There is more to Fall than merely allergies. Not only is autumn the season of turning
leaves and turning of sports from baseball to football, but it is also the
season for Renaissance Faires. We are
fortunate to have the largest (this is Texas) Renfaire in the US, although
purists sniff that our Faire is more like a combination flea market and costume
party. I had the pleasure of working
there for a few years, so I am more familiar with Renfaires than most, and I
still enjoy them. My theme this week is
about the Renaissance in general and their Faires in particular.
I was at a
Renaissance fair a few weekends back and there was this blacksmith putting on a
forging show. At the end, he took questions from people. Someone asked,
"What's your favorite thing to make?"
Without
skipping a beat, he responded with "Babies."
“Dad, will
you pay for my ticket to the Renaissance festival?”
“Sorry,
son. I’m baroque”
I
volunteer part time as a jouster at the Renaissance fair.
I’m a free
lancer.
Hundreds
of years ago vulgarity was commonplace, people were often drunk before noon,
and public urination was not unusual.
At least
that's what I tried telling the security guard at the renaissance faire…
My wife was
on her lady time while at the Renaissance Faire and told me she was craving dark
chocolate.
I asked
her if the craving was period specific.
My
girlfriend and I went to the Renaissance fair and saw a minstrel get cut in the
arm
He's gonna
be okay though, my girlfriend had just the thing to stop the flow of minstrel
blood.
I've been
trying to get the local renaissance fair reenactors to change the way things
are run...
It's an
exercise in feudality!
My dad set
up a booth at a Renaissance Fair where people can dress up and get their pictures
made as Frodo from Lord of the Rings exclusively.
He called
it his Frodo-Booth.
I just
paid for a boat ride to a magic themed renaissance carnival. The price was
reasonable.
It was a
fair fairy faire ferry fare.
"A
Riot at the Renaissance Faire!"
Police
intervened before anyone began luting.
“Dad, can
I go to the renaissance festival?” Dad: “No, you’re grounded.”
Son: No
fair!!
Dad:
Exactly what I said.
My
wife and I were planning trips for the summer.
She is a
regular attendee of the Renaissance Fair, but I have never gone. I really want
to go, so she said she will take me this year. When I brought up the county
fair at the end of the summer, I found out that she had never been to it. I
offered to take her to that. She was all in board with that idea.
"Good,"
I said. "That sounds like a Fair trade to me!"
I started
studying art history.
I'm really
learning a lot. This painter named 'Renaissance' is just amazing.
“I heard
the Renaissance painters had a brush with greatness.”
And I
will finish up with a long, involved technical dissertation.
Several
years ago, a group of artistic polymaths decided to mathematically represent
different styles of painting.
Each of the polymaths was a leading figure in a different field of mathematics,
and each pursued and studied a different style of painting. Together, they
decided that if they could create mathematical expressions for each style of
art, they could decide which was superior.
The first polymath was an expert in isoperimetry, and he was absolutely
obsessed with history.. This polymath's passion for history bled into his
artistic pursuits, as well; he found that the works of the old masters,
particularly Renaissance artists, could never be topped. For most of his
adulthood, he spent his downtime trying to replicate the painting of
Renaissance artists in modern settings, but he could never quite get it right.
Using his isoperimetric expertise, this polymath created a geometric formula
that succinctly captured the essence of Renaissance paintings. He called this
the Renaissance Equation.
The second polymath was an expert in set theory and an outspoken advocate for
Impressionism. He found beauty in the way impressionists introduced the
movement of life into their paintings in the same way he felt he encapsulated
the movement of objects between sets. Impressionism and set theory, for this
polymath, were two sides of the same coin—two objects in the same set. He
decided to use set theory to categorize and represent the necessary and
sufficient qualities for something to be considered impressionist to create a
fuzzy set with extremities reaching from not-impressionist to impressionist.
Ultimately, this led to a breakthrough that led to an algorithm that could
categorize any painting in an impressionist spectrum, and this perfect
categorization furthered his belief that impressionism was the most beautiful
style of painting. He called this the Impressionist Explanation.
The third polymath was an expert in isomorphisms. He saw true beauty in the
ways in which an isomorphism could be distinguished, and could not be
distinguished, based on the elements of the morphism from which they were
reversed and inverted. This polymath believed that the value of isomorphisms,
more than anything else in mathematics, depended on the perspective of the
viewer. He looked at Neo-Surrealism in much the same way; from some
perspectives, two isomorphisms could be differentiated in the same way two
Neo-Surrealist paintings could be. He mathematically mapped countless
Neo-Surrealist paintings and built an algorithm that could utilize much of his
research into isomorphisms to differentiate between them. His results, which
suggested that Neo-Surrealist paintings were all isomorphisms, proved to him
that his favorite genre of art was superior. He called his work the Neo-Surrealist
Formula.
The final polymath was an expert in orthogonal matrices and a lover of Cubism.
He viewed matrices as the foundation of higher mathematical thought, and
because the determinant of an orthogonal matrix must always be 1 or negative 1,
he believed his study to be the purest form of mathematics. Naturally, he fell
into Cubism. Though Cubism did not represent perfectly orthogonal figures, this
polymath believed this was not a failure of Cubism, but a failure of art as a
whole—the need to portray broader themes caused the cubes not to be perfectly
orthogonal. Despite this, the fourth polymath traced the primary vectors in the
most prominent paintings of each genre, and he found that the vectors in Cubist
paintings most closely resembled the orthonormal vectors he had long studied.
He published his findings as the Cubism Experiment.
After the four polymaths had completed their individual projects, they convened
to discuss their results. Even after seeing the work the others had put in,
each polymath still trusted his own mathematical formula and believed his
favorite genre of art was the best.
To reach a
final conclusion, the mathematicians decided to submit their findings in a
single bundle to a group of neutral mathematicians from all over the world.
They
combined their work into a single expression of paintings, which they called:
Paintings: Renaissance, Impressionist, Neo-Surrealist, and Cubist Expressions. Within weeks of publication, this set of data became widely known as:
The
artists’ formulae known as PRINCE.
