Not everyone in the Dutch Republic enjoyed a Golden Age of material wealth. There were some who found worldly goods and pleasures of the flesh were hollow and fleeting, and expressed that in a new sub-genre of Vanitas.

This stems from a long Christian tradition of the worthlessness of earthly possessions, and the promise of life after death. These are crystallised in the wisdom literature of the Bible, in particular a verse from Ecclesiastes, given in the Latin translation of the Vulgate as vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas, or vanity of vanities, all is vanity, although here the word vanity refers to feelings of emptiness and futility, rather than conceit.

Vanitas paintings thus point to:

• the brevity of life on earth,
• the imminence of death,
• the worthlessness of earthly riches,
• the futility of earthly pursuits and pleasures.

Because those are abstract concepts, the challenge in every Vanitas painting is to find the right symbols, generally accomplished through an allegorical language. They also overlap with other themes in painting such as the Memento mori, the reminder of one’s own mortality.

These have their origins in the Flemish Renaissance, as in Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Vanitas from about 1535-40. This features an unusual androgynous angel with butterfly wings, cradling a human skull with fragmentary Latin inscriptions. Within the skull is an inset window, through which there is a tiny landscape view. This artist started his career in Antwerp, and is thought to have moved to Haarlem after 1550.

When Vanitas paintings first became popular in the Dutch Republic, they were most commonly expressed in carefully composed still lifes. Clara Peeters’ Fruit, Dead Birds and a Monkey (1615-20) shows a typically strange collection of objects: at first glance a basket of fruit, but the grapes are covered with bloom, a peach is going rotten, and there is a fly on an apple. The little monkey, busy feeding from nuts, is gazing at a small pile of dead birds.

These became elaborate and contrived at times, and sometimes involved a self-portrait.

In Peeters’ Vanitas Portrait of a Woman, the artist gazes into the distance, probably a carefully-angled mirror to see her own reflection. Beside her head is a bubble, a sign of Vanitas. In front of her, on the table, are the contents of a still life, with the worldly symbols of Vanitas: gold and silver coins, jewellery, a couple of dice, with their association with chance and earthly pleasures such as gambling.

In Cornelis de Vos’s Allegory on Transitoriness (1620-29), a mother, possibly the artist’s wife, sits looking full of Vanitas, as her two children blow soap bubbles. Around her, the family’s most valuable possessions are piled up: gold, silver, porcelain, a lute, a string of pearls and other jewellery, and the younger child’s foot rests on a sack of cash. De Vos was Flemish, with his workshop in Antwerp, and often collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens.

Carstian Luyckx, another Flemish painter from Antwerp, brings in additional objects to his undated Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Still Life. These include a globe representing the physical world, the gall from a tree, a snuffed-out candle, seashells, and coral. He uses another common device found in Vanitas painting: an open book, here showing King Charles I, who was executed in 1649, and his wife Henrietta Maria of France, who was deposed as queen of England by the civil wars, forcing her to flee to France in 1644.

David Bailly’s Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols (1651) is a complex web of allegory containing multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His true self-portrait at the time is in the painting held with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.

Gathered in front of the artist are ephemera and other Vanitas objects: the snuffed-out candle, a glass of wine, flowers, and soap bubbles, together with a string of pearls and a skull. If that message isn’t clear enough, he provides the quotation on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas, together with his signature and date. This painting is also unusual for its innovative use of colour and monochrome passages to distinguish its features from their ground. Bailly worked in the city of the Dutch Republic that became most strongly associated with Vanitas painting, Leiden.

Gerard ter Borch’s younger half-sister Gesina modelled for some of his paintings and trained as a painter herself. Between 1667-69, brother and sister painted this Memorial Portrait of Moses ter Borch (1645-1667) to commemorate their younger brother Moses, also a promising artist, who was killed in the Second Anglo-Dutch War in the summer of 1667. Centred on his full-length posthumous portrait, he’s surrounded by Vanitas symbols, including a snake, butterfly, watch, a small pipe, armour, an hourglass, a skull, shells, weapons, snails, fungal decay, and withering flowers. The ter Borchs worked from Amsterdam, although Gerard seems to have travelled more widely.

