Meditation

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 03:00:08 -0400

Folly's Foliage

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 08:35:22 -0400

In the New York Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg Gets It Wrong

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 05:51:57 -0400

Bring Me The Red Pages

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:55:55 -0400

This and other pics of Codex Rossanensis courtesy of calabriaonline.com

One of the cable channels is showing the whole run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in order, and so we’re dipping in from time to time. I’m glad to report that it holds up quite well, as sitcoms go. At a certain juncture in tonight’s episode, Murray ripped the breast pocket off Ted Baxter’s jacket, and I turned to my wife and said, “Watch. Later he pulls off all three.” Sho nuff, it came to pass as I had said.

Now, normally I wouldn’t spoil in that way, but we had been discussing just how strange memory is, and this incident presented a good example. I haven’t seen that episode since it first ran in 1972. It was not deeply meaningful to me then. There was no particular reason that this detail should have lodged itself in my cortex. But there it was. Something about the visual of Eventual Captain Stubing’s sartorial assault was odd enough to stick with me involuntarily, for no particular reason, all these years… alongside who knows how much other pop-cultural clutter and high-minded ephemera.

Brains are strange. Minds are mysterious. Strangely hangs the Loop that wears the Moebius strip. But here’s the lesson of the moment: not only is a picture worth a thousand words, but it’s also an agent of Mnemosyne. And Mnemosyne likes codices. (And polkas, waltzes, and schottisches.)

A Christmas Hymn

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 22:09:48 -0500

credo ut intelligam, ambulo ut legam

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 19:47:17 -0400

Sidney Hollis Radner, 1919-2011 – A personal remembrance

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:06:38 -0400

This article first appeared in The Mandala Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 1 (July/August 2011), pp. 26-27.

Magnificent Obsession

It seems as if I’ve always known his name. No, not Houdini’s—Sid Radner’s.

That Tony Curtis movie is what first sparked my interest in the monarch of manacles. An obscure 1971 BBC documentary is what really kindled the flame. The Truth About Houdini was televised in the greater Los Angeles area around Halloween of 1976, and I vividly recall a photo in that week’s TV Guide of the real Houdini with his striped shirt, his heart-shaped hair, and his ball and chain. It was a photographic still from The Grim Game, and at the time it was one of the few photos of Houdini that I had ever seen. I carefully extracted it from the magazine and packed it away in an Antonio y Cleopatra Cigars box with my other childhood treasures. Now and again, I studied it with care.

From that moment and for many years, I sought out books and information about Houdini. Because I’m the sort who mulls over footnotes, it seemed to me that Sid Radner was popping up everywhere. Randi and Sugar cited him. Henning and Reynolds thanked him. Christopher too, and eventually Brandon and Silverman, Kalush and Sloman, Koval and Culliton. And from the very beginning, the coincidental convergence of Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner and Gilda Radner in my 1970s TV-saturated mind made Sid’s name unforgettable. I was Radner-aware.

Flash forward a couple of decades. Sometime in the middle 1990s, I was on the phone with Bill Brehm concerning the Houdini Historical Center in Appleton, and he realized I was in New England. “You should go visit Sid Radner!” he declared. “I should? I mean yes, yes. I should!” A little while later, the phone rang and Sid was inviting me and my wife to his home in Holyoke. From his perspective, I was a random stranger who happened to share his magnificent obsession. From my perspective, he was one of the last living connections to the Man Behind the Myth. Here was a chance to savor his unique perspective, and to see some of his collection.

I couldn’t wait.

Dogged determination

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:42:43 -0400

I once heard Phil Leider say of Francisco Goya that he had only ever truly longed for two things: the career of Diego Velázquez and the love of the Duchess of Alba.

The Duchess of Alba in Mourning, 1797, collection of the The New York Hispanic Society (The Hispanic Society of America)

Maybe that’s so.

His last duchess Goya depicted several times, most memorably in an enigmatic painting in which her defiant stance seems to contradict the connotations of her mourning apparel. She points down toward the dust at her feet, where some finger – his? hers? – has inscribed “solo Goya”.

Seems like something’s going on there. He kept this painting among his possessions from the time of its creation until his death in 1828.

