Because most fish aim to spend their entire lives underwater, where few artists go to paint, fish are seldom seen in paintings. That contrasts with those who try to capture fish by going fishing, an activity I have previously covered in this series in this article and a second.

Most of the aquatic creatures seen in paintings of myths, including those accompanying the god Neptune, appear to be caricatures of marine mammals including dolphins, or sea-monsters bearing no resemblance to fish.

One exception to this is Joseph Stella’s The Birth of Venus from 1922. As might be expected, his treatment is completely novel and seems to have benefited from visits to an aquarium. Aphrodite is shown at sea, in the upper part of the painting her upper body above the waterline, and below morphing into an aquatic plant underneath, where it finally merges into a helical shell. Matching the birds and flowers above the water are brightly coloured fish below.

Another interesting exception is Joachim Beuckelaer’s depiction of water in his Four Elements cycle from 1569. This shows A Fish Market with the Miraculous Draught of Fishes in the Background, the one place even landlubbers would come across fish, combined with the Gospel story in the far distance.

In the summer of 1872, as a one-off, Gustave Courbet painted an allegorical still life of The Trout, that is “hooked and bleeding from the gills”, a powerful expression of his personal feelings after being imprisoned for damage to the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune the previous year.

JMW Turner recruits a school of fish for effect in his Slave Ship from 1840. His threatening sky and violent sea put the ship in the middle distance, silhouetted against the blood-red sky. The foreground is filled with the ghastly evidence of the slaves who were cast overboard.

Seen in amongst a feeding frenzy of fish and scavenging seabirds are hands raised from the waves in their final plea for rescue, a gruesome manacled leg, and various shackles used to restrain the slaves when in transit. Further back on the left a vague white form could represent spirits, and on the right is the thrashing tail of a sea monster.

Fish make the occasional appearance alongside legendary mermaids, as in Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids from 1879. These mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails, and frolic with fish under the light of the moon.

Historically the most important fish in Europe has been the humble herring. In the Middle Ages herring fisheries prospered and were the foundation of Copenhagen and Great Yarmouth, and influential in early Amsterdam. They remain strongly associated with the Netherlands and Nordic countries, where they are commonly preserved in brine (soused) or pickled.

Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Selling Herring (c 1661-62) is going from door to door with her fish, here trying to convince an old woman standing with a stick at the door of her dilapidated cottage in the Dutch Republic.

In Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Home for Dinner from 1917, a young girl holding some fresh fish stands talking to a man with a spade.

JMW Turner toured the West Country as far as Cornwall in 1811, and the Tate Gallery has his ninety-page sketchbook recording many views of the Cornish coast from that visit. He later developed several into fine oil paintings, although it’s unclear whether this watercolour of St. Mawes, Cornwall, from about 1823, had its origins in those sketches and studies.

As with his paintings of other coastal areas, Turner shows a fishing boat coming in to a beach to land its catch, and the great activity in the open air fish market in the foreground. Behind are typical Cornish cottages stepped up from the shore to the top of the coastal cliffs, and the castles of St Mawes (closer) and Pendennis, in Falmouth (more distant, on the other side of this estuary).

Richard Dadd’s Fish Market by the Sea, from about 1860, shows an impromptu open-air fish market, run by the fishermen’s wives, to sell their husband’s catch as soon as it had been landed.

Trim is one of the Dark Arts of SSDs. It’s important if not essential, but it’s not easy to discover whether an SSD is Trimming properly. Some say that you need to enable Trim for external SSDs, yet others don’t and never seem to encounter a problem.

Why Trim?

Data stored on a hard disk doesn’t need to be erased before the space it takes can be reused, but SSDs work differently. Before a page of SSD memory can be reused, it must be erased, and that’s the part that takes time. If a fast SSD had to erase each page when it needed to write to it, that SSD wouldn’t be much faster than a good hard disk.

To overcome this problem, when the file system has pages that no longer contain data in use, it should tell the SSD that they’re free so they can be erased to prepare them for reuse. In SATA SSDs that’s performed by the TRIM command, and its equivalent for faster NVMe SSDs is DEALLOCATE, although it’s the older command whose name has stuck.

Modern SSDs also perform their own housekeeping, and in many cases may not need to be Trimmed at all. However, when an operating system and SSD both support Trim (or DEALLOCATE), that should ensure optimum performance.

When an SSD doesn’t get Trimmed and can’t compensate for that with its own housekeeping routines, its performance suffers noticeably. This is most commonly seen with SATA SSDs that would normally have write speeds of around 500 MB/s. When they need a good Trim, that can fall to around 100 MB/s, the same speed you’d expect from a hard disk. But this doesn’t affect read speeds at all, so one way of telling whether an SSD needs Trimming is to measure its read and write speeds.

Which SSDs are Trimmed?

You’ll be delighted to know that, for their relatively high cost, all Apple internal SSDs Trim reliably, without any need for tweaking any settings.

As a rule, external SSDs don’t Trim by default if they have a SATA interface, giving them read and write speeds of about 500 MB/s. Those with faster NVMe interfaces, including those connected by Thunderbolt 3-5 or USB4, should Trim by default when they’re formatted in APFS.

System Information normally lists a drive’s Trim support, if you can find the right section. Browse its Hardware section to discover the protocols the drive supports. These can be confusing, as the SSD and its enclosure may well have multiple entries in different headings, and some of the information may appear conflicting.

USB4 drives operating in Thunderbolt 3 mode can also be confusing. When connected to an Intel Mac (which doesn’t support USB4 itself) they may be reported in the Thunderbolt/USB4 device tree as being USB4.0 operating in Thunderbolt 3 mode, with a link speed of up to 40 Gbit/s, then in the NVMExpress device tree with a link width of x4 and speed of 8.0 GT/s.

SATA drives should appear in the Serial-ATA device tree, even though they might be connected via Thunderbolt 3, and you may see a statement of Trim support.

Device trees worth inspecting include: NVMExpress, PCI, SATA, Storage, Thunderbolt/USB4 and USB.

Which file systems Trim?

Trim is well-demonstrated in SSDs formatted in APFS, and is known to occur in HFS+. However, old PC files systems like ExFAT don’t have any Trim support, and it can’t be enabled in a Mac at least.

Unfortunately, as HFS+ is now an old Mac filesystem, it can’t readily be seen in log entries, while those from APFS contain valuable detail that makes them suitable for use when testing for Trim.

How to verify Trim

Use Mints to verify whether your external drive does get trimmed correctly when it’s mounted, using its Disk Mount feature. In essence, what you do is:

1. Eject and disconnect the external drive.
2. Connect the drive at a known time, according to the Mac’s clock.
3. Leave the Mac alone until all that disk’s volumes have been mounted.
4. 20 seconds after connecting the drive, or 10 seconds after the last of its volumes has mounted, open the Mints app.
5. Click on the Disk Mount button, and set the time in its log window to the time at which you connected the drive.
6. Set the period to a minimum of 20 seconds, long enough to cover the period up to 10 seconds after the last volume mounted.
7. Uncheck all the category checkboxes except the first, APFS +.
8. Click the Get log button.
9. When log entries are displayed, scroll to the end and look back for APFS trim entries.

This only works for APFS, though, as log entries for HFS+ don’t appear to show Trimming in this way.

Those entries are characteristically of the form
23-03-25 19:01:06.930 apfs spaceman_scan_free_blocks:3311: disk5 scan took 0.030901 s (no trims)
23-03-25 19:01:10.960 apfs spaceman_scan_free_blocks:3293: disk5 scan took 4.030544 s, trims took 3.944665 s
23-03-25 19:01:10.960 apfs spaceman_scan_free_blocks:3295: disk5 471965989 blocks free in 9131 extents
23-03-25 19:01:10.960 apfs spaceman_scan_free_blocks:3303: disk5 471965989 blocks trimmed in 9131 extents (432 us/trim, 2314 trims/s)
23-03-25 19:01:10.960 apfs spaceman_scan_free_blocks:3306: disk5 trim distribution 1:1461 2+:1267 4+:4121 16+:785 64+:822 256+:675

Check that the named disk, here disk5, is the SSD or APFS container on the SSD that you’re checking. If it has entries reporting that blocks have been trimmed, this confirms that the SSD has been trimmed as expected. Disks that don’t trim normally only show the first of that series, ending in the words no trims.

It’s possible to enable Trim for all external storage using the trimforce command, but you should normally verify that your external SSD does Trim correctly when mounted.

If you have an SSD that hasn’t been Trimming and is suffering poor write performance, you may be able to help it recover by copying its contents to another disk, then erasing its volumes, or the whole container. Those should return their whole contents as free space, and so enable the SSD’s own housekeeping to erase them in readiness for reuse.

Painting in the Golden Age didn’t occur in isolation, but was greatly influenced by artists of Flanders and Brabant to the south, many of whom visited or migrated to the Dutch Republic. Some Dutch artists effectively exported their landscape and other skills to Italy, where there was a group of emigrés known as the Bentvueghels (meaning birds of a feather) between about 1620-1710.

From the late 1590s until well into the following century, the distinctive style of Caravaggio (1571-1610) drew followers across Europe, most of whom saw his paintings when they were training in Italy. This wave of Caravaggism spread when those painters returned to their native lands, including the states of the Dutch Republic.

Caravaggio’s style was by no means unique, and his use of chiaroscuro had been anticipated a century earlier in this wonderful nocturne by the early Netherlandish painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Nativity at Night, thought to be from about 1490. Chiaroscuro makes narrative sense here, and results in a scene of great tenderness and reverence, thanks to its soft transitions of tones.

Caravaggio’s third painting of Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist was completed in about 1609-10, shortly before his death, and illustrates his style at its height.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s father was a well-known Caravaggist, and she followed suit for the early years of her career. Her painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes followed a decade later in 1620-21. Over that period, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Dirck van Baburen and Jan van Bijlert became influenced when in Italy, and returned to Utrecht, where they have become known as the Utrecht Caravaggists.

Van Honthorst’s The Soldier and the Girl from about 1621 is a good example, where the young woman is lighting her candle from a burning coal.

Van Honthorst’s dimly lit indoor scenes are associated with pleasures, often fairly sinful ones, as in his Merry Company from 1623. He shows here how directional lighting can transform appearance, turning quite ordinary or ugly faces into caricatures.

As music was breaking out of seedy dens of iniquity into mainstream culture, learning to play an instrument and playing to others became fashionable, as shown in van Honthorst’s merry Concert on a Balcony from 1624.

During the 1620s his paintings became more narrative and less Caravaggist, as seen in his Solon and Croesus from 1624. This shows the elderly Greek statesman getting a hostile reception from Croesus, with his court laughing at his responses. Included are two slaves supplicating themselves before the king, in an interesting condemnation of slavery for its time.

Some more mainstream artists also showed Caravaggist tendencies.

Rembrandt’s very early painting of The Operation from 1624-25 shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head, by the light of a commonplace candle on a candlestick holder.

Hendrick ter Brugghen’s religious narrative of Jacob Reproaching Laban for Giving him Leah in Place of Rachel is from the later years of Caravaggism, in 1627.

Although remarkably little is known of the paintings of Judith Leyster, she appears to have been influenced when painting in Haarlem.

Like most of her surviving paintings, A Game of Tric-Trac was made before her marriage to Jan Miense Molenaer, in this case in 1630.

Although Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro is best known from his later paintings, Saint Peter in Prison (The Apostle Peter Kneeling) dates from 1631.

Later interiors and genre works show the more lasting influence imported from Italy.

Erasing SSDs securely has been a longstanding problem that has been solved in Macs with T2 or Apple silicon chips, with the introduction of Erase All Content and Settings (EACAS) four years ago in macOS Monterey. This article explains how it works, what it does, and when you should use it.

Boot disk

While Intel Macs are simpler, the internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac is divided into three APFS containers/partitions.

Intel Macs have the same Apple APFS container with the Boot Volume Group in it, but the other two containers are replaced by a single small EFI partition.

macOS manages and uses the first two containers, ISC and Recovery, and that containing the Boot Volume Group is the one we’re concerned with. That includes the System and Data volumes, the former being made into a read-only snapshot that’s mounted as the Signed System Volume and contains macOS. Everything you install as a user, including apps and your Home folder, is in the Data volume, which is encrypted automatically even if you don’t have FileVault turned on.

