Saturday, May 16, 2015

Woodblock.

This is coolbert:

As seen at the excellent Internet web site Scholars-Stage thanks to the tip from that other excellent Internet web site Isegoria.net.

Japanese traditional art form with the military context.

Ukiyo-e!

"When Modern War Met an Antique Art"  by T. Greer.

"We associate ukiyo-e prints with traditional Japanese landscapes or pastoral settings, episodes from Japanese myths or historical epics, and scenes of courtesan life in Edo. It can be a bit bewildering when we see the same art style and production methods used to produce more modern images. This should not be too much of a surprise, however: the most famous of the great Japanese woodblock artists died only a few decades before Commodore Perry brought his black boats to Edo bay. Much of their era would disappear in the miraculous changes of the Meiji revolution, but as the prints included here show quite clearly,  much of the old order lived on into the 20th century."

"These prints all depict episodes from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 or the Russo-Japanese War that was waged a decade later."

As you can well imagine, this particular woodblock print is of obvious immediate interest to me.


A traditional woodblock print as done by and described as: "Yasuda Hampo, 'Picture of the Eighth Attack on Port Arthur. The Flagship of Russia Was Destroyed by the Torpedo of Our Navy
and Admiral Makaroff Drowned' (1905)". Click on image to see and enlarged view.

Called a torpedo but more correctly that Russian ship sunk by a moored naval sea mine.

This was the sinking of the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk. "Petropavlovsk . . . was the lead ship of the Petropavlovsk class of pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Russian Navy. Petropavlovsk . . . On 13 April 1904, the battleship was sunk after striking two mines near Port Arthur. 652 men and 27 officers died, including the Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov and renowned war artist Vasily Vereshchagin"

That device we moderns refer to as a torpedo a self-propelled underwater explosive device as fired by a submarine [not totally exclusively so] and running either on the surface or submerged!

coolbert.

No comments:

Post a Comment