Evert Collier’s A Vanitas from 1669 is another collection, showing additional objects which became involved in the allegory, including a sword, armour, fine fabrics, and ornamental feathers. Collier was born in North Brabant, trained in Haarlem, then moved to Leiden.

Some later Vanitas paintings developed the theme of young boys blowing bubbles, as in Karel Dujardin’s Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles, an Allegory on the Transitoriness and Brevity of Life from 1663. Dujardin worked in Amsterdam.

In the world of presidential health, distrust and speculation run so rampant that even Mr. Trump’s online assurance that he was fine was immediately explained away as part of a cover-up.

© Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Even if Mr. Mamdani is as awful as his opponents insist, campaigning against an opponent’s flaws works only if you don’t seem even worse.

“A Marriage at Sea” provides a kind of rebuke to the current extreme cultural narratives about heterosexual romance.

Another of the new genres to emerge and develop in the Dutch Golden Age is animal painting. This appears to have started among Flemish painters at the end of the sixteenth century, but didn’t become popular until about 1640, when a succession of painters in the Dutch Republic depicted domestic animals as part of their landscapes.

Aelbert Cuyp is thought to have painted this Landscape with Cattle when he was only about nineteen, in 1639. It’s set against the background of the city of Dordrecht, the oldest in the two provinces of Holland, and situated on the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt river delta. The herdsman and animals in the foreground are engaged in diversions from that landscape: the man is taunting a billy goat, while the cow at the far right is urinating copiously.

Cuyp continued to develop his landscapes with more diverse themes. Orpheus with Animals in a Landscape from about 1640 is one of at least two different paintings he made of this story from mythology. Here he has included a wide range of both domestic and exotic animals and birds, including a distant elephant, an ostrich, herons and wildfowl.

His paintings of domestic animals also took him indoors, for example in this fascinating painting of Sheep in a Stable from about 1645. The sheep are faithfully depicted, and surrounded by objects suggesting elements of a still life. In the foreground are empty mussel shells, a couple of earthenware pots, and two wickerwork baskets with some scarlet cloth. He also renders the texture of the fleeces using painterly brushstrokes, particularly that of the standing ram.

Artists who had travelled to lands in the growing Dutch Empire sent back paintings of the animals they saw there. Albert Eckhout, who had been born in Groningen, accompanied John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, Dutch governor of Brazil, when he landed at Recife in January 1637, to document local inhabitants and wildlife.

Eckhout’s Study of Two Brazilian Tortoises is believed to have been painted in Brazil in about 1640.

Paulus Potter was probably the first dedicated animal-painter, through his brief career in Delft, The Hague and Amsterdam.

Potter’s first masterpiece is The Bull (also widely known as The Young Bull) (1647), which is nearly life-sized, and almost hyperreal in its surface details. Originally intended just as a portrait of the central bull, Potter enlarged the canvas to accommodate (from the left) a ram, lamb, ewe, herdsman, cow, and above them a bird of prey, possibly a buzzard. Beyond them are more cattle in the meadows, which recede to the church of Rijswijk, which is between Delft and The Hague.

He went on to paint portraits such as Two Pigs in a Sty (1649), featuring two hairy pigs at rest. Many of the older breeds of pig were more hirsute than modern varieties, and Potter has painted their coats realistically, as well as skilfully lighting the face of the sow sat on her haunches.

Potter’s Cows Grazing at a Farm from 1653 was one of his last paintings, and apart from its meticulous detail, its rich lighting effects might be more typical of Corot two hundred years later. Potter died tragically young the following year, but the new sub-genre was taken up by others, including Adriaen van de Velde.

Van de Velde’s undated Milkmaid with Cow and Goats in Front of a Barn is a farmyard delight, with the cow being milked looking directly at the viewer.

The Hut (1671) was one of van de Velde’s last paintings, and has long been esteemed in the Netherlands. It’s one of his most natural compositions, sparkling with bright colour in the clothing and animals. The artist even adds the reality, perhaps as a touch of humour, of some fresh cowpats.