Data volume

As the Data volume is invariably encrypted, the best way to securely erase its entire contents is to destroy its encryption key. Provided that can be performed robustly, so the key can never be recovered, no one will be able to decrypt its contents. (There is an expectation that one day it might be possible to break the encryption using quantum computing, but that’s not something you should be concerned with at present.)

The encryption key used to encrypt the Data volume is itself encrypted, and forms part of the mechanism used by FileVault when that’s enabled. To ensure that those encryption keys don’t leave the Secure Enclave, they’re encrypted again, and the key that’s destroyed by EACAS is one of those. macOS also employs anti-replay techniques to ensure that previous keys can’t be reused.

Additional features

In addition to destroying the encryption key for the Data volume, EACAS performs other useful tasks. These include signing out of your Apple Account, including iCloud and iCloud Drive, destroying all fingerprints used for Touch ID, and turning off Location Sharing to disable Find My and Activation Lock.

Although I can’t find any official account of additional data being erased by EACAS, I believe that all LocalPolicy records stored in Apple silicon Macs are also destroyed. LocalPolicy authorises access to external bootable disks, so those who have configured an external disk to boot their Mac are likely to be required to re-authorise it before it will boot that Mac again.

What EACAS doesn’t do, though, is sign you out of third-party cloud or other services such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud, or deauthorise that Mac for Apple media such as Music. Neither will it do anything to your Mac’s SSV: that’s left intact, still running the same version of macOS.

How to use EACAS

Start EACAS from System Settings > General > Transfer or Reset > Erase All Content and Settings…. In older versions of macOS still using System Preferences, open them and it’s offered as a command in the app menu.

If you continue, you should see one final warning before the contents of the Data volume are blown away into the great bit-bucket in the sky.

What’s left of your Data volume, shown here in Recovery mode, is a mere 300 MB or so.

When to use EACAS

If you want to wipe your Mac’s Data volume so you can reinstall its user(s), EACAS is the simplest and quickest way to do that, and doesn’t require starting up in Recovery. Its additional features ensure that, when you install its new primary user, everything should work properly and you don’t end up with ghost Macs left over from the past.

It’s the method of choice when preparing your Mac for disposal, particularly if you’re passing it on to someone else, as it ensures that no one can recover any of the data stored in your Home folder, or anywhere else on its Data volume. Performing that manually requires you to work through a list of additional procedures, almost all of which are automatic in EACAS.

The only time when you’re likely to prefer a different method is when you want to erase both the Data and System volumes, perhaps to return to an older version of macOS. Although you can do that using Disk Utility in Recovery mode, that doesn’t install the matching firmware. If you really want to return to factory-fresh conditions, the best way is to put that Mac into DFU mode, then restore it from the IPSW image file for that version of macOS. Although that does require a second Mac, it’s quick and comprehensive.

One other caution: never use EACAS on a macOS VM, as it’s unlikely to recover. It makes more sense just to delete the whole VM and be done with it.

Summary

• EACAS performs a secure erase of the Data volume, as well as some useful extras.
• It’s the method of choice for preparing your Mac for disposal.
• It’s also suitable for wiping user data before setting your Mac up afresh, using its existing macOS.
• If you want to wipe the System volume as well, to reinstall macOS, restore from an IPSW in DFU mode.

Long before paintings became movable objects of great value used by the rich as investments, artists and the owners of their paintings wanted to protect the paint layer that had been so carefully applied to the ground. From the early Middle Ages onwards, one popular means of doing this has been to apply some form of protective layer, a varnish.

Varnishes have been widely used not only for protection. Careful choice of their composition can enhance the appearance of a painting, through the optical properties of the varnish medium and its smooth, glossy surface. Until the late nineteenth century, the great majority of painters either applied final layers of varnish themselves, or advised their patrons and clients to do so.

Three types of varnish have come into common use:

• Drying oil and resin, in effect a resin-rich transparent and unpigmented paint layer, that usually becomes an integral part of that. Some artists have added pigment, perhaps to make a general colour adjustment. There isn’t any clear distinction between that and a final paint glaze.
• Solvent and resin, from which the solvent will evaporate, leaving a thin surface coat of resin.
• Water-based washes such as egg white, known as glair, vegetable gums like gum arabic, and animal glues.

Resins used in varnishes have rich and sometimes strange histories. Most are exudates from trees in exotic locations, and have evocative names like mastic, sandarac, colophony and dammar. They’re usually highly insoluble, either in drying medium that has to be heated to make oil-based varnishes, or in turpentine or similar organic solvents. A great many recipes have been proposed, and there’s always the lure of the perfect, and inevitably top secret, formula.

The biggest problems with varnishes are their propensity to yellow or grey with age, and their tendency to take up dirt and atmospheric contaminants. Rembrandt’s first painting of Bathsheba at her Toilet from 1643 has sadly lost much of its detail into the gloom of old varnish, which can be almost impossible to clean off when composed of drying oil and resin, without damaging the paint layer underneath.

Any work older than a few decades that has been varnished or had any form of surface treatment is unlikely to appear today with the colours the artist intended. Multiple layers of old varnish and trapped dirt give a misleading impression of what we would have seen soon after the work was completed. Painstaking work by conservation specialists can often restore old paintings to what we presume is their former glory, in full colour again.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1490-1510) is seen above before recent conservation work, and below is the result of thousands of hours of painstaking cleaning and treatment.

Another problem for the conservation specialist is a painting like Edward Poynter’s A Visit to Aesculapius from 1880. Although this is little more than a century old, the evidence from contemporary prints made from this work is that it was originally far from being so dark. Sadly it’s now almost impossible to read as a result of its near-black shadows.

A good varnish should be both colourless and transparent, but painters haven’t always respected that.

When finishing his monumental Raft of the Medusa in 1819, Théodore Géricault is thought to have applied glazes or varnish containing asphalt to give the painting a deep brown tone. Asphalt is not only completely unprotective and almost attracts dirt, but it never fully dries, and can have adverse effects on underlying paint too. It hasn’t helped that this two hundred year-old painting was rolled up and stored in a friend’s studio when it remained unsold, and was then transported to London still rolled up the following year.

Conventional wisdom says that it’s best to leave an oil painting to dry for at least six months before varnishing it. JMW Turner sometimes varnished over paint layers that were far from dry. In the case of The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842 (1843), painted on mahogany, Ruskin reported that it had “cracked before it had been eight days in the Academy Rooms”, although this overall view shows little evidence of that damage.

Hellen and Townsend attribute this to Turner’s extensive use of Megilp, here a product sold by his colourman containing leaded drying oil and mastic varnish. Used sparingly and with great caution, such medium modifiers don’t necessarily cause serious ill-effects. But Turner has used Megilp to excess, to produce a soft impasto used in the foreground figures, in particular. This has resulted in wide and shallow drying cracks, as the surface has dried quickly and shrunk over trapped layers of liquid paint.

Varnishes do provide mechanical protection to the paint layer, but at the cost of locking out atmospheric oxygen, required for drying oils to polymerise properly in their drying process. Applied too early, varnishes can therefore greatly slow drying of underlying paint layers; the danger is that they may saponify (turn to soap) instead of drying normally.

Despite these dangers, varnishes can, when used with care by those who understand them properly, be valuable beyond simply providing a protective coat. Kirsty Whiten’s The Quing of the Now People (2015) achieves its superbly realistic effect by the skilful combination of conventional oil paint with varnish.

In the late nineteenth century, attitudes to varnishing oil paintings changed markedly, as Impressionists like Camille Pissarro started to prescribe that their works should on no account be varnished. This was to preserve the soft matte surface of the paint as applied by the artist, and became increasingly popular in the twentieth century.

For such paintings, protection can be provided by glass, when necessary. That isn’t of course an option for many extremely large oil paintings on canvas, which will probably need to be varnished and cleaned periodically well in the future, as they have in the past.

Varnishes, usually of the third type containing vegetable gums or animal glues, have also been used extensively on paint layers other than oils.

These are reported in Samuel Palmer’s Tintern Abbey at Sunset, above, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, below. Gum or glue varnishes can have impressive optical effects when used carefully on watercolours.

Unfortunately, their tendency to yellow can also cause colour shifts. William Blake liked to apply glue varnish to his watercolours and perhaps to his glue tempera paintings as well. In the case of his Penance of Jane Shore in St Paul’s Church from about 1793, this has resulted in a generalised yellow shift and loss of chroma.

Other artists appear to have been more successful: Henry Ossawa Tanner apparently applied varnish to this tempera painting of The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah almost a century ago, and it doesn’t appear to have suffered any adverse consequences, yet.

Varnishing has become such an accepted process that major exhibitions have incorporated ‘varnishing days’, although what happens on those occasions can be quite different. In Turner’s day at the Royal Academy in London, Varnishing Day was an occasion for artists to make any last-minute changes, and Turner himself seems to have turned up armed with paint and brushes and continued to work on his paintings.

Varnishing Day in the Paris Salon was completely different, attended normally by the artists’ colourmen, who applied a coat of varnish to the paintings for which they were responsible. The artists themselves don’t seem to have been involved, unless they chose to apply the varnish in person.

When you’ve tried all the logical solutions, restarted, had a go in Safe mode, and still can’t solve a problem, you may need to bring the big guns to bear on it. These are radical fixes that carry a risk of going further than you want, but are all you’ve got left. You might have been recommended them by someone who seems to know best, or, as we saw last week, by an AI. This article looks at the state of those big guns in Tahoe 26.1, and which you should consider seriously.

Reset NVRAM and SMC

Although quick and simple to use, resetting the NVRAM and SMC are well known for fixing all sorts of problems. They’re still valuable in Intel Macs, but you can forget them in Apple silicon, as the SMC resets with each startup, and the NVRAM is protected from user access. The only way you could reset an Apple silicon Mac’s NVRAM is by Restoring it in DFU mode, which almost certainly isn’t something you want to do at this stage.

Reset TCC

TCC is the subsystem responsible for implementing privacy protection, and is notorious for its mystifying misbehaviour. Before convincing yourself that doing anything with TCC is going to help a problem, you should really look for a pattern of misbehaviour that points to one of the resources that it controls access to. If possible, tie this to a single app and use
sudo tccutil reset All com.apple.clock
for example to reset just that one app’s privacy settings.

TCC is also a popular recommendation in solutions that lack a firm logical basis, where there’s no attempt to target one app, but go for the lot with
sudo tccutil reset All
The effect of that is to empty every section (apart from Location Services) in Privacy & Security settings. That’s certain to stop many apps from working properly, and you’ll end up adding them back one by one over the following days or weeks. In some cases, even that doesn’t prove sufficient, and deleting TCC’s database seems the only way forward. That and other issues are discussed here.

tccutil doesn’t appear to have changed in any significant way in Tahoe.

Delete LaunchServices’ database

LaunchServices handles many features including opening apps, populating their Open Recent menu commands, and handling much of the integration of apps with their documents. To achieve that, it maintains an extensive database of apps and other executable components.

Access to LaunchServices’ database and control over it is provided in the lsregister command, buried deep in /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support, although there’s a public lsappinfo tool that provides different features and is seldom used. Earlier this year I gave an account of its use in Sequoia, but its most popular option to kill the LaunchServices database has been removed from Tahoe “because it was dangerous and no longer useful”, a fair assessment.

Repair permissions

I have recently reexamined the various forms of repairing permissions. If anyone or anything recommends you run
sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs
you shouldn’t listen to another word they say, as that form went out with El Capitan, and isn’t even possible with a modern version of macOS.

The more modern replacement, initiated by the command repairHomePermissions in Recovery mode, may once have had a purpose, but is now grossly disruptive, as it locks the user out of most of the contents of their Home folder by removing them as their owner.

It would take you hours to restore your Mac to a usable state after performing that ‘repair’. If anyone recommends that you try it, ask them when they last used it successfully.

Clean install

Tahoe does provide convenient methods for clean installing macOS, as described here. One of the simplest is to Erase All Content and Settings using the EACAS option in Transfer or Reset, in General settings. That renders all your data inaccessible by securely erasing its encryption key, then you can migrate from your latest backup when setting up your currently installed version of macOS afresh.

