Mervovignian Brooch, Made In Copper Alloy Covered In Gold,set With S W Garnets And A Sapphire, 700 A.D.

And Phaethon, as he inhaled the air, burning and scorching as a furnace blast, and saw destruction on the flaming world, and his great chariot wreathed in quenchless fires, was suddenly unable to endure the heat, the smoke and cinders, and he swooned away.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 2

Self Reflected, Greg Dunn / Hannibal 1.02 Amuse-Bouche

les miserables 1964: Marius and les amis

The Wilton Diptych (detail), Unknown Master, 1395

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - Shadows and Silhouettes

No man needs nothing.

literature:  —  dorian gray  { the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde }

“Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do.”

“But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? What then?”

T.E. Lawrence once owned a bronze replica of Hypnos, the god of sleep.

In 1909, when he was on his way back from a tour of Syria, T. E. Lawrence passed through Naples and wrote a friend: "The bronzes in the Naples museum are beyond words". He paid a Neapolitan bronze foundry eight francs for a flawed freehand copy of the Hypnos head now in the British Museum (itself a Roman copy of a Greek work dating from the fourth century BC).

He wrote to his brother Will that it was "very good work, but a bad cast, modem naturally. I asked the price and tumbled down with it to eight francs, little more than the value of the metal. You will admire it immensely; and I'll give you five minutes to find out the fault in the casting".

After returning to Oxford he placed it on a seat in the bay window of his study in the garden bungalow, where it became his most cherished ornament. According to Vyvyan Richards, Lawrence would lie on the floor and contemplate it. He wrote that "nothing, not even the dawn–can disturb me in my curtains: only the slow crumblings of the coals in the fire: they get so red & throw such splendid glimmerings on the Hypnos & the brass-work". He also wrote to his brother Arnold: "I would rather possess a fine piece of sculpture than anything in the world".

Source

Hôtel de Ville de La Rochelle, France, photo by Arnaud Atreide

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947)