Jan Weenix’s early painting of a Landscape with Shepherd Boy from 1664 reveals his true forte in the realistic depiction of the sheep and dog.

Some specialised even further: Melchior d’Hondecoeter concentrated on birds and game.

Concert of the Birds (1670) is one of his more elaborate paintings featuring a wide range of native species.

D’Hondecoeter painted this huge Portrait of Three Children in a Landscape with Game in the latter half of the 1600s. The children appear to have taken to field sports at a very early age, and have here amassed an impressive ‘kill’, with their muzzle-loading gun, although I hope that an unseen adult may have had a hand in its use. The lone tortoise being ignored by each of the children and dogs is slowly crawling its way towards them, as if it has just emerged into the wrong painting.

还记得之前大家热议的神秘 AI 图片编辑模型「nano-banana」吗？

前几天，我们在 LMArena 大语言模型竞技场里面用它进行了多轮测试，结果表现都非常出色。

现在，Google 终于揭开了它的神秘面纱。

Google 正式推出了其最先进的图像生成与编辑模型——Gemini 2.5 Flash Image。

在更新的技术博客里面，Google 提到此前的 Gemini 2.0 Flash 已经在图像生成方面，以其低延迟和高性价比受到了开发者的喜爱，但用户们也一直期待更高质量的图像和更强大的创作控制功能。

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 就是带着一系列的重磅更新，来强势回应这些期待。

和我们之前的体验效果一样，Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 的主要特点包括下面几点

1. 充分保持角色的一致性
2. 基于提示的图片编辑
3. 利用 Gemini 的现实世界知识
4. 多幅图像融合

一张图讲一个故事：角色、场景随心换

以往的 AI 绘图工具，最大的痛点之一就是难以保持角色或物体的一致性。我们都曾经经历过，想让同一个角色出现在不同场景中，结果却常常画风突变，每一次生成都像换了个人。

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 彻底解决了这个问题。

它可以轻松地将同一个角色置于不同的环境中，或者从多个角度展示同一款产品，同时完美地保持其核心主体不变。Google 提到这对于需要讲述连续故事、生成品牌系列资产或制作产品目录的场景来说，无疑是一项革命性的功能。

为了展示这项能力，Google AI Studio 中还提供了一个模板应用，让开发者可以快速上手，甚至在其基础上进行二次开发。

在这个体验项目里，我们不需要输入任何的提示词，只用上传一张人像照片，它就会调用这个最新的图像模型，为我们生成从 1976 年 到 1990 年等各个年份的照片。

马斯克看到自己这么帅心里一定在想，我的 Grok 也可以。

一句话修图，用自然语言精准编辑

除了这种保持好高度一致的角色生成，精准的编辑也是一大亮点。Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 允许我们通过简单的自然语言指令，对图片进行精准的局部修改 。

像是模糊图片背景、消除 T 恤上的污渍、从合照中移除某个人、改变人物的姿势、为黑白照片上色……

这一切，都不再需要复杂繁琐的专业软件操作，我们只需要像聊天一样，用一句话告诉 AI 想做什么即可。

这跟我们之前在 LMArena 中的体验是一样的，像是我们也转换过照片的风格，从黑白到彩色；以及对照片进行细微的调整等。

Google 同样设计了一个简单的应用，来方便我们更好的体验这种基于提示词的图像编辑，但是完全媲美 PS 软件的效果。

不止会画，更「懂」世界

过去的图像模型虽然能创造出精美的图片，但往往缺乏对现实世界的深层语义理解 。

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 借助 Gemini 强大的世界知识库，让图像生成变得更加「智能」。

这意味着，模型不仅能看懂我们潦草手绘的图表，还能回答与现实世界相关的问题，并一步到位地执行复杂的编辑指令。

听起来很有多模态推理的感觉，Google 在 AI Studio 中展示了一个互动教育应用，将一块简单的画布变成了可以答疑解惑的智能导师，我由衷的感叹这个模型是真的厉害。