If you want to go back to fresh firmware and macOS as well, then the simplest way is to Restore in DFU mode, as explained here. That also gives you the choice of using any compatible IPSW, making it possible to perform a full downgrade to an earlier version of macOS if you wish. Remember that Apple silicon Macs can’t run a version of macOS that was released before that model shipped. If in doubt, consult Mactracker’s database for the original version shipped with that model.

Summary for Apple silicon Macs:

• Resetting SMC and NVRAM is not possible (still available for Intel).
• Resetting TCC is still available.
• Killing the LaunchServices database is no longer available (but still in Sequoia).
• Repairing permissions is grossly disruptive and should be avoided.
• Clean install can be confined to the Data volume, or include firmware and macOS.

Whatever you choose, I wish you success.

Apple has just released its regular weekly update to XProtect, bringing it to version 5323. As usual, it doesn’t release information about what security issues this update might add or change.

This version adds five new Yara rules in its TIMELYTURTLE series, for MACOS.TIMELYTURTLE.DYCASWOC, MACOS.TIMELYTURTLE.DYCASWOCB, MACOS.TIMELYTURTLE.LELINO, MACOS.TIMELYTURTLE.TRNO, MACOS.TIMELYTURTLE.DYHEOC, and a single new rule for MACOS.REALSTAR.VO, which appears to be a new genus of malware.

You can check whether this update has been installed by opening System Information via About This Mac, and selecting the Installations item under Software.

A full listing of security data file versions is given by SilentKnight and SystHist for El Capitan to Tahoe available from their product page. If your Mac hasn’t yet installed this update, you can force it using SilentKnight or at the command line.

If you want to install this as a named update in SilentKnight, its label is XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5323

Sequoia and Tahoe systems only

This update has at last been released for Sequoia and Tahoe via iCloud. If you want to check it manually, use the Terminal command
sudo xprotect check
then enter your admin password. If that returns version 5323 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you should be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

Update

As of 22:00 GMT on 11 November, the update to 5323 has reappeared for download to the traditional location via Software Update or SilentKnight, and is available through the iCloud connection for Sequoia and Tahoe.

Over the previous fifteen articles Dante has taken us through his vision of Hell. As he journeys on to Purgatory, this article offers an overview of the best-known book in his Divine Comedy.

It was Botticelli who provided the clearest pictorial map of Dante’s journey, as he descended with Virgil through a succession of circles, each with its own class of sinner. Highest are the woods where Dante was wandering when he encountered the three wild beasts. At the left, Virgil led Dante down to the area where the cowards are trapped, neither being allowed admittance to Heaven, nor to Hell. Charon’s boat then crosses the River Acheron, shown in blue, taking Dante and Virgil to the First Circle of Limbo.

Introduction

This journey starts just before dawn on Good Friday in 1300, when the poet is wandering lost in a dark wood. His way is blocked first by a leopard, then by a lion, and finally by a wolf.

1 To the gates of Hell

Forced to retreat back into the wood, Dante comes across a man who introduces himself by way of a riddle, leading Dante to recognise him as the ghost of the classical Roman poet Virgil. He tells Dante that the only way out is to pass through the eternity of Hell. When the pair reach the gate of Hell, they read its warnings, culminating in the bleak exhortation: leave behind all hope, you who enter.

They first encounter those stuck forever on the periphery, those whose lives were too cowardly to enter Heaven or Hell, who are stung repeatedly by flies and wasps.

2 Abandon hope

They then cross the River Acheron in Charon’s ferryboat, and enter the First Circle of Limbo, a place of tranquil and calm. Here are the souls of those who led honourable lives before the Christian era, and others who never had the opportunity to follow Christ. These include the great classical writers: Homer, Horace the satirist, Ovid and Lucan. Together with Virgil, these five invite Dante himself to join them as the sixth among the ranks of great writers, in an ambitious piece of self-promotion.

3 In Limbo

Virgil leads Dante down to the Second Circle, for those guilty of the sin of lust.

Here the lustful are thrown around by vicious winds, and Dante hears the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, that inspired many fine paintings.

4 Paolo and Francesca

Passing the three-headed dog-monster Cerberus, Virgil takes Dante on to the Third Circle, full of gluttons wallowing in stinking mud, under a constant deluge of rain, sleet and snow. In the Fourth Circle, they see a mixture of the avaricious and prodigals pushing great boulders in opposite directions.

5 Cerberus and gluttony

The Fifth Circle holds the swamp of the River Styx, in which sullen spirits are submerged and the wrathful fight one another. Dante and Virgil cross this in a boat piloted by Phlegyas, who deposits them at the gate to the city of Dis, entrance to the lower parts of Hell. The gate is slammed shut on them, and requires a messenger from Heaven to let them through.

6 Money and anger

Here Dante enters the Sixth Circle, for heretics who denied the soul’s immortality, among them the Florentine Farinata degli Uberti, who is imprisoned in a tomb. The pair are carried by Nessus the Centaur on to the Seventh Circle, for the violent.

7 Furies and heresy

These not only include tyrannical warriors like Attila the Hun, murderers and bandits, but those whose violence was directed at their own lives in suicide, who are trees in a wood and kept in perpetual pain by harpies feeding on them. The pair then cross a desert on which fire rains to torment the souls of blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers.

8 The Minotaur, killers and suicides

Dante learns of a statue of an old man on Mount Ida, on the island of Crete, whose tears form the rivers of Hell.

9 Violence against God

Virgil guides Dante onto the back of Geryon, formerly a king slain by Hercules and condemned to suffer in Hell for his fraud, who flies the pair on to the Eighth Circle, for the fraudulent. This is divided into a series of rottenpockets, depressions in which different types of fraudster are confined. They pass through the areas for pimps, flatterers, corrupt religious leaders, sorcerers, corrupt officials and hypocrites.

10 Fraud

Among the corrupt religious leaders or simonists is Pope Nicholas III, who had been shamelessly nepotistic.

The later rottenpockets contain thieves, those who gave fraudulent counsel, those who sowed discord, and falsifiers and imposters of various kinds. Thieves are attacked repeatedly by snakes to undergo their own reptilian transformation.

11 Bribery, hypocrisy, theft

Among these many cheats and frauds are those who fight one another, and sink their teeth into flesh.

12 Fraud and inciting division

Dante and Virgil are lowered into the Ninth Circle by Antaeus, one of the giants who stand guard around its periphery.

There is the lake of Cocytus, in which those guilty of treachery are frozen and suffering for eternity. These include souls of those who were treacherous against their relatives, their homeland, guests and benefactors.

13 Treachery

Among them is Count Ugolino, who sinks his teeth into the neck of Archbishop Ruggieri, who left him to starve to death in a cell.

14 Count Ugolino

Finally, Dante and Virgil see Lucifer himself, before leaving Hell.

15 Lucifer himself

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was one of the leading painters of the early Southern Renaissance, working in his native city of Florence. In addition to his huge egg tempera masterpieces of i (c 1482) and The Birth of Venus (c 1485), he was a lifelong fan of Dante’s writings. He produced drawings which were engraved for the first printed edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481, but these weren’t successful, most copies only having two or three of the 19 which were engraved. He later began a manuscript illustrated edition on parchment, but few pages were ever fully illuminated.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) was a precocious and highly-acclaimed academic painter who dominated the Salon in the late nineteenth century with his figurative works, often drawn from mythology. Classically-trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, he grew infamous for his nudes painted against false settings, and his vehement opposition to Impressionism. However, he taught at the Académie Julian, and worked tirelessly even when his paintings fell from favour.

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796–1875) was French, and one of the most prolific and greatest European landscape artists of the nineteenth century, who was key to the development of Impressionism. Following in the classical tradition, he also painted several narrative works set in those landscapes.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a major French painter whose Romantic and painterly style laid the groundwork for the Impressionists. In addition to many fine easel works, he painted murals and was an accomplished lithographer too. Many of his paintings are narrative, and among the most famous is Liberty Leading the People from 1830. This article introduces a series featuring his major works.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Purgatory and Paradise

Although Heaven and Hell have clear biblical roots, the concept of Purgatory as part of the Christian life after death is more recent. It originated in the early Christian Church, flourished in the Middle Ages, and ripened only in the Catholic Church after the schism of Protestants in the Reformation during the sixteenth century. It can be seen as a route to Heaven for those who had sinned on earth, so long as they had confessed and repented.

Dante had much greater freedom in imagining what Purgatory might be, and adopted a physical structure that is the exact inverse of his vision of Hell: a mountain rising through seven terraces to culminate in a terrestrial paradise at the summit. Each terrace then accommodates a class of sin, rising from pride at the foot to lust just below Paradise.

The least-known of the three books in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Paradise was its most important to contemporary readers. Having given gruesome detail of what would await them in Inferno, and the penance they would have to pay in Purgatory, Paradise must be everyone’s ultimate aspiration. Dante invokes classical cosmology in nine concentric shells rather than the simple physical structures of the two previous realms, which for many readers is more nebulous.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 333. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Black leopard exposé of 2003 could fax.

Click for a solution

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

Black leopard (a panther) exposé (Exposé was one of its new features) of 2003 (released 24 October 2003) could fax (it was the first Mac OS X to come with integrated support for faxing).

2: Officially a 750, it brought the fastest notebook in the world in 1997.

Click for a solution

G3

Officially a 750 (its proper name is the PowerPC 750), it brought the fastest notebook in the world (the PowerBook G3) in 1997 (first Macs with the G3 came in November 1997).

3: Came with a plus, bulging trash and SCSI.

Click for a solution

System 3

Came with a plus (it shipped with the Mac Plus in January 1986), bulging trash (it was the first version of Mac OS to show the Trash bulging when it had items inside it) and SCSI (it was the first version to support SCSI devices).

The common factor

Click for a solution

The number 3, to celebrate Mac Riddles 333.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

macOS gives you the choice of upgrading to the latest version, but each year makes it easier to upgrade by mistake. For those wanting to stick with macOS 15 Sequoia this has become even harder to get right. This article shows how you can install security updates without risking the upgrade, using my free utility SilentKnight. If you prefer you can do essentially the same thing from the command line.

Check for updates

Run the latest version of SilentKnight (2.12) and it will show you all the updates waiting for your Mac, including the Tahoe upgrade. Don’t, whatever you do, click on the Install all updates button at this stage, or try installing individual updates. Quit SilentKnight and open Software Update in System Settings to install the security update to Sequoia first.

Update macOS

Although you can download and install macOS updates using SilentKnight, it’s far better if you use Software Update to do that. Open that in System Settings and read what it offers very carefully.

Although you know you don’t want to click on Upgrade Now, you should also avoid clicking on Update Now in the expectation that it will update Sequoia to 15.7.2. Instead, click on the ⓘ button next to it to ensure that you only update what you intend.

In this window, uncheck the Tahoe upgrade, and tick macOS Sequoia 15.7.2 and Safari, then click on Update Now. Make a mental note of the large size of the Tahoe upgrade, and when the download starts, check that isn’t being downloaded. If it is, cancel it if you can, quit all other open apps, and shut your Mac down. Leave it a few seconds before starting it up and trying again.

Once the Sequoia security update has been installed and your Mac restarts into 15.7.2, open SilentKnight and let it check for updates again.

Install remaining security updates

In most cases, almost all the outstanding security updates such as XPR should now be installed as part of that macOS update. However, the one you’re likely to have to install manually is XProtect, and you also want to change SilentKnight so it doesn’t put you at risk of inadvertently upgrading to Tahoe.

Open SilentKnight’s Settings and uncheck Allow Install All Updates. That removes the button from its main window that you could click accidentally and initiate an upgrade.

Now open Terminal to install the outstanding XProtect update. Type the following command
sudo xprotect update
press Return and enter your admin password. That update should then be installed from iCloud. Check that by opening SilentKnight one last time.

SilentKnight confirms that all your security updates have been installed successfully. Although the Tahoe upgrade is still waiting there to catch you unawares, there’s now no Install all updates button. When you want to install individual updates such as XProtect, use the Install Named Update… command in the File menu. Paste in the Label of the update, such as XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5323, check that it isn’t the Tahoe upgrade, and click the Install Named Update button for each security update you want to install.

