Investors have sent stocks and bonds higher on expectations of a soft landing. But some Republicans think the central bank overstepped its bounds.

© Richard Drew/Associated Press

After film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, a slate of contenders has emerged. Still, there are few front-runners.

© Focus Features, via Associated Press

A large number of the people who make decisions in this country have either seen violence over the past decade or felt the pressure and constraint of potential violence.

Among Ovid’s Heroines, Ariadne is in a class of her own. She’s the only one who not only survives, but emerges from her crisis rather well in the end. The daughter of King Minos of Crete, her half-brother, from her mother’s extraordinary bestial relationship, was the Minotaur. Her father blamed the Greeks for the death of her full brother Androgeus, so demanded they provided the Minotaur’s annual diet of seven young men and seven young women. The Minotaur was kept concealed inside the Labyrinth, an ingenious maze designed and built by the master artificer Daedalus.

Theseus was the son of King Aegeus of Athens, and decided to put an end to this attrition of young Greeks by killing the Minotaur. The only way he could gain access to it was by including himself in that year’s batch of sacrificial victims. When Theseus arrived on Crete, Ariadne fell desperately in love with him.

Ariadne came up with an ingenious plan to enable Theseus to make his way back out of the Labyrinth once he had killed the Minotaur: she provided him with a ball of thread, which he used to mark his route of entry. He could then retrace his steps along the line of thread and escape. In return for this assistance, Theseus agreed that, once he had killed the Minotaur and escaped, he would marry her.

When it was Theseus’ turn to enter the Labyrinth, Ariadne held the end of the thread, he went in, killed the Minotaur, and found his way back to her. They wasted no time, and sailed immediately from Crete, stopping off overnight on the island of Dia (Naxos), where they consummated their marriage. The following morning, Theseus and his crew set sail before Ariadne had awoken, abandoning her on the island, as she watched Theseus’ ship heading towards the horizon and Athens beyond.

John William Waterhouse paints the moment that Ariadne (1898) starts to wake, as Theseus’ ship has just sailed. As she hasn’t yet realised she has been abandoned, she lies back at ease. On and under the couch are a couple of leopards, a clear reference to the imminent arrival of Bacchus, although his chariot is more usually drawn by lions or tigers.

By the moment shown in Angelica Kauffman’s Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus (1774), she has seen Theseus’ ship heading back to Athens, and is now swooning in the realisation that she has been jilted.

The painting that perhaps captures best Ariadne ready to write her letter to Theseus, is Paulus Bor’s Ariadne (1630-35). She looks desolated, is still undressed from bed, and clutches the thread with which she had saved his life, the thread that she thought held them together as a couple, only now there is no one at the other end.

Evelyn De Morgan envisages her alone on the beach, in her painting of Ariadne in Naxos (1877). It’s possible that Ariadne had slept there, in the large brown blanket still wrapped around her legs, but there’s now no trace of her former husband, not even a sail on the horizon.

The other painting that’s truly Ovidian is Herbert James Draper’s Ariadne (c 1905). Still half-naked, kneeling on a rock by the sea, she beats her breast in the grief of Theseus’ betrayal. This is a direct reference to Ovid’s lines in Ariadne’s hypothetical letter.

Ovid’s letter also contains some subtle allusions as to what happened next, but is written in ignorance of that. In a remarkable turn of fortune, who should turn up on the island of Dia/Naxos but the god Bacchus, who promptly marries Ariadne, and carries her off to Olympus with him. Maybe Bacchus’ lifestyle didn’t make him an ideal husband, but this was far better than the fate of Ovid’s other heroines.

Eugène Delacroix’s Autumn – Bacchus and Ariadne (1856-63) shows the moment of his arrival, as he helps the despondent Ariadne back up from her gloom. Behind is his chariot, here drawn by lionesses.

Jean François de Troy’s Ariadne on Naxos (1725) is the ideal romantic ending, the couple staring longingly at one another as putti cavort with fruit. But look carefully at what’s going on down at the beach, in the background.

Maurice Denis’ Bacchus and Ariadne from 1907 is a radically modern treatment of the story of Ariadne’s abandonment on the island of Naxos, which could be mistaken for a recreational beach scene at a coastal resort. Buried in there are some more traditional references.

Just to the right of centre, Dionysus stands behind Ariadne, helping to hold a red and white striped cloak or sheet on her left shoulder. Ariadne’s three attendant nymphs are resting on the rocks at the left. Various bacchantes and other figures are riding black horses down in the water at the right, one of them clutching the thyrsus (staff). There is no sign of Silenius, a chariot, or big cats, and a yacht at the right edge may not have anything to do with the narrative.

My favourite painting of this scene has to be Lovis Corinth’s vivacious and complex Ariadne on Naxos (1913). He uses multiplex narrative to tell the whole story, from Theseus’ betrayal at the left, to the arrival of Bacchus at the right.

None, though, shows Ariadne’s revenge on Theseus.

Theseus had made an elaborate arrangement with his father, the king of Athens, to signal to him the outcome of his mission. When Theseus had sailed from Greece, his ship had black sails. The agreement was that he would change those sails to normal white or, more probably, tan ones in the event that he had successfully killed the Minotaur.