图像融合：轻松实现「无缝」拼贴

新模型还带来了一项酷炫的功能——多图像融合。我们可以将一张图片中的物体「放」进另一张图片的场景里，或者用一张图的风格去渲染另一间屋子，整个过程只需一条提示指令就能完成。

同样是 Google AI Studio 里面的模板体验应用，我们只需要把产品拖拽到新场景中，就可快速生成一张毫无违和感的、真实照片般的融合图像。

在这个模板应用里面，我们甚至不需要输入任何提示词，可以直接拖动某个物体，到场景图片上的具体位置，然后它会自动生成融合的图片。

如何上手体验？

除了我们在前面提到的那些 Google AI Studio 里面的模板应用。

目前，Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 已经可以通过 Gemini APP、Gemini API、Google AI Studio 和 Vertex AI 进行访问。

关于调用 API，具体的定价是每百万输出 token 30 美元，官方介绍，生成一张图片大约消耗 1290 个输出 token，也就是说，每张图片的成本约为 0.039 美元，换算下来人民币不到 3 毛钱。

值得一提的是，所有通过 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 创建或编辑的图片，都会包含 SynthID 隐形数字水印，以便识别其为 AI 生成或编辑的内容。

这跟前些天 Google 发布 Pixel 10 系列手机时，讲到 AI 图片编辑 Ask Photo 工具时，使用的 C2PA（内容来源和真实性联盟） 内容凭证是一样的。

最后，Google 还提到正在努力提升模型在长文本渲染、角色一致性稳定度和图像细节真实性等方面的表现。

总而言之，Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 的发布，让 AI 图像工具从一个单纯的绘画玩具，向一个真正实用的创意与生产力工具迈出了一大步。

它不仅解决了我们过去使用 AI 绘图时的诸多痛点，还带来了更多有趣、实用的新玩法。

之前 4o 生图能力出来，看到很多 App 开始主打用一张图每天生成一首诗，还有像是拿到了今年 Apple 设计大奖的 CapWords，拍一张生活里的照片，来实景学习一门新的语言……

我现在已经迫不及待想看到基于 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 模型，又会有哪些新应用诞生了。

#欢迎关注爱范儿官方微信公众号：爱范儿（微信号：ifanr），更多精彩内容第一时间为您奉上。

爱范儿 | 原文链接 · 查看评论 · 新浪微博

Although there are a few still life paintings from classical Roman times, the first known in modern painting was made by Hans Memling in about 1485, and Caravaggio painting one in about 1599. There were precious few until after 1610, and it wasn’t until the Dutch Golden Age that they appeared in any quantity. Once they started, they quickly became popular, and may have accounted for as much as 10% of all paintings sold in Leiden, for instance. Their success was the result of religious intolerance.

Unlike the Italian Renaissance, the Flemish Renaissance revelled in the faithful depiction of surface textures and adventures in optics. Centres such as Antwerp trained painters in the skills needed, but Flanders and Brabant formed the Catholic Spanish Netherlands, where religious paintings were expected. Artists who followed the Reformed tradition rather than Catholicism or who wanted to paint secular works found themselves oppressed, and many migrated to the north, to paint in the Dutch Republic.

One of the most successful of the pioneer still life painters of the early seventeenth century was also a woman, Clara Peeters, and one of the finest still life painters of any age. We don’t even know when she was born, but she seems to have trained in Antwerp, then pursued her career successfully in the Dutch Republic. She’s thought to have been internationally successful by 1611, when at least four of her paintings were sold to Spain. Her last reliably-dated works are from 1621, although there are a few attributed to her from later.

Venetian Glass, Roemer and a Candlestick (1607) is one of Peeters’ earliest known works, which shows an extraordinary skill in rendering the varied surfaces and their optical properties. It is also one of the first still lifes in which the artist has included their own image reflected in the motif, here the base of the candlestick holder.

As in many still lifes, its contents have interesting symbolic meaning. The confectionery shown is sweet and ephemeral, the ring a sign of earthly riches and temporal relationships, the fly an indicator of earthly decay, and the burning candle combines remembrance with the strict limits on lifespan in this world. This is not just a still life, but an expression of vanitas, the futility and limits of our earthly existence, a theme for a separate article in this series.