There’s one final trick you need to remember. When macOS keeps notifying you of the Tahoe upgrade, click on that notification away from its buttons to open Software Update, then close that window. That should ensure that macOS doesn’t try upgrading your Mac on the sly. If it does start downloading the Tahoe upgrade, quit all open apps and shut down. After a few seconds start up again and that upgrade should be forgotten. For a while, at least.

Following their return to the outskirts of Paris after the Franco-Prussian war and Paris Commune, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir had painted in and around the Monets’ home in Argenteuil on the north bank of the River Seine. Monet commuted into the city by train, the Sisleys shared their house, and Renoir visited in the summer.

Édouard Manet was another visitor, and painted this oil sketch of Claude Monet in Argenteuil in 1874, showing Monet working in his floating studio. His position in the boat appears relaxed, but would have become uncomfortable if maintained for long, as he would have had to keep bending forward to paint, suggesting he might have posed for this painting.

In 1876, Monet’s wife Camille became seriously ill, deteriorating further with the birth of their second son in 1878. The family moved to share a house with his patron Ernest Hoschedé in Vétheuil, further out to the north-west. The Sisleys moved to Moret-sur-Loing on the opposite side of Paris, leaving only Renoir to continue his summer visits.

Renoir’s The Boating Party at Chatou (1879) shows watersports taking place further down the river, with a combination of social rowing in the foreground, and two sports rowers further out in the river.

Renoir’s By the Water from about 1880 is believed to have been painted on the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise on the Île de Chatou, which he was soon to use for his major work Luncheon of the Boating Party (below). If that’s the case, then what appears to be a lake in the background is really the River Seine.

During the summer of 1880, Renoir started work on another of his masterpieces, that he didn’t complete until the following year: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), with its complex group of figures.

This was again set on the Île de Chatou at the Restaurant Fournaise, and funded by commissioned portraits over this period. Among his models are his partner and later wife Aline Charigot (left foreground, with affenpinscher dog), the actress Jeanne Samary (upper right), and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte (seated, lower right). This was exhibited at the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, where it was praised by several critics.

Later in 1882, Renoir painted The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autumn, close to another bridge over the river for which Monet had a particular affection.

In 1881, Gustave Caillebotte acquired a property at Petit-Gennevilliers, near Argenteuil, where he had a boatyard, and moved there permanently in 1888. He and Renoir maintained the tradition of painting this section of the River Seine.

Caillebotte’s Boat Moored on the Seine at Argenteuil from about 1884 has thoroughly Impressionist style and facture, with its obvious brushstrokes forming the broken reflection of the boat on the water, and even detail through the depth of the painting.

Although Caillebotte didn’t make formal series of views that became such a feature of the art of Monet and Pissarro, in the mid-1880s he painted several views of the modern bridges over the River Seine near Argenteuil. The Bridge at Argenteuil and the Seine (1885) is Impressionist in style, with its broken water surface. This features a steam paddle tug towing a laden barge towards the next bridge, which I think is the railway bridge that Claude Monet painted at least twice.

In 1888, Renoir spent the summer painting at Argenteuil and Bougival, where he rediscovered his landscape form.

Renoir’s The Seine at Argenteuil from 1888 is another view of leisure boating, painted in a style more similar to Sisley’s high Impressionist landscapes, with coarse high chroma brushstrokes laid to form the surface of the water.

For Gustave Caillebotte and his friends, this was the place to come to enjoy a day’s sailing, as shown in his late painting of Sailboats on the Seine at Argenteuil from 1892, just two years before his untimely death at the age of only forty-five. With that, Argenteuil and Chatou were abandoned and Impressionism moved on.

You may have heard my deep sigh of disappointment last week when I looked through macOS Tahoe 26.1. Despite its bumper crop of 90 fixes for security vulnerabilities, as a scheduled update it has two major flaws. It is at once an opportunity ignored, and a failure to learn from history.

Liquid Glass

Ever since the first beta-release of Tahoe reached developers in June, its human interface has been lambasted like no other. Apple has had a torrent of objections to several of its new features, including the gross rounding of corners of windows and controls, its bland and indistinguishable icons, interference between overlaid content, and its uniform bleached-out tone. In those five months, there has been no shortage of suggestions as to what needs to be improved.

Apple’s response is a Liquid Glass control in Appearance settings that purports to provide a “tinted” variant that “increases opacity and adds more contrast”. As I demonstrated early last week, it does neither, and in Light mode in the great majority of Apple’s own apps, this “tinted” variant doesn’t make a blind difference.

Above is Light mode, Liquid Glass set Clear, without Accessibility. Below is the same, but with Liquid Glass set to Tinted.

After many attempts to find some difference between Clear and Tinted in the bundled apps I use most often, I’ve decided that they are visually identical. And where the Liquid Glass effect results in optical interference between layers, Tinted doesn’t alter opacity to eliminate that interference.

This is illustrated in the defaced search box at the top left of System Settings, where the blurred contents of the navigation sidebar at the left remain visible underneath the window’s search box. I can’t understand how any designer could see that released to the public, and providing the new Liquid Glass setting is farting into a hurricane.

Background Security Improvements

Although Apple went out of its way not to let us know, I’m actually glad to see the return of Rapid Security Responses (RSR), even if they’ve been given this sanitised name. What disappoints me deeply is that the BSI shows no sign that Apple has learned from its past mistakes with RSRs just over two years ago.

RSRs, which have never been officially declared dead, were downloaded through Software Update, and gave the user the choice of installing them automatically, downloading and installing them when they chose to, or ignoring them and waiting for the next macOS update. Not only that, but once installed, they could be removed and macOS reverted to its previous state.

What Apple never did get right is how to number the macOS version once an RSR had been installed. Rather than extend version numbers consistently with a fourth digit, Apple decided to append a letter in parentheses, making 13.4.1 become 13.4.1 (a) when its first RSR had been installed. When the first RSR was released on 1 May 2023, Safari’s build number was changed, but not its version number. But with the second RSR on 10 July, someone mistakenly changed Safari’s version number from 16.5.1 to 16.5.2 (a), and that was therefore given as its User Agent, and promptly broke many major websites including Facebook.

Because that RSR could be removed by the user, there was an immediate solution, and Apple delivered a revised RSR a couple of days later.

From this, we learned that:

• RSRs undergo very little testing before release, as they’re supposed to be issued quickly.
• Because they undergo such little testing, their chances of significant incompatibilities are greater.
• Giving the user the option to delay installing an RSR saves many from being caught out by flawed RSRs.
• Giving the user the option to uninstall an RSR is essential in the event that one proves to be flawed.
• Knowing when an RSR is being installed is essential if users are going to be able to identify the cause of problems arising from them.
• Numbering of macOS versions needs to be restructured to accommodate RSRs.

Now, over two years later, it seems Apple has forgotten those lessons. It won’t even describe these as security updates, but “improvements”, won’t include them in the release notes for 26.1, hides their single control at the very bottom of a long list in Privacy & Security settings, rather than in Software Update, provides no manual option, and no means to uninstall them.

I wonder how long it will be before we all regret those decisions, and have to repeat past mistakes before we can learn from them.

When the French Impressionists reassembled after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, they gathered a little further up river from Louveciennes and Bougival, at the small town of Argenteuil on the north bank of the River Seine. At the time it was just on the outer edge of the north-western suburbs of the city, about 12 km (7.6 miles) from the centre, and was only fifteen minutes by train to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Claude Monet was able to commute into the metropolis, and the Sisleys moved in with the Monets in 1872. This weekend I show a small selection of the best-known paintings that were made in and around Argenteuil, and particularly at Chatou, down river.

Although Monet was barely making a living from his art at this time, he was among the few who could afford to use cadmium yellow, which has been found in his painting of The Artist’s House at Argenteuil from 1873.

This marked the start of a highly productive period for Alfred Sisley, and, in conjunction with Monet and Renoir, changed his art. The three concentrated their efforts on the recording of transient effects of light using colour, removing black from their palettes, and abandoning the traditional ‘finish’ of their paintings.

Sisley’s Footbridge at Argenteuil from 1872 is dominated by the perspective projection of the bridge itself, almost to the exclusion of the river below. His figures are gestural but look natural in their forms.

The Impressionists occasionally painted themselves at work, particularly during the earlier years of the movement. Above is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Monet Painting in his Garden in Argenteuil from 1873. He is using a conventional lightweight wooden easel, with a small canvas allowing him to work standing, with his oil paints in the pochade box under the easel.

Monet’s The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1873) is one of his several landscapes centred on the railway from the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian War. The following year, he painted the same bridge, as seen below in The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1874).

Monet’s commute ended at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where in 1877 he obtained permission to paint a series of works showing the station. By the third Impressionist Exhibition of April of that year, Monet had assembled seven views of the station, including one that even seemed to please the critics. Among the paintings from that campaign is his Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877).

One of the products of Renoir’s painting with Monet was this highly chromatic view of The Duck Pond (1873) at a farm near Argenteuil.

The following summer, Renoir visited Argenteuil again, to paint in the company of both Monet and Manet. The Seine at Chatou (1874) is one of his more vigorously crafted works, with a water surface similar to those being painted at the time by Sisley.

Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Black leopard exposé of 2003 could fax.

2: Officially a 750, it brought the fastest notebook in the world in 1997.

3: Came with a plus, bulging trash and SCSI.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

Loose words confuse, and one of the words used most loosely in macOS is permissions. This explainer tries to separate them from other access controls.

Permissions

The access permissions of files and folders are set in their attributes in the file system, stay with that item, and are applied universally for all apps and processes that try to access them.

The simplest and most basic of access controls, these can be inspected and changed in the Finder’s Get Info dialog for all accessible files and folders. They control the ability of apps and other code to read from and write to each file and folder. Normally, if you’re the named owner of a file or folder, you expect to have both read and write access, and that ensures the apps you run with user privileges can open, edit and save changed files.

Permissions are relatively crude controls, so Access Control Lists (ACLs) can refine those permissions with more specific restrictions. They were introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005, and are now applied as standard to some widely used folders including the Home folder. The presence of ACLs is normally indicated in the Get Info dialog by the words You have custom access.

No matter what security controls and privacy protection might give you access to, they can’t override the fundamental limits imposed by permissions, and can only limit access further.

Security controls

The macOS security system imposes its own controls according to its rules. Most obvious among those are System Integrity Protection (SIP) and sandboxing.

SIP was introduced in 2015 with El Capitan, and primarily puts system folders, files and some components, including certain extended attributes, beyond the reach of even the root user. The only way to get past SIP is to disable it, a serious undertaking as it has more general effects on security.

Sandboxing is security protection that limits the files individual apps can access by imposing a sandbox as set by their entitlements. It’s therefore determined by the app trying to access files, and doesn’t apply to apps that don’t run in the sandbox. As an app’s entitlements are baked into its signature, there’s nothing a user can do to alter them.

Privacy protection

macOS designates certain locations and resources as being private, and protects them using its Transparency, Consent and Control (TCC) system. Although it has a longer history, this was first implemented in its current form in macOS 10.14 Mojave in 2018, and since then has grown with every new major version of macOS. Privacy protection operates outside of file attributes, using a rule-based system applied to each app, and applies to command tools and other processes as well.

Among the folders this protects are the Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and those on removable storage. While access to individual folders is controlled, if you do encounter problems it’s usually simplest to add that app to the list of those with Full Disk Access, in Privacy & Security settings, in the first instance. That can leave a lot of apps with unnecessary access to private data, so you should periodically check through the list of apps with Full Disk Access to ensure they all still require it. Remember that Full Disk Access can’t override restrictions imposed by permissions or ACLs.

In Tahoe, privacy-protected folders include:

• ~/Desktop
• ~/Documents
• ~/Downloads
• iCloud Drive
• third-party cloud storage
• removable volumes
• network volumes
• Time Machine backups.

Unlike permissions and security controls, there’s no command line interface to these controls, which can only be accessed by the user in Privacy & Security settings. As a result, TCC uses an attribution chain that traces up through the call chain to an app that is responsible for the privacy settings to be applied. For example, when you run commands in Terminal, the privacy settings used by TCC are those of the Terminal app, while helper apps are normally the responsibility of their parent app.