However that may have gone, Leider was surely right about Velázquez, the greatest Spanish painter of the 17th-century, and maybe the greatest of them all – the painter of whom Ruskin supposedly said that everything he does “may be regarded as absolutely right” and to whom Ruskin ascribed “the highest reach of technical perfection yet attained in art.”

Why wouldn’t Goya want to be Velázquez redux? The earlier artist had lived a charmed life as court painter to Philip IV, under whose auspices he cranked out not only a seemingly endless supply of stock portraiture, but also some of the most psychologically and intellectually compelling images in western art.

It didn’t matter what Goya wanted, though. It was not to be. Living through the French Revolution and the Peninsular War, Goya was surrounded by destruction, corruption, incompetence, and folly. Sure, he became court painter – nominally the same position Velázquez had held. But Goya’s monarch was an imbecile surrounded by monsters. Recognizing the sad irony of his plight, Goya pulled no punches when it came time to speak truth to power.

Three Rings for the Republican Kings under the Missouri Sky

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:45 -0400

Between a Rock and a Void Place

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 21:00:38 -0400

Ryoanji garden. Photo by japan-guide.com.

In the northwest of Kyoto, in the Temple of the Dragon at Peace (Ryōan-ji), stands a garden where only the viewer grows. It is a rock garden— the greatest rock garden in the world. Since the late 1400s it has been tended daily by Zen monks in the service of those who go there to see what is or is not to be seen.

Ryoan-ji, concentric circles and lines, Blogodisea.com

The monks rake the rocks into straight lines where the large stones are absent, and they rake them into concentric circles where the large stones are present. The net effect is of an ocean’s regular waves lapping gently against every shore in a tiny archipelago, except that nothing is moving.

A rock garden such as this is an example of the art of karesansui, which is often translated “dry landscape” but which etymoliterally means “dry mountain water”; the evocation of land and sea is explicit.

There are many ways to interpret this garden and its elements.

Unable to flip the bird

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:37:20 -0400

This Is My Body

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:00:10 -0500

The Roettgen Pietà (Vesperbild), polychromed willow or poplar, 89cm, ca. 1360, Landesmuseum, Bonn

The Roettgen Pietà, a painted wooden sculpture about three feet high, tells us a couple of important things about Christian devotion in 14th-century Germany.

In German, this subject is called a Vesperbild, an image for use during ritual devotions at sundown. More broadly, it’s an example of an Andachtsbild, an image intended to stimulate meditation. For this reason, the holy figures are isolated from their narrative context and presented in a pose and a moment that amplify the statue’s emotional import.

The body of Jesus has been removed from the cross, and Mary now holds her dead son on her lap and laments his passing. The poignancy of the statue resides in a cluster of double meanings. Just as Mary once held the baby on her lap, she now holds the man. Before, he was brimming with new life; now he is beyond life’s end. Once he was beautiful; now he is ugly. Once perfect and intact, now distorted and destroyed.

The anonymous sculptor captures these antinomies in visual and tactile form. Mary is straight and rectangular: her knees and hips bend at ninety degrees so that her lower legs and torso form a visual rectangle that establishes the basic order of the artwork. In contrast to her rigid, vertical, rectilinear form, the body of Jesus spreads in a zig-zagging diagonal from upper left to lower right. He bends at the ankles, the knees, and the hips, while his arms extend limply, one dangling straight down and the other resting on his mother’s forearm. His enormous, heavy head falls back, bending his neck at an impossible angle and casting the thorns of his crown in sharp profile against the negative space. In macabre harmony, Mary’s oversized head tilts slightly off center, toward his, as she stares blankly at the space before them and contemplates the horror of the moment.

The weight and angle of his head, his gaping mouth, his dangling arm, and his broken pose emphasize that Jesus is dead. Amplifying this point, the artist presents the wounds in his feet, hands, and side as plump blossoms of gushing blood held constant. Red paint describes the course of blood that once dripped down his arms, and rivulets of red make a maze of his forehead where thorns have harmed him. His near nudity and the gore of his wounds stand in contrast to the splendor of his mother’s blue garment, once partly gilt.