Her paintings from 1611 that ended up in the Spanish Royal Collection, and are now in the Prado, move on from that impressive start.

This Table is laid out for a meal, with its range of food and surfaces with different optical properties. Settings for meals, particularly that of breakfast, were later to become a sub-genre in their own right.

Over the coming centuries, still life paintings featuring game were to become popular throughout Europe. Peeters’ Still Life with Game Piece and Poultry is their ancestor. Shells are another vanitas association.

Her Still Life of Fish and a Candlestick is one of the earliest and most accomplished paintings of the fruits de mer, which were to find favour with William Merritt Chase nearly three centuries later.

In the last of these from the Spanish collection, Clara Peeters makes another cameo appearance in its reflections, providing tantalising glimpses of herself.

The following year, her still life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honour (1612) reveals multiple miniature self-portraits reflected in the gold cup at the right.

In her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, her surface and optical rendering is breathtaking, and all thoughts of vanitas have gone. This is a celebration of the thoroughly earthly and sensuous pleasures of food. These are sustained in several of her other later paintings.

She hadn’t entirely forgotten the spiritual dimension, though. Another of her most interesting paintings returns to the concept of vanitas and the ephemeral.

Peeters established herself an international reputation, sold her paintings into major art collections, and pioneered what was to come in the rest of the century, yet is omitted from many accounts of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

By this time, still life paintings were enjoying growing popularity in the buoyant market of the Dutch Golden Age. Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621) painted this Flower Still Life in oil on copper in 1614, during the early years. He had been born in Antwerp, but because of the threat of religious persecution moved to Middelburg in the Dutch Republic, where he founded a school of floral painting.

At first its eclectic mixture of different flowers and flying insects appears haphazard. These merit a deeper reading, though: the flowers include carnation, rose, tulip, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, cyclamen, violet and hyacinth. These could never, at that time, have bloomed at the same time. The butterflies, bee and dragonfly are as ephemeral as the flowers around them. This too has more than a touch of vanitas.

By 1620, still life paintings were much in demand in northern Europe, and had ceased being occasional curiosities. Bosschaert’s career and family business was founded on the still life, which had come of age at last.

Collations of food grew ever more inventive, with Pieter Claesz combining a table of bread and delights in his Still Life with Musical Instruments from 1623. His underlying themes here are the rich browns of the food, wood and tortoise, and their curved forms. Claesz had been born near Antwerp, trained in that city and became a master there in 1620, when he too migrated to the Dutch Republic, where he established his studio in Haarlem.

Other artists developed the still life in the direction of food, as shown in Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Ewer, Vessels and Pomegranate from about 1645. He brings together an impressive variety of surface optical effects too, in this bravura display of technique.

Still life paintings pressed on into culinary exhibitions, usually centred on the breakfast table (ontbijtjes), which in Spain developed into bodegone, populated by caterers and their customers at roadside stalls.

Another fine example is Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with Salt Tub from about 1644, with its combination of bread, fish, sea salt, and an ornate glass goblet with its optical effects.

I’ve already shown some still life paintings including living creatures. Those developed into another sub-genre of dead game, which in turn linked to hunting and the depiction of wildlife.

Jan Weenix specialised in this sub-genre. His Still Life of a Dead Hare, Partridges, and Other Birds in a Niche from about 1675 is one of a large number of finely detailed and realistic paintings which he made. Weenix was born in Amsterdam, where he lived and worked for much of his life, but was a Catholic who worshipped in ‘hidden’ churches that were tolerated in the Dutch Republic.

These piles of animal corpses spilled out into a strangely dark countryside, in paintings such as his Still Life of Game including a Hare, Black Grouse and Partridge, a Spaniel looking on with a Pigeon in Flight from about 1680. These became popular at the time, and Weenix was commissioned to decorate the houses of the rich with large murals on canvas, and to paint series for European royal courts. The more ostentatious paintings were known as pronkstilleven.