Privacy protection is built around the user’s consent and intent. When a process tries to save a file to a protected folder that it doesn’t already have access to, you should be prompted to give your consent before TCC allows that. Alternatively, when an app tries that, it should display the File Save dialog, where you can express your intent to save the file to that folder. Without consent or intent, TCC should block that file from being saved there unless that app has been given Full Disk Access in Privacy & Security settings.

Privacy protection is the most complex and opaque of these, and can present the toughest problems to solve.

Key points

• Permissions by attributes
• Security by security system
• Privacy protection by TCC, the app and rules
• Loose words confuse.

Artists seldom painted the interior of their studio until the nineteenth century, and it was unheard of in the Renaissance. So when you’re offered a glimpse into that of Sandro Botticelli in the 1480s you’d be justifiably suspicious, particularly when it wasn’t painted until 1922, over half a millennium later.

Nevertheless, almost exactly eleven years ago, on the fifth of November 2014, a remarkable painting claiming to depict Botticelli’s studio at that time was auctioned in New York. Captured on its canvas were the faces of those long dead, those of the artist and members of the Medici family.

The painting’s title reveals its key figures: Botticelli’s studio: The first visit of Simonetta presented by Giulio and Lorenzo de Medici (1922). The artist stands at the left in front of an exquisite tondo he is working on. Bowing to him at the centre is Giuliano de’ Medici, who is accompanied by Simonetta Vespucci, wearing the green dress. Behind her is Lorenzo de’ Medici, also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, and behind him are Giovanna Tornabuoni and her attendants. The view through the window is of the Palazzo Vecchio in the centre of Florence.

Painted by the British artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, those figures weren’t based on models or imagination, but on contemporary sources.

Giovanna Tornabuoni comes from a detail of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s painting The Visitation (c 1488) in the Tornabuoni Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Giovanna was born as Giovanna degli Albizzi in 1468, married Lorenzo Tornabuoni in 1486 when she was about eighteen, and died in childbirth two years later in 1488. She is here accompanied by her maid and nurse.

Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492) hails from Girolamo Macchietti’s undated portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was born in 1449 into the banking family, the grandson of Cosimo de’ Medici, at the time one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Europe. Lorenzo was groomed for power, and became de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic when his father died in 1469.

He survived an attempted assassination in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore on Easter Sunday 1478, in which his brother Giuliano was stabbed to death. This led to his excommunication, and invasion by forces of the King of Naples. He resolved that, and died in 1492, when he was forty-three.

Botticelli also painted this Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici in about 1475. Giuliano was born in 1453, younger brother and co-ruler of the Florentine Republic with Lorenzo. He was brutally murdered in that attack in the cathedral on Easter Sunday 1478, dying at the age of twenty-five. Although he never married, an illegitimate son of his became Pope Clement VII.

The painting shown in progress is Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat, thought to have been completed in 1483. It shows the Virgin Mary being crowned by a pair of angels, writing down the start of the Magnificat in a book, and holding a pomegranate in her left hand. It has also been interpreted as a family portrait of the de’ Medicis, in which the Virgin is Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, who are the angels. I believe that Lucrezia was one of Giovanna Tornabuoni’s aunts by marriage.

The source of the likeness of Botticelli is more of a problem, as he isn’t known to have painted a formal self-portrait. It’s generally believed, though, that he revealed himself in cameo in this detail from his The Adoration of the Magi from about 1475.

It’s also thought that Filippino Lippi included his portrait in this section he painted in 1483-84 of Massaccio’s incomplete fresco in the Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, in Disputation with Simon Magus and Crucifixion of St Peter.

But of all the figures shown in this painting, Simonetta Vespucci is the most fascinating. She was born Simonetta Cattaneo in 1453, and when she was only fifteen or sixteen, she married Marco Vespucci, cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, the first to demonstrate that the New World of the West Indies and Brazil wasn’t part of Asia.

Once married, she lived with her husband in Florence, where she was a great favourite at the court of the de’ Medicis. Giuliano de’ Medici entered a jousting tournament in 1475 bearing a banner with an image of Simonetta as Pallas Athene, painted by Botticelli. She had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in the whole of northern Italy, but that beauty was fleeting as she died of tuberculosis in 1476, when she was only twenty-two.

Many paintings have been claimed to be portraits of her, but perhaps the most credible is Piero di Cosimo’s Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci from 1490.

Several of Botticelli’s works have been claimed to feature figures for which Simonetta modelled, even the naked Venus in his famous The Birth of Venus (1484-86). The least unlikely might be his Idealized Portrait of a Lady, also known as Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph, thought to have been painted in 1480, four years after her death. Such portraits were commonly not true to life, but idealisations intended to flatter rather than identify, so we will never know if she was its subject.

Inevitably, time in Botticelli’s studio is slightly out of joint. The figures might have been able to gather together in this way in about 1475, before the deaths of Simonetta and Giuliano de’ Medici, but that is well before Botticelli might have painted Madonna of the Magnificat, and when Giovanna Tornabuoni was still a child.

This remarkable painting was the second of its kind by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.

Two years previously, in 1920, she had painted The Forerunner, showing Leonardo da Vinci trying to convince the Milanese court of his idea for flying machines. Notable figures included here are (from the left) Savonarola (from Fra Bartolomeo’s portrait), Beatrice d’Este (Duchess of Milan), Cecilia Gallerani, Elisabetta Gonzaga, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ludovico Sforza (Duke of Milan, and Leonardo’s patron).

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale sold The Forerunner to Lord Leverhulme, and it is now on view in the Lady Lever Art Gallery. She was subsequently commissioned to paint Botticelli’s Studio in 1922 for Montague Rendell. That was shown at the Royal Academy later that year, and has been in a succession of private collections since.

Diagnosing problems using the Unified log is a complicated business that requires understanding, insight, experience and a systematic approach. As few of us feel competent to wade through thousands of log entries trying to spot where things go wrong, this might seem an ideal opportunity for the use of AI. I’m very grateful to one of our regular readers for the opportunity to demonstrate how Claude coped with diagnosing a troublesome problem they’ve been having with the Clock app in Tahoe.

Signs and symptoms

When you’re diagnosing any problem, you should start with a clear account of its signs and symptoms before even thinking of resorting to the log. A good physician may take an hour or more obtaining a full history and examining a patient before they start thinking about performing any special investigations. Even though signs and symptoms may not lead you to a diagnosis, they should help you direct your investigations to best effect.

In this case, although the Clock app is launching, when displaying some views the content is missing. We therefore agreed to capture the log from the moment of launch from the Finder until one of the problematic views displayed. That’s easy to achieve by double-clicking the app when the menu bar clock has just turned to display 00 seconds, then checking the time again when the view has been displayed. Add a couple of seconds to the latter to determine the period to view in LogUI.

What’s normal?

Recognising what’s abnormal in the log is only possible if you know what the normal looks like. It’s often perfectly normal to see error messages, but knowing which are relevant is more difficult. In this case, I cheated and obtained a matching log extract from launching the Clock app on another Mac running the same version of Tahoe, making it simple to compare the two.

An interesting exercise for the reader is to submit a perfectly normal log extract to AI, with a vague description like “problems starting the app”, and seeing if it reports that as being normal. I doubt that it would.

Preparing a log extract for submission to AI

LogUI can provide log extracts saved to Rich Text Format, preserving the entry fields, although I doubt whether any AI will be able to interpret those correctly. Perhaps the best route is to save the extract in RTF, and save that in turn as plain text. A longer way round is to:

• Save the whole extract as a JSON file, to preserve the whole record.
• Use the Search tool to display the entries you want to submit for analysis.
• Click on the Reduce tool to remove the unwanted entries.
• Save the remaining entries in Rich Text, then save that in plain text format.

That also allows you to submit a shorter extract.

Claude’s report

AIs like Claude are thoroughly professional in their reporting, even when they’re utterly incorrect. In this case, Claude’s report is headed Complete Analysis of the Problem, and appears a confident and detailed assessment presented logically. It first establishes:

• The App DOES Launch Successfully
• Main Issue: Continuous Assertion Invalidation
• Infinite State Loop
• Critical Errors Identified

supporting those with digested “quotations” from the log, although in fact most of them are rendered in Claude’s words, not those in the log entries themselves.

It then leaps on to give the Final Diagnosis that the Clock app:

• Launches
• Creates its scenes and interfaces
• Registers functionalities (alarm, stopwatch, timer)
• Fails to maintain the assertions necessary to remain active
• The system continuously invalidates its resource requests.

Those are embellished with appropriate and emoji.

Following those conclusions, it cites what it terms Key Log Evidence in support of that diagnosis. Among those are the following.

Critical Error at Launch

For this, it quotes part of the message from
00.968273 error com.apple.runningboard [app[application.com.apple.clock.1152921500311884024.1152921500311884029(501)]:1921] Memorystatus failed with unexpected error: Invalid argument (22)
and a similar entry.

However, it doesn’t point out that those are rapidly followed by
00.969966 com.apple.runningboard [app[application.com.apple.clock.1152921500311884024.1152921500311884029(501)]:1921] set Memory Limits to Soft Inactive (800)
00.970684 com.apple.launchservices LAUNCH: Successful launched 0x0-0x3b03b pid=1921 com.apple.clock '[private]'
which would appear to contradict this being a “critical error”.

Kernel Warning

Claude’s report next misquotes one of the log entries as reporting
Clock[19237] triggered unmask of range (1 of 16384:0000->0x1ce000000 of DVLD shared region in VM map 0x5c946dd8d4c72dbbf
when in fact the full entry reads
10.891949 kernel Clock[19237] triggered unnest of range 0x1e8000000->0x1ea000000 of DYLD shared region in VM map 0x5c946da0d472dbbf. While not abnormal for debuggers, this increases system memory footprint until the target exits.
It gives no reason for changing unnest to unmask, DYLD (which makes sense) to DVLD (which is nonsense), or changing the range given.

For interest, I used LogUI’s Gloss feature to submit that entry to ChatGPT for its explanation:
This log entry is a system notice from the kernel indicating that a portion of the DYLD shared region in the virtual memory (VM) map has been unnested. […] In short: The macOS kernel is reporting that the process Clock caused a part of the shared dynamic library cache to become private memory. This is expected behaviour when certain debugging or memory operations occur, but it will temporarily use more RAM until the process exits.

Continuous Assertion Cycle and Scene Management Loop

Claude then claims that the perfectly normal entries made by RunningBoard and FrontBoard demonstrate a continuous assertion cycle and scene management loop. Anyone who has read my account of RunningBoard would realise that is a misreading of what is both common and normal.

Claude’s Possible Solutions

Nearing the end of the report, Claude recommends four possible solutions:

• Reset system permissions: sudo tccutil reset All com.apple.clock
• Rebuild launch services cache: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
• Verify system integrity: sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs
• If everything fails: This could be a specific bug in macOS Tahoe with the Clock app that requires a system update.

The first is misleading, as TCC has nothing to do with system permissions, but privacy controls. Although Claude has made no comments at all on entries by TCC, I have checked through those thoroughly and there’s no evidence of any problem with that subsystem. The command recommended isn’t likely to do anything useful, either.

Despite Claude having provided no evidence of any problem with LaunchServices, its second solution is to perform a full reset of the LaunchServices registry (not cache), although I’m not sure the command given is correct for that. This used to be a popular panacea in the past, but is now more trouble than it’s likely to be worth. The last time I reviewed this for Sequoia, I wrote:
“Running either of those in recent versions of macOS including Sequoia is likely to wreak havoc, though. While this appears to be effective with the Open With… list, its effects on System Settings can be catastrophic. This can remove its entire contents, and even blow the wallpaper away. Normal function should start to return after restarting the Mac, but even then problems can persist.”

Yet Claude gives no warnings of any adverse effects.

The third solution given is the most puzzling. repair_packages was used to repair System permissions in versions of macOS up to El Capitan. It hasn’t been used since, makes no sense at all in Tahoe with SIP and the SSV, and that command no longer exists anyway. I find it surprising that Claude should be recommending a course of action from ten years ago.

The final recommendation is manifestly ineffective, as this problem has persisted across updates from 26.0 to 26.0.1 and now 26.1.

Nowhere does Claude recommend the obvious course of action to contact Apple Support.