In his rush to abandon Ariadne, Theseus forgot to change the black sails. As the ship approached the Greek mainland, his father noticed this. Knowing that meant that they would have to continue sending young Greeks to their death on Crete, King Aegeus threw himself to his death from a cliff. Theseus was broken by grief when he realised that his carelessness had caused the suicide of his father. I wonder if Bacchus and Ariadne ever visited Theseus to remind him of how his treachery backfired.

Not only were monkeys and apes featured in some early European paintings, but in the early 1600s they featured in their own sub-genre of singerie, French for monkeying, as in monkeying about. In these, monkeys dressed up as humans assume the role of humans in an everyday activity. Among the artists who painted singeries were members of the Teniers family.

David Teniers the Younger’s A Monkey Encampment from 1633 shows monkeys in human roles in a camp. They sit talking outside a large tent, staff a stall, and in the background are arriving at a military meeting, presumably involved in the recruitment of the population into its army or militia.

By about 1650, Abraham Teniers developed this into his comic undated Barbershop with Monkeys and Cats. Two cats are sat in the chairs in a barbers, and their attendants are monkeys. The barbershop shown is traditional in that it not only caters for the cutting of hair, but also has facilities and instruments for minor surgery, hence the use of hot coals in cleaning the surgical instruments.

When Holland grew rich in the Golden Age, much of those profits were gambled on tulip flowers, during what became known as Tulipmania or Tulipomania. Bulbs of varieties in demand fetched extremely high prices, which speculation drove into a bubble. When reality returned to the market, prices crashed and fortunes were lost.

Jan Brueghel the Younger’s Allegory of Tulipmania from about 1645 shows tulip trading during its height, with each figure a monkey dressed in human clothing.

Anthropomorphism of monkeys persisted long after the Golden Age, and elsewhere in Europe.

Antoine Watteau’s tondo of The Monkey Sculptor from about 1710 is another singerie, this time set in the sculptor’s studio.

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Darwin was busy unravelling the mysteries of evolution, singerie came back into vogue. One of its exponents was Zacharie Noterman, who painted Monkey Business after about 1850. A monkey dressed as a businessman is plodding through his paperwork, as the bartender stands in front of him, smoking his clay pipe.

Monkeys became popular visual devices for those who wanted to criticise juries and organisers of art exhibitions for excluding their art, and showing members as monkeys is wicked satire.

Hans Canon’s African Jury Meeting from 1870 makes just that comment about a jury which had apparently rejected the artist’s work. In the top right corner is the upper face of the artist himself.

By the end of the eighteenth century, many artists were attempting to portray animals and birds more faithfully to nature, in paintings becoming increasingly objective.

George Garrard’s A Marmoset in Three Attitudes from 1793 appears to have been intended for a reference description of the species, setting it in its natural habitat and in three postures which the artist took as being characteristic. Unlike later illustrations, though, this painting is painterly in its depiction of vegetation, and is by no means academic or dry.

For one or two artists, singeries were not enough. Gabriel von Max probably painted more works of monkeys or apes than any other artist, from models he kept at his residence by Starnberger Lake, in the Bavarian countryside, where he painted each summer.

In von Max’s Monkeys as Judges of Art (1889), a crowd of monkeys are packed together in front of a canvas which already has a gilded frame, and will shortly be announcing their decision on that work. The artist avoids anthropomorphism, and his monkeys look very natural and non-human.

His undated A Visit to the Artist’s Studio shows a similar group of monkeys watching their leader handle von Max’s paint and brushes in his studio. I suspect that the artist may have supplemented his sketches of the group with some photos, as it appears implausible for the monkeys to have remained in much the same positions for long.

Von Max appears to have had tender and personal relationships with his monkeys. In Go to Sleep! from 1900, a young woman, possibly his daughter, is nursing an infant monkey who is staring with tired eyes into the distance. Charles Darwin’s book The Descent of Man had been published in 1871, so by this time von Max would have been well aware of the proposal that monkeys and humans had common ancestors.

Von Max’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1910) shows him at the age of seventy with another young ape.

Finally, contemporary artist Serhiy Kolyada uses the figure of a painting monkey at the heart of The Theory of Origins (2012). The artist explains:
A painting monkey perhaps a commentary of contemporary art? Protective of its bottle of Teacher’s whisky and looking over its shoulder at a naked Teacher pointing to the supposed “cradle-of-civilization” Africa on a world map; both Teachers providing pupils with an escape? Or knowledge? An Egyptian pyramid, Stonehenge, Mount Kailish, the Temple of Tibet, a UFO and dinosaur, Sator Arepo and yin-&-yang all tease but fail to appease. Puzzles, a Bible, equations and runes add to the confusion, offering no real explanation except to say: Maybe Origin Theories are a mess and human beings have no idea, in fact, of their origins on this planet.

男性到了一定年纪后，会不自觉地掉入「好为人师」的陷阱。有爹味是其次的，那最多不招人喜欢；最要命的是，会因此被困在原地。

不进步有问题吗？

没有，只要愿意，怎么躺都可以。但这里的问题不是躺，而是困在原地是一种不自知的状态，被困住了还不知道自己被监禁的真实，这才是最糟糕的。

潮来潮去，如藤壶，如游勇，或沉底，或游猎，都是选择，但在睡梦中被流沙淹没，实在不能算一种舒服的死法。