Others used the still life as a link to what later became natural history painting.

For their familiarity, bright colours, and natural beauty, butterflies were popular in the Dutch Golden Age, particularly in smaller paintings such as still lifes destined for the collector’s cabinet. Nicolaes de Vree’s undated Forest Floor Still Life with Flowering Plants and Butterflies from the latter half of the seventeenth century is a fine example of a painting that goes beyond the normal still life and depicts a more natural scene.

Still life painting during the Dutch Golden Age flourished and brought commercial success to many artists. It also laid the foundations for several sub-genres which were to be developed later. Far from being the lowest of the genres, for around a century in the Dutch Republic they were among the most innovative and exciting.

The fact that we’re talking like Donald Trump could mean that we’re starting to think like him as well.

In 1640, soon after Rembrandt and his wife Saskia had moved into their own house in a fashionable quarter of Amsterdam, she gave birth to their third child, who died shortly afterwards. The following year, their fourth was born, Titus, the only one to survive to adulthood, although even he died before Rembrandt.

His vast group portrait of The Night Watch (1642) is perhaps the most famous of all those of militia in the Dutch Republic. It’s more correctly titled Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and features the commander and seventeen members of his civic guard company in Amsterdam, and took the artist three years to complete from his first commission to its display in the guards’ great hall.

Captain Frans Banninck Cocq (in black with a red sash), followed by his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch (in yellow with a white sash) are leading out this militia company, their colours borne by the ensign Jan Visscher Cornelissen. The small girl to the left of them is carrying a dead chicken, a symbol of arquebusiers, the type of weapon several are carrying.

At the time, Saskia’s health was declining rapidly, and she died in 1642, most probably from tuberculosis, which was rife at the time. Rembrandt hired a widow, Geertje Dircx, to look after his young son Titus, and she became the artist’s lover.

Another superb example of Rembrandt’s later techniques is in his painting of David and Jonathan from 1642.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is his dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight. This is a post mill, whose wooden top was turned into the wind to set its sails turning.

His relationship with Titus’ nurse broke up acrimoniously in 1649, and he first had to pay her alimony, then the cost of confining her in a house of correction when she broke her side of their agreement. As they were parting, he began a relationship with the much younger Hendrickje Stoffels, who had been his maid.

Stoffels is claimed to have been the model for A Woman Bathing in a Stream, painted in 1654, when she was expecting their first child.

She probably appears again in his masterly painting of Bathsheba with King David’s Letter from 1654, showing an imagined moment late in this Old Testament story.

Bathsheba is at her bath, this time in the privacy of her bedchamber, her feet being cared for by an old and presumably worldly-wise maid or nurse. Clutched in Bathsheba’s right hand is a letter, the title tells us from the king himself. Her eyebrows are raised in surprise, and she stares dreamily down at her attendant. We must presume that this letter is the king’s invitation to her to join with him in adultery. Rembrandt skilfully heightens the suspense in the lighting, and enhances the intimate detail with Bathsheba’s jewellery and ornamented hair. The crumpled sheets behind her make it clear that David’s invitation isn’t to a public engagement, but to a very private one.

In June 1654, Stoffels was summoned by her church accused of committing “the acts of a whore with Rembrandt the painter”, for which she was banned from receiving communion. That October, she gave birth to their daughter, but the couple were unable to marry as Rembrandt would consequently have lost access to a trust set up by Saskia. His finances continued to worsen, and in 1656 he declared his insolvency, resulting in his house being sold at auction early in 1658. He was, though, allowed to keep his studio equipment, and he was able to live on as a tenant. That year Rembrandt’s son Titus and Hendrickje Stoffels formed a company of art dealers, thus enabling the artist to continue painting.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter looking decidedly Christlike, and Mercury the younger, almost juvenile, figure, sat at the table of a dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury. This dramatic lighting is precursor to similar effects in his later Ahasuerus and Haman and Conspiracy of the Batavians, shown below. Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing the evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from 1658 is one of the most insightful of his unique series of self-portraits, showing the artist bankrupt and growing old.