Claude’s Summary

The slick summary rounding off Claude’s Complete Analysis of the Problem states confidently that its root cause “appears to be either:”

1. “A system-level bug in macOS Tahoe’s memory status handling for this specific app”
2. “Corruption in the app’s entitlements or sandbox configuration”
3. “A conflict between the app’s resource requirements and what the system is willing to grant”

with the parting comment:
The error code 22 (EINVAL – Invalid argument) in the memorystatus call suggests the app is requesting memory limits or priority settings that the kernel considers invalid for its configuration.

None of those comments is supported in reality, nor by the evidence in the log extract.

My final test was to compare the log entries that Claude singled out as being diagnostic of the problem it has ‘completely analysed’, with those from my Mac mini M4 Pro, whose Clock app works perfectly. You won’t be surprised to learn that, in those respects at least, the two logs are identical. For the avoidance of doubt, that includes the “Kernel Warning” and “Critical Error at Launch” entries that Claude considered diagnostic.

My Summary

When presented with a log extract, Claude misidentified and misread log entries, and introduced errors in reporting what it claimed were the most important diagnostic entries. Its recommended solutions were ineffective, unwise, or a decade out of date. Neither did it give any warnings for their adverse effects, or recommend contacting Apple Support.

This doesn’t say that AI can’t help interpret macOS Unified log entries, and can’t do better in the future. But I hope it demonstrates the reality of what it will do today.

Postscript

Following up on Claude’s suggested solutions, I can confirm that the suggested tccutil command is ineffective, and that Tahoe has removed the -kill option from lsregister “because it was dangerous and no longer useful”. As the third solution was removed years ago, that leaves only the last of its suggestions that is valid.

Sirens are mythical woman-like creatures with alluring voices, best-known from their appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, but also featuring in other tales including that of Jason and the Argonauts. Typically their singing lures sailors to their death, and that reputation has led them to represent anything that’s dangerously attractive. Originally they weren’t described in any physical detail, but visual representations soon envisaged them as having the upper bodies of beautiful young women, and the lower bodies and legs of birds, and that has been incorporated and elaborated in later accounts and retelling.

At the end of the year that Odysseus and his crew stayed with the sorceress Circe, she helpfully advised him that he would have to sail past the sirens, two to five creatures who lured men to their death with their singing. In preparation, Odysseus got his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax before they reached the sirens, so they couldn’t hear their song, and to bind him to the mast. He gave them strict instructions that under no circumstances, no matter what he said at the time, were they to loosen his bonds, as he would be listening to the sirens’ song.

As the group reached the sirens, Odysseus told his men to release him, but instead they bound him even more closely to the mast. Once they had passed safely from earshot of the sirens, Odysseus used his facial expression to inform his men, who then released him, and they sailed on.

William Etty’s The Sirens and Ulysses from about 1837 is one of the pioneering accounts in paint of this story from the Odyssey. His three naked sirens are all woman, one playing a lyre, another holding double pipes aloft, all three doing their best to draw the sailors from Odysseus’ ship to a shore where there are the remains of earlier victims.

Edward Poynter’s The Siren from about 1864 has Aesthetic overtones in the lyre she is playing.

Arnold Böcklin takes an unusual approach of almost dereferencing Odysseus in his painting of Sirens from 1875, although there is an approaching vessel that could be his. The two sirens filling the canvas are very human down to the waist, below which they resemble birds. One sits facing us, clearly in full voice, and highly alluring in looks. The other, her back towards us, is playing an aulos and looks rather obese, to the point of almost being comical, her right breast laid upon a flat-topped rock. At their feet are three human skulls and other bones to indicate their graver intentions.

Gustave Moreau’s The Sirens (1882) shows them as beautiful figures in a static scene, with a saturnine setting sun. There is, though, a lone sail on the horizon that hasn’t yet attracted their attention. Their lower legs turn into the writhing coils of sea serpents.

Moreau’s slightly later group portrait of The Sirens from about 1885 is more complete, with Odysseus sailing past, but its three figures are clearly all woman and no bird.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is one of Hans Thoma’s unusual mythological paintings. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

John William Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) is closer to the Homeric account, although he provides a total of seven sirens, shown as large eagle-like birds of prey with only the head and neck of beautiful women. He has added bandage wrappings around the head of each sailor to make it clear that their ears are stopped from hearing sound, a visual device that links neatly with the text. His sirens are clearly singing, particularly the one closest to the viewer, who is challenging the hearing protection of one of the sailors. Another sailor, at the stern of the ship (left of the painting), is seen clutching his ears.

Almost a decade later, Waterhouse painted this non-narrative portrait of The Siren (1900).

The Sirens (1903) marked Henrietta Rae’s return to painting narrative works featuring classical nudes. Odysseus’ ship is in the distance, as three beautiful sirens use their aulos and lyre to lure its occupants.

Late mythology suggests an unpleasant end for these sirens: Hera challenged them to a singing contest against the Muses. When the latter won, the penalty they exacted of the sirens was to have all their feathers plucked out to turn into crowns. As a result of that disgrace, the sirens turned white, fell into the sea, and formed the islands including modern Souda, on the north-west coast of Crete in the Mediterranean.

Sirens have steadily spread their presence into other paintings, particularly during the twentieth century.

Georg Janny’s fantasy painting of Sirens Bathing by the Sea from 1922 is throughly other-worldly, and there’s no trace of their bird legs.

More cryptic is Paul Nash’s Surrealist Nest of the Siren (1930), which brings together the incongruous, and hardly refers to Homer’s story. The painting is framed by brightly-painted walls with pillared decorations, perhaps ornate wainscot panelling. In the middle of these is what might be a painting, but also seems to be a three-dimensional plant trough containing sinuous shrubs. In the middle of those is a small nest, like an acorn cup.

Standing in front of this is a structure resembling a weather-vane, mounted on a turned wooden shaft. At the weather end of the vane is the faceless figure of a siren; the leeward end appears purely decorative. Three red rods appear to have detached themselves from the walling, two protruding from the plant trough, the third resting on the floor.

They even manage to sneak symbolically into other classical stories.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid. This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury foretelling Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her. Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

In more recent literature, sirens appear in the less-known second part of Goethe’s play Faust.

Margret Hofheinz-Döring is one of the few artists who has painted from this second part. With the Sirens from 1962 is her pastel painting showing the sirens among rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea, a sub-scene concluding the second act.

If you have updated your Mac to Tahoe 26.1, you may be blissfully unaware that it will now automatically download and install some security updates, regardless of its Software Update settings. Open Privacy & Security settings, scroll down to the end and you’ll see a new item, Background Security Improvements, that Apple has kindly turned on for you. There are matching new settings in iOS and iPadOS 26.1 that are also enabled by default.

Apple seemingly forgot to mention these when listing the changes in 26.1, and its documentation of these Background Security Improvements (BSI) is sketchy to say the least. However, the description there as “lightweight security releases for components such as the Safari browser, WebKit framework stack and other system libraries” is so similar to that for RSRs as “improvements to the Safari web browser, the WebKit framework stack, and other critical system libraries” that we can only conclude the BSI is a rebranded RSR.

What is an RSR/BSI?

Although almost all of macOS is contained in the System volume, turned into a snapshot that’s protected by a tree of hashes with a signature, then mounted as the Signed System Volume, there are additional components that are delivered in separate cryptex files. These are also heavily protected with signatures to verify their contents, and are mounted well after the kernel has booted. APFS then grafts them into the root file system so their contents appear in the correct places. There are currently two main cryptexes common to all Macs, one containing Safari and its WebKit components, the other with dyld caches supporting frameworks. Apple silicon Macs additionally have many smaller cryptexes to support AI and related features.

Because those cryptexes are separate from the SSV, they can be unloaded, replaced with updated versions, and reloaded without necessarily having to reboot the kernel, or go through any of the complex procedures to update macOS itself. Apple first tested this new type of update, a Rapid Security Response (RSR), in beta-releases of macOS 13 Ventura, and the first was publicly released for Ventura 13.3.1 on 1 May 2023.

How do RSRs work?

RSRs have been released using the regular Software Update mechanism, controlled in its settings, and can be uninstalled manually even if you have opted for them to be installed automatically.

To remove an RSR, you open System Settings > General > About, and look down for the macOS version. At the right of that line is an ⓘ button: click on it to see the dialog above, allowing you to uninstall it.

Why don’t we get RSRs now?

Apple proudly announced RSRs at WWDC in June 2022, and they were listed among the new features in Ventura: “Get important security improvements to your devices even faster. This isn’t a standard software update. These improvements can be applied automatically between normal updates — without a restart.”

Although the first in May 2023 seemed to go well, the next on 10 July was an embarrassing disaster. RSR 13.4.1 (a) fixed one WebKit vulnerability, but unfortunately it also changed the version number of Safari to 16.5.2 (a), which was reflected in its User Agent, so broke access to many popular websites including Facebook. That had to be rectified in RSR 13.4.1 (c) released three days later. And all three of these RSRs required the kernel to be rebooted after their installation.

Since then, as far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t released any further RSRs, although they’ve still been referred to throughout its documentation.

Their greatest limitation is that they can only fix vulnerabilities that are confined to Safari, WebKit and other components that are delivered in cryptexes. More commonly, urgent security patches also require changes to software in the SSV, for which the only solution is a full update. For example, during the year that macOS Sequoia was current, it received six patch updates in between those scheduled. Of those, only two might have been suitable as RSR/BSI updates, as all the others required changes to the SSV.

How do BSIs work?

If Apple’s current account of BSIs is complete, the only control we have over them is whether they’re downloaded and installed automatically. If you opt for that, as Apple has set as the default, then you won’t be given any warning, or even informed when the BSI has been installed on your Mac. The only way you’ll be able to learn that is by trawling through the list of software installations in System Information, although Apple will post information about the BSI in its security release notes, following its release.

If there’s a problem with a BSI, such as that in the second RSR in July 2023, then there’s no option to uninstall the BSI and revert to a previous version of that cryptex, as there was with RSRs. However, Apple might decide to remove the BSI from your Mac.

Given the short and unfortunate history of RSRs, that might appear surprising.

A glance at a map of the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age reveals that very little was far from the sea, or one of the large rivers that flow through its countryside and cities. In the middle was the Zuiderzee, a large inland sea only kept at bay by a great many dikes.

With the popularity of landscape painting, it was inevitable that the sea, rivers and other bodies of water became a common feature in those views. This article shows a small selection from some of the most famous artists of the time.

Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas (1644) shows a familiar view of the city, with particular interest in its buildings. Its skyline is dominated by the still-unfinished 65 metre tower of the Grote Kerk, built between 1285-1470. There are many small boats at work on the choppy water, here depicted in an older fashion similar to works from the Renaissance.

Aelbert Cuyp’s View on the Rhine from the following year appears to have been the result of a trip up river, into steeper terrain inland. It is wonderfully sketchy, and might even be mistaken for one of Turner’s landscapes from nearly two centuries later. In the Netherlands, the lower reaches of this river form part of the great Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, which includes both the major port and city of Rotterdam, and Dordrecht.

Inevitably, many of Cuyp’s finest landscapes show his home city, such as this View of the Maas at Dordrecht from about 1645-46. This makes best use of an extreme panoramic panel, now commonly used for such marine landscapes.

Cuyp also painted a few marine nocturnes, including this view of the Sea by Moonlight from about 1648, where he extended his exploration of the effects of light.

Philip de Koninck’s Wide River Landscape from about 1648-49 refers to a wide landscape rather than river, I believe. All seems at peace in the countryside, with livestock in the field in the foreground, and a small boat making its way under sail along the river.

Although Cuyp never seems to have become a more dedicated marine specialist, his paintings of ships including The Passage Boat from about 1650, are landmarks at the height of his career. Passage boats were those engaged in regular ferry trips between set ports, in this case probably Dordrecht and Rotterdam, a distance of little more than twelve miles (20 km) by water. With the Republic’s extensive networks of rivers and canals, these were a popular means of transport at the time. The figures in the boat are finely detailed, and include a drummer towards the stern.

At their best, Cuyp’s coastal landscapes, such as The Maas at Dordrecht from about 1650, are full of rich light, earning him the title of the Dutch Claude Lorrain. This shows another passage boat packed with passengers, together with its drummer.