Steve Jobs and Machine Beauty

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:10:51 -0400

The Brothers Houdini

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 23:53:06 -0400

Creighton Gilbert (1924-2011)

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:30:22 -0400

Creighton Gilbert, the author of many fascinating works of art history, has died.

I entered Yale’s graduate program in art history with the idea of studying under Creighton. Although my evolving interests eventually drew me toward a specialization in Northern Renaissance and Baroque, I enjoyed several seminars and many illuminating conversations with him. I’ll leave it to the obituaries to provide a proper overview of his life and works. This is a personal remembrance.

On the heels of his rich and controversial work Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals, Creighton offered a seminar on the origins of Caravaggio’s art. Northern Italian painting before Caravaggio had long held Creighton’s attention; his 1955 dissertation under Friedlaender (who was then working on Caravaggio Studies) was a monograph on Girolamo Savoldo. Being somewhat taken with Caravaggio and his followers, and being so accustomed to thinking of him as revolutionary, I was quite eager to do the reverse engineering that Prof. Gilbert proposed. So Creighton guided me into a study of il Moretto da Brescia and helped me to see what was, and what was not, a good argument in relation to questions of influence.

During this time, I went often to Creighton’s office hours and pelted him with questions, these often pertaining to the history of art history. I asked him about his favorite instructors and educational experiences, for example, and with a gleam in his eye he recalled, as if he had felt it that very morning, the excitement and hunger with which he and his fellow students used to travel across town (to a competing institution) to hear Meyer Schapiro.

Prehistoric painting

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:05:41 -0500

My earliest childhood ambition (at least in response to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”) was to become a paleontologist. This fascination with prehistory arose in part, as it must with many children, in response to some well chosen dinosaur toys. I learned to say and spell the names of the various species and staged mighty, improbable battles on plateaus made of sofa cushions. At some point, a field trip to the La Brea tar pits[link unavailable] catalyzed my interest and I began to read whatever I could find not only about Mesozoic megacritters but also about the Pleistocene scene. I was particularly interested in the edge cases – misapprehensions such as “brontosaurus” and mysteries such as the Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon nexus.

Eventually, this obsession gave way to another (and then another, and then…). I never returned to it in a serious or specializing way, but I continue to feel the allure of prehistoric artifacts and the poorly understood cultures that produced them. Interpreting art historical objects unaccompanied by textual or verbal cues – interpreting them only in relation to site-specific material factors and explicitly speculative cultural models – has a way of infusing complex questions of methodology with simplicity, clarity, and humility.

I recently received a copy of the latest (8th) edition of Janson’s History of Art and since I happened to have an earlier edition (4th) on hand, I took interest in what had changed in just shy of twenty years. The quantity of color photographs, like the price, has increased dramatically. The production values are better. The earlier text was Anthony Janson’s adaptation of his father’s famous work. In the preface, the son embraces Horst Janson’s traditional historiography and (with a profession of sympathy if not regret) fends off the encroaching “new art history”. In contrast, the new volume has been revised or rewritten by a committee of six specialists; after a score of years the vitality and value of the (by-now-not-so-) new art history is a settled matter.

On the Fonthill Vase

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:51:12 -0500

It’s a Carnival of Art History!

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:06:11 -0500

Byron’s Quick and Dirty Guide to Persuasive College Writing

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:02:20 -0400

Immersion

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 12:29:54 -0400

In the first post in this series, I discussed ways in which the space around a single figural sculpture becomes a tacit part of the artwork by virtue of the moving viewer’s interpretive act. In the second post, I considered how the spatial relationships among multiple figures in a more complex figural sculpture can provide interpretive clues and cues that lead to a rich understanding not only of the fiction’s virtual space, but also of its mental, social, and emotional spaces.

Now I would like to consider immersion, which I will treat as a set of visual, spatial, and kinetic opportunities afforded the viewer of an artwork by virtue of its scale, situation, and referential complexity. I will offer two examples, one which invites the interpreter to go around and upon and another which invites the interpreter to go within and beneath.