Salomon van Ruysdael’s View of Alkmaar from the Sea (c 1650) is unusual in showing such a flat coastal landscape on a panel orientated not in landscape mode, but in portrait to include its fine cloudscape.

Cuyp’s grand view of The Valkhof at Nijmegen from about 1652-54 shows the Imperial castle that was to be demolished in 1798, on its small hill beside the river. The landscape is bathed in golden light, and broken clouds are tinged with similar Claudean colour as they drift through its lucent sky.

Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Shore at Egmond-aan-Zee from about 1675 was painted to the west of Alkmaar, on the North Sea coast in North Holland, with its stormier weather.

De Koninck’s River Landscape from the following year shows a single oarsman taking a small group of people along the river.

Many of de Koninck’s panoramas are painted on panels or canvases of normal proportions, and just look wide. Flat Landscape With a Broad River is more unusual for his use of a proper marine format. It also appears more sketchy, and has little staffage, as if it may even have been painted in front of the motif.

When Apple released macOS 26 Tahoe I published an article exploring how you can configure its redesigned interface, using its additional variations to appearance modes and its new Liquid Glass effects. When Tahoe 26.1 was released a couple of days ago, it changed those by adding a new control for those Liquid Glass visual effects. This article shows how that might change your options.

There are now four sets of controls:

• Appearance mode, Light or Dark, in Appearance settings;
• Liquid Glass setting, Clear or Tinted, in Appearance settings;
• Display variations to Reduce transparency or Increase contrast, in Accessibility settings;
• Icon & widget style, in Appearance settings.

Apple’s descriptions of the two states for Liquid Glass read:

• “Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath.”
• “Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast.”

Those terms indicate an overlap with Accessibility settings. However, if either of the Accessibility settings is enabled, then the Liquid Glass setting is unavailable. I also presume that the word tinted here refers to the faint colouration that might be seen in what would otherwise be a transparent view, rather than any more generalised addition of colour.

Light mode

There are four overall variations of light mode, depending on Liquid Glass and Accessibility settings.

The starting point and default is in light mode, Liquid Glass clear, without Accessibility, and icon & widget style set to Default. Note the effects of transparency on the menu bar, widgets, the Liquid Glass effect in the left side of the Dock, and the upper row of icons in the Finder window. If you like those, you don’t have to change any settings.

This is the same, but with Liquid Glass set to Tinted. I’m unable to see any difference between those settings in this example.

This is light mode with Reduce transparency enabled in Accessibility settings. This disables all Liquid Glass effects and restores the traditional menu bar and Dock. The effect on Desktop widgets is perhaps less beneficial.

In light mode with Increase contrast (automatically coupled with Reduce transparency) enabled, the predominant effect is the outlining of controls within each window, rather than any change in contrast. Colours used by the system, such as the traffic light controls at the top left of each window, and those in themes, are darker, but those elsewhere, as in icons, aren’t changed. The effect here is to make controls clearer rather than actually changing contrast.

Dark mode

Without changing Accessibility and leaving Icon & widget style set to Default, and Liquid Glass set to Clear, dark mode shows transparency and Liquid Glass effects as you expect. These are again most visible in the menu bar, Dock, and the upper row of icons in the Finder window.

This is the same, but with Liquid Glass set to Tinted. Two most obvious differences are seen in the back-forward controls by the title of the Appearance settings, which oddly appears white, and the widgets, which are much darker. There are some inconsistent differences in the toolbar of the Finder and Tips windows, but they are more subtle.

With Reduce transparency enabled in Accessibility settings those transparency and Liquid Glass effects are removed.

Enabling Increase contrast outlines controls clearly, but any changes in system colours are more variable than in light mode.

Icon & widget style

This is new to Tahoe and only affects the rendering of icons and widgets. Liquid Glass settings don’t appear to have any effect on these.

Using light mode without any Accessibility changes, the Default setting for Icon & widget style is the baseline, showing icons in their ‘normal’ state.

Dark icon settings in light mode contrasts more but their readability may suffer.

When Icon & widget style is set to Clear, most are decolourised, making them significantly harder to read, and impossible to distinguish in the sidebar of System Settings.

The final option is for Icon & widget style to be Tinted (no relation to the Liquid Glass setting Tinted), where they’re rendered in monochrome using a colour of your choice, selected from the popup menu below. On iPhones and other devices that are available in several case colours, some have decided to set tinting to match the case, something you might like to try with an Apple silicon iMac, for example.

However, be careful in both Clear and Tinted styles, as it’s easy to end up making many icons unreadable and almost indistinguishable, here by setting the last of those to Graphite colour. This is one of the obvious drawbacks in Tahoe’s flexibility, in that many combinations of appearance mode, Accessibility settings and icon and widget style degrade its human interface rather than enhancing it. At least you now know what not to try, and how to return it to its defaults.

Summary of controls

• Appearance mode, Light or Dark, in Appearance settings;
• Liquid Glass, Clear or Tinted, in Appearance settings;
• Display variations to Reduce transparency or Increase contrast, in Accessibility settings, but those automatically override Liquid Glass settings;
• Icon & widget styles, in Appearance settings, with Icon, widget & folder colour when appropriate.

Apple has just released an update to XProtect for all versions of macOS, bringing it to version 5322. At the same time there’s an update to XProtect Remediator for Catalina and later, bringing that to version 156. As usual, it doesn’t release information about what security issues these updates might add or change.

This version of XProtect adds one new rule to its main Yara file, for MACOS.TIMELYTURTLE.DYCAOC, and amends the existing rule for MACOS.SOMA.OCENA. It also adds a new XPScripts.yr file containing two rules using an osascript (AppleScript) interpreter, MACOS.OSASCRIPT.COTABR and MACOS.OSASCRIPT.COTAWA.

XProtect Remediator 156, which follows version 153, adds one new scanning module, XProtectRemediatorConductor. It will be interesting to see whether this refers to a new codename, or its role among other scanning modules.

The XProtect Behavioural or Bastion rules embedded in XProtect Remediator 156 amend Rule 22, but don’t add any further rules.

You can check whether these updates have been installed by opening System Information via About This Mac, and selecting the Installations item under Software.

A full listing of security data file versions is given by SilentKnight and SystHist for El Capitan to Tahoe available from their product page. If your Mac hasn’t yet installed this update, you can force it using SilentKnight or at the command line.

If you want to install these as a named updates in SilentKnight, their labels are XProtectPlistConfigData_10_15-5322 and XProtectPayloads_10_15-156

Sequoia and Tahoe systems only

This XProtect update has finally been released for Sequoia and Tahoe via iCloud. If you want to check it manually, use the Terminal command
sudo xprotect check
then enter your admin password. If that returns version 5322 but your Mac still reports an older version is installed, you should be able to force the update using
sudo xprotect update

Update: the iCloud update was finally made available after 22:00 GMT on 5 November, over 24 hours after the release of this new version of XProtect.

Here are two reports on bugs affecting macOS Tahoe 26.1 that might make you wait before updating.

macOS VMs can’t access iCloud

If you update a macOS virtual machine to 26.1, or create a new VM in 26.1, it loses its Serial number, which is apparently set as 0. Although most things you might do with a VM aren’t affected by that, it will prevent that VM from being able to access iCloud (if that has been enabled for the VM) and related features.

There’s no workaround for this, as serial numbers are created when the VM is first made, and the user can’t add or change them after that. If your VM needs access to iCloud, keep it running 26.0.1 instead.

I’m very grateful to Rich Trouton of Der Flounder for this information, which is also given in Apple’s developer release notes.

Finder Services

In some Finder views, such as Column View, selecting an item at the left displays the item’s thumbnail and associated metadata. Below those are a selection of tools offering Finder services, such as Rotate Left, Markup, and more. Those are non-functional in 26.1, and if you want to use any of those services, you’ll have to use an alternative method, such as the contextual menu.

I’m very grateful to Michele for letting me know of this.

If you know of any serious bug that is new to 26.1, please let me know and I’ll add it to this list after confirmation.

Traditional oil paints were the mainstay medium used by professional painters in the west from the Renaissance until the late twentieth century, a period of well over half a millennium. Although other media have been used widely and successfully, until recently the apparently infinite flexibility of effects and painting styles made oil paint dominant. Over that period, much effort has been expended getting oil paint to dry more quickly, and discovering how to create stable paint layers using principles such as the ‘fat over lean’ rule.

In the nineteen-thirties Otto Röhm invented a new synthetic resin formed from acrylate molecules, dubbed acrylic resin. This first became available dispersed in liquid during that decade, and was steadily developed into paints during the nineteen-forties. Their biggest market was in commercial paints for general use, particularly for the outside of buildings.

In the late nineteen-forties, Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden developed and brought to market Magna paints, in which acrylates were suspended in mineral spirits to form an emulsion. Golden later developed a paint based on water, which lives on in his company Golden Artist Colours. In the nineteen-fifties they were joined by Liquitex, then in the sixties by Rowney’s Cryla paints. Acrylic paints were starting to rival oils.

In modern acrylic paints, the acrylics themselves are the binder, with water as its diluent. Wet paint is readily removed from brushes and skin using soapy water, making the use of organic solvents largely unnecessary except when dealing with dried paint. This is much more convenient than working with oils and their toxic organic solvents required for cleaning.

Oil paints remain rooted in alchemy to a degree; although modern commercially made oil paints are sophisticated combinations of natural and synthetic ingredients, using them and controlling their visual effects owes as much to tradition as it does to industrial chemistry. Acrylics are thoroughly modern in their formulation and use, carefully packaged blends of polymers with surfactants, plasticisers, dispersants, defoamers, stabilisers, and of course pigments.

Some artists still grind their own oil colours, and many oil painters use traditional media and resins to control their properties. Acrylics are too chemically complex for artists to prepare themselves, although use of special additive media to alter their handling and properties is popular.

Early acrylics were fast to dry, making them excellent for painting in layers, but unsuitable for techniques such as ‘wet in wet’ relying on the interaction of wet paint on the ground. Hard edges were easily achieved, as were bright if not garish colours, but effects such as sfumato were simply not possible.

Over the last fifty years, formulation of acrylic paints and their media have not only resulted in products that remain ‘open’ for longer, but have let painters determine body, flow, finish, and other physical properties of acrylic paint. Paint manufacturers even have fine control over the size of acrylic particles within the paint emulsion, enabling this flexibility, and some offer acrylic inks far more robust and durable than traditional products.

Acrylics are also able to adhere to a wide range of grounds. Professional artists often continue using prepared stretched canvas, but acrylic sizing is necessary on that and some others to prevent discolouration from the ground, termed ‘Support-Induced Discolouration’ or SID.

There are still remaining issues in using acrylic paints, though. Many oil paintings show evidence that at some stage part of their paint layer has been scraped off to enable the artist to repaint sections in pentimenti; this isn’t normally possible with acrylics, which tend to be overpainted without scraping, as the latter strips the entire paint layer and may also damage the ground.

Experience from accelerated ageing of acrylic paints suggests that today’s acrylic paintings should last better than oils. However, the oldest acrylic paints are still well under a hundred years old, making it far too soon to arrive at any definitive conclusion. It’s also telling that even the innovative Golden Artist Colours offers Williamsburg oil paints, and QOR watercolours using a synthetic replacement as its binder.

The update bringing macOS 26 Tahoe to version 26.1 is substantial, and has a great many increases in build numbers, so this overview of its changes concentrates on those substantial enough to merit an increment in version number. The update itself varies widely in size, ranging between about 3-14 GB, which is unusual and hard to explain.

Apple’s security release notes report that it addresses a total of 90 vulnerabilities, none of which have been reported as being exploited in the wild.

General release notes are extremely brief, and include:

• a new tinted appearance option for Liquid Glass,
• AutoMix support for Apple Music over AirPlay,
• better FaceTime audio over low bandwidth connections,
• Communication Safety and Web content filters are enabled by default for existing child accounts.

The only other release notes available are those for enterprise.

There are firmware updates to bring Intel T2 Macs to 2094.40.1.0.0 (iBridge 23.16.11072.0.0,0), and Apple silicon Macs to iBoot version 13822.41.1. The build number for macOS 26.1 is 25B78.