Inception: A meta-magical matryoshka

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:44:59 -0400

Technology

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:07:49 -0400

In the previous post in this series, I considered how the pose and three-dimensionality of a figural sculpture support its interpretation. I noted that representational sculptures reside at the intersection of what is actual and what is virtual. Because it is there and we can regard it in many ways, a statue shows us part of a projected fictional world and implies or suggests even more, unrealized in the sculpture, about that world. The artist leaves its underdetermined fictional details to the viewer’s imagination.

I described how different vantages on Michelangelo’s David yield somewhat different understandings of the figure, and I explained how Bernini later carried vantage-based variations to an energetic extreme in his own David. From these observations and others, I drew a conclusion: although we typically think of movies in relation to photography and painting, film (like its cousin, theater) is more akin to sculpture.

Asserting a close kinship among sculpture, theater, and film raises issues of technology, so I would like to recommend a way of thinking about technology and to illustrate how it can inform the interpretation of art.

Diegesis

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:01:37 -0400

Poor Agostino di Duccio. He had learned his craft under the most innovative and imaginatively expressive sculptural master of the quattrocento, Donatello. But Agostino could not have been happy on the mountain in Carrara as he oversaw the quarrying of a shallow, broad block of marble some eighteen feet long. Over the course of his career, Agostino had taken to bas-relief work of the sort one finds on the façade of a church or a palazzo. He had created grand works in terra cotta, too, but clay is a thing far different from stone.

Nevertheless, here he was, perhaps because the elders in Florence had decided to make good on a fifty year old plan to erect a huge statue of Donatello’s making on a buttress of the cathedral. Then in his late 70s, Donatello was no longer in a position to give more than nominal attention to such a project. To Agostino fell the labor.

What can change the nature of a song?

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:19:25 -0500

I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite pecs.

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:05:36 -0400

News, nihil obstatrics, and gynecommodity

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:34:44 -0400

In the gossip-driven feeding frenzy that keeps alive the tawdry tale of rising and declining wannabe John Edwards (now with video), the New York Daily News wins quip of the day[link unavailable] :

Hunter had been hired by the Edwards campaign to videotape the candidate’s movements, but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform.

The commodification of sexual scandal is nothing new, of course, and in times like these more than ever the media are motivated to regard as “news” whatever will maximize sales. Thus, there’s a regrettable tendency to spew rather than eschew.

What’s cheapened in yellowing press, beyond the players’ tattered reputations, is a factor arguably worth conserving: the vitality of sexual allusion as a literary device.

For some of their puissance, these worthy tropes depend on indirection– a wink, a nod, a knowing glance. But in a cultural milieu where everyone seems to say entirely too much altogether, and where even the king is in the altogether, it’s hard for prose to play allusively without seeming turgid.

But will it sell?

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:02:40 -0400

Partial Recall: Phil Leider

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:58:16 -0400

Hillary in Analog

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:14:52 -0500

Evidence in Art: Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson

dcbyron@gmail.com (David Byron) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:15:55 -0500

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson, oil on canvas, 1893, may be seen at the Hampton University Museum in Hampton, Virginia.*

Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson presents a memorable and moving scene: light from an unseen fireplace spreads leftward across a ramshackle interior where an old man transmits to his young pupil a bit of musical lore, a rudiment of learning, a measure of possibility. Materially, the painting consists of some oil-based pigments smeared purposively onto a rectangle of canvas. When it comes to interpretation, we grasp the artist’s pictorial illusion without difficulty and quickly begin to ponder themes that the illusion seems to address: paternal affection, the ages of man, the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next, the appreciation of values not rooted in material wealth, the bittersweet blessing of joy in the midst of deprivation, and perhaps others.

What is the relationship between the set of material facts about the painting– how it actually looks as a paint-smeared stretch of fabric– and the set of claims we might reasonably make about its meaning? How does Tanner’s painting work as a meaning-making machine?

The painting is nearly monochromatic. Earth tones define the planks of the floor, the chair on the left, the coat draped over that chair, the rear wall and cabinet, the old man’s shirt, trousers, and shoes, the boy’s shirt and shorts, and of course the ash-black complexion of the old man and the golden brown hues of his pupil. The only colors breaking this homogeneity are the yellow rags and blue shadows in the background.