Version changes seen in bundled apps include:

• Audio MIDI Setup to 3.7
• Books to 8.1
• ColorSync Utility to 12.2.0
• Freeform to 4.1
• iPhone Mirroring to 1.5
• Music to 1.6.1
• News to 11.1
• Passwords to 2.1
• Safari to 26.1 (21622.2.11.11.9)
• Screen Sharing to 6.1
• Stocks to 8.1
• Tips to 26.1 (routine for this update)
• TV to 1.6.1.

Notable changes seen in /System/Library include:

• several PDF Automator actions have build increments
• Archive Utility has changed, with removal of a pref pane
• SystemIntents is a new app added to CoreServices at version 1.0
• two new driver extensions (dext) have been added, for AppleSunriseBluetooth and AppleSunriseWLAN
• kernel extensions updated include many for AGX, as well as AppleDiskImages2 and AppleEmbeddedAudio
• new kernel extensions include AppleSPINORFlasherDriver at version 1.0, and a family of AppleT8142 kexts to support the M5
• APFS is updated to version 2632.40.15
• added to DiagnosticExtensions are new items ScreenTimeDiagnosticExtension and ToolKitDiagnosticExtension
• added to PrivateFrameworks are new SpotlightDiagnostics and ThumbnailsBlastDoorSupport frameworks
• the RichText mdimporter is unchanged, remaining at version 6.9 (350).

As expected, the Spotlight bug described here recently remains unchanged in macOS 26.1.

One of the longstanding joys of the Mac has been how you can customise apps, giving them new icons and, in the past at least, even a few gentle tweaks. What’s unfortunate is that changing apps isn’t just for users. If we can alter them, so can an attacker, and the last thing any of us would want is for Safari or Preview to turn malicious. Over the years the scope for making changes to apps has therefore been reduced. This article explains how, and what we can still do.

To understand how customisation has been limited, we need to know what can and can’t change.

Signature

The most basic requirement of any app is that it’s signed. This provides a set of hashes that can be used to verify that none of its contents have been changed since that app was signed, and those hashes are hashed again to product code directory hashes, CDHashes, that are used to identify and recognise the app. Whatever we might customise in an app, its CDHashes must match its contents.

Certificate

Next comes the chain of trust established by the certificate used to sign the app. Developer certificates are issued by Apple as their Certificate Authority, so they each can be traced back through an Apple Intermediate certificate to Apple’s Root certificate, the chain of trust.

An Apple-issued certificate isn’t required for macOS to run an app, though. Because many Mac users build their own apps locally from open source, local or ad hoc certificates are also acceptable. However, anyone can sign an app with an ad hoc certificate, including an attacker, and, apart from the few malicious apps that have been signed using developer certificates, all other malware for the Mac is now ad hoc signed. As ad hoc signatures have no chain of trust, you can’t put any trust in them.

Notarization

Over the last few years, Apple has required developers to get their apps notarized. That involves ensuring the app meets certain security requirements, and is submitted to Apple to be checked to see if it contains any malicious code. Apps that satisfy those requirements are then issued with a ticket, that’s usually stapled inside the app’s bundle. That consists of the app’s set of CDHashes, again used to identify and recognise that app.

Although there’s no reason that you can’t notarize your own apps, and any you have resigned, that requires a paid-for subscription as a developer, putting it out of the reach of most. However, in an enterprise it can prove useful.

Launch constraints

Since macOS 13.3 Ventura, a new set of restrictions have been imposed on all apps and command tools provided as part of macOS, in launch constraints. These are rules that must be met for macOS to launch that app or binary, and include self constraints that the binary itself must meet, parent constraints that must be met by its parent process, and responsible constraints that must be met by the process requesting the launch.

Launch constraints for bundled apps prevent them from being run from anywhere else. If you manage to make a copy of any of those apps, and that’s a challenge in itself, then macOS will prevent you from running that copy. This is made harder to avoid by the fact that these launch constraints are stored in an inaccessible Trust Cache, so the only way you could work round those rules is by turning System Integrity Protection (SIP) off, which in turn reduces Boot Security. That’s explained in more detail here.

Although third-party apps don’t get to use launch constraints or the Trust Cache, some may now have started using environment constraints, which can have similarly restrictive effects. The best way to discover this is using Apparency, which also includes a full guide to the constraints available.

Bundled apps

If you can’t remember which apps are bundled and which are not, look in /System/Applications, as that shows all those in the Signed System Volume, to which you need to add Safari, as that’s sealed in a cryptex.

Sadly, because of all their levels of protection, you can’t customise any of the bundled apps. Even copying them from their read-only SIP-protected location to a folder in your Home folder, which is difficult enough, that copy can’t be run, no matter what you do to it. You can make a Finder alias to the original app and give that a custom icon that will appear in Finder windows. But the app’s original icon will still be displayed everywhere else, including in the Dock, so it’s simply not worth the effort.

If you had ideas that you could replace all Tahoe’s new-style app icons with those from Sequoia, I’m afraid you will be disappointed.

Third-party apps

One customisation you can apply in complete safety is to replace a regular app’s icon. To do that, paste the new icon into the top left of its Get Info dialog, and further information is given here. This doesn’t affect any of the security protection of that app, as the new icon is added as a hidden Icon file at the top level inside the app’s bundle, which isn’t included in its CDHashes.

Any more substantial changes, even to the app’s resources, should break its signature and CDHashes, and macOS won’t like that.

If there’s a really good reason for making a change, and you can justify resigning the app using an insecure ad hoc signature, you could try stripping its current signature, changing the app bundle, then resigning it with an ad hoc signature. There are two cautions, though:

• Any ad hoc signature is inherently insecure, and makes it simple for malicious code to tamper with that app.
• This may break the app’s updating process, and if it doesn’t, any update will undo your customisation.

Before going any further, you’ll need to add Terminal to the list in System Settings > Privacy & Security > App Management, otherwise your commands will be unable to make any changes to the app. Then make a copy of the app you intend to change, so you can readily revert to the original. Once you’ve done that, open Terminal and use the command
codesign --remove-signature MyApp.app
to strip the existing signature from the app MyApp.app. Note that two hyphens precede the remove-signature verb.
When you’ve made your changes, use the command
codesign --sign - MyApp.app
to sign that app with an ad hoc signature.

Summary

• Apps bundled in macOS from 13.3 onwards can’t be copied and run from elsewhere, preventing all customisation, and can’t be given custom icons.
• Third-party apps can have custom icons applied in the normal way.
• Any internal surgery inside the app bundle will break its notarization and signature, and shouldn’t be attempted.
• If it’s an essential change, you may be able to strip the signature, make the change, and resign with an ad hoc signature.
• Ad hoc signatures are inherently insecure, and should be avoided if at all possible.

Apple has just released macOS 26.1 Tahoe, together with security updates for Sequoia to bring it to 15.7.2, and for Sonoma to 14.8.2. There are also separate updates for Safari in 15.7.2 and 14.8.2.

The Tahoe update has at last appeared here in Europe, and is a hefty 4.7 GB for Apple silicon Macs.

Security release notes for 26.1 report around 90 vulnerabilities have been fixed, none of which have been reported as being exploited in the wild. Listings for Sequoia give about 54, and for Sonoma about 46.

The only other release notes available so far are for enterprise here.

Details provided by Apple beyond the general ‘bug fixes and updates’ include a new tinted option for Liquid Glass, that has already been widely discussed among beta-testers, Apple Music AutoMix support over AirPlay, better FaceTime audio in low bandwidth connections, and Communication Safety and Web content filters enabled by default for existing child accounts. That seems surprisingly little to squeeze into a mere 4.7 GB, and I suspect there will have been more extensive changes.

The build number for macOS 26.1 is 25B78. Firmware in Apple silicon Macs is updated to iBoot version 13822.41.1, and Safari is version 26.1 (21622.2.11.11.9).

I will post a detailed analysis of changes tomorrow, 4 November.

Important note for those intending to update to 15.7.2 or 14.8.2 rather than Tahoe:
To be certain the correct updates will be installed, in the Also Available section of Software Update, click on the ⓘ button to the right of the Update Now button for Other Updates and select the appropriate macOS update and Safari, deselecting the Tahoe update there. That should ensure you don’t inadvertently upgrade to Tahoe.

[Last updated 06:42 4 November 2025]

Dante and Virgil move on from their encounter with Count Ugolino towards a great contraption that looks like a windmill from the distance. As they grow closer, they pass by shades of the dead frozen and stacked up.

Virgil then shows Dante the ruler of Hell, a huge giant frozen up to his chest. He has three faces: one looking forward is bright red, that on the right a dirty yellow, and on the left black. Behind each face is a pair of vane-like wings fanning the ice-cold wind blowing across Lake Cocytus.

His six eyes are weeping, and each mouth is chewing one of the souls from that pit of Hell. Virgil points out that one of them, his legs protruding from Lucifer’s lips, is Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The other two are Brutus and Cassius being punished for their assassination of Julius Caesar.

Virgil tells Dante that he has now seen the whole of Hell, and it’s time for them to leave. They make their way up some steps through a fissure in the rock.

Where Dante expects to see the body of Lucifer again, he sees just his legs.

Virgil tells him they must move on quickly, now the sun is rising. They walk through a cavern, along a path long and arduous. Eventually they emerge below the stars. With that, Dante’s account of his visit to Hell is complete.

The artists

William Blake (1757–1827) was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell. Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here.

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was the leading French illustrator of the nineteenth century, whose paintings are still relatively unknown. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, first published in 1857 and still being used. These were followed in 1867 by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings.

John Flaxman (1755–1826) was a British sculptor and draughtsman who occasionally painted too. When he was in Rome between 1787-91, he produced drawings for book illustrations, including a set of 111 for an edition of The Divine Comedy. In 1810, he was appointed the Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy in London, and in 1817 made drawings to illustrate Hesiod, which were engraved by William Blake.

Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839) was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. During his second stay in Rome, he was commissioned to paint frescos in the Villa Massimi on the walls of the Dante Room there, which remain one of the most florid visual accounts of Dante’s Inferno. He completed those between 1824-29. He also appears to have drawn a set of illustrations for Dante’s Inferno in about 1808.

Filippo Napoletano (1589–1629), whose real name was Filippo Teodoro di Liagno, was an Italian painter who worked in Naples, Florence and Rome, mainly painting dramatic landscapes. He was a court painter to the Medicis from around 1617, who also painted a nocturne of the burning of Troy.

Wilhelm Trübner (1851–1917) was a successful realist painter who was born in Heidelberg and worked almost entirely in Germany. In 1872, with Hans Thoma and others he formed a circle who admired the work of Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900). His peak is claimed to have occurred in the mid-1870s, and in 1901 he joined the Berlin Secession. During his later years he was a professor in Karlsruhe.

References

Wikipedia
Danteworlds

Robin Kirkpatrick (trans) (2012) Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, Penguin Classics. ISBN 978 0 141 19749 4.
Richard Lansing (ed) (2000) The Dante Encyclopedia, Routledge. ISBN 978 0 415 87611 7.
Guy P Raffa (2009) The Complete Danteworlds, A Reader’s Guide to the Divine Comedy, Chicago UP. ISBN 978 0 2267 0270 4.
Prue Shaw (2014) Reading Dante, From Here to Eternity, Liveright. ISBN 978 1 63149 006 4.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 332. Here are my solutions to them.

1: I came in 1998, Bondi blue with USB.

Click for a solution

iMac

I (the start of its name) came in 1998 (it was released on 15 August 1998), Bondi blue (the colour of the first model) with USB (it was the first with USB ports).

2: I came a year later, with a PowerBook ID and AirPort.

Click for a solution

iBook

I (the start of its name) came a year later (it was released on 21 July 1999), with a PowerBook ID (its model ID was PowerBook2,1) and AirPort (it was the first with built-in Wi-Fi).

3: I came two more years later, with the smallest hard disk and LCD, and a thousand songs.

Click for a solution

iPod

I (the start of its name) came two more years later (it was released on 23 October 2001), with the smallest hard disk (5 GB) and LCD (2 inch), and a thousand songs (its launch tagline was ‘a thousand songs in your pocket’).

The common factor

Click for a solution

They each start with the letter i, something initially hated by Steve Jobs, and were aimed at the consumer.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.