He drew Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther (1660) from an Old Testament story in the book of Esther, via the contemporary play Hester by Johannes Serwouters, first performed the previous year. The original narrative revolved around Haman, one of King Ahasuerus’ officials, who proposed to hang Mordechai as a scapegoat for the Jewish nation, as revenge for their pride. In this painting, Haman is shown in the shadows on the left, with King Ahasuerus in the centre, and Esther – Mordechai’s cousin and Ahasuerus’s wife – radiant in her intervention to save Mordechai’s life.

In 1661, Rembrandt secured a major commission for what was then the new Amsterdam City Hall, completed in 1655, now the Royal Palace. The dozen large spaces intended for paintings were going to be filled by Govert Flinck, who had started but not completed them when he died in 1660. Rembrandt sketched what he is believed to have completed in the summer of 1662.

The painting that we see today as The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis (1661-2) is but a small central rectangle within the original. His entire painting was hung in place for a while, but appears to have fallen into disfavour. It was taken down and returned to the artist, who wasn’t paid, and no longer had sufficient influence to change anyone’s mind in the matter. Meanwhile Jürgen Ovens (1623–1678) completed Flinck’s version, which was hung instead of Rembrandt’s. Rembrandt was desperately short of money at this time, so cut the painting down to a more saleable size, repainted parts of it, and sold it on.

Hendrickje Stoffels died in July 1663, leaving Rembrandt with his son Titus. Despite his advancing years and continuing battles to pay his rent and bills, Rembrandt’s paintings attained new heights. Typical of these are two portraits of Lucretia ending her life following her rape by Sextus Tarquinius.

In the earlier of the two, from 1664, Lucretia is seen just about to run the dagger home into her chest. Rembrandt dresses her in fine contemporary clothes, rather than the black robes of the story, and she is richly decorated with jewellery. She faces the viewer, but her head is slightly inclined to the right, and she stares emptily at her right hand. Her face shows calm resignation to her fate, with a tinge of wistful sadness. Her arms are outstretched to the edges of the canvas. The left hand is grubby and held open, palm towards the viewer, perhaps protesting her virtue. The right grasps the handle of a dagger, which is just being brought around in an arc to impale her chest and bring her end.

Rembrandt’s later painting of 1666 is more remarkable still: Lucretia has already pierced her chest with the blade. Her fine clothing has been pulled back to reveal her simple white shift, with a broad streak of fresh, bright red blood running down from the point at which the dagger was inserted. Her arms are outstretched here too, but for very different purposes. The right hand still clutches the dagger, which has dropped to waist level already. Her left hand is dragging a beaded bell-pull, presumably to summon her family to witness her final moments on earth. It is her face, though, that makes this painting. Her eyes, moistened by welling tears, are looking away to the right of the painting, in an absent-minded stare. Her brow is tensed with subtle anxiety. She knows that she is about to die, and is preparing herself for that moment.

Rembrandt continued to develop his mark-making right up to his death. It’s often at its most florid when he painted fabrics, such as the clothing of the couple shown in The Jewish Bride of about 1665. The Dutch Republic had long been a safe harbour for Jews fleeing from oppression in other European countries, and Rembrandt had cultivated close relationships with members of the large Jewish community in Amsterdam, some of whom had modelled for his paintings of Old Testament stories.

The Return of the Prodigal Son from about 1668, the year before the artist’s death, is a more conventional treatment of this parable from the Gospels, in which the younger son, almost barefoot and in rags, kneels in front of his father. Around them are members of the household, and details that are now hard to read. As with other late works, there’s a profound feeling of tenderness and redemption, which may have had personal significance.

Rembrandt’s son Titus van Rijn died in 1668, at the age of only 26, and Rembrandt died on Friday 4 October 1669. Three years later the Dutch Republic was invaded by French forces, and its Golden Age came to an abrupt end.

Rembrandt is probably the most famous artist of the Dutch Golden Age. Although his career is by no means typical, it does illustrate some of the forces at work behind the explosive growth of art during this period, and is a good excuse to show a few of his paintings for context with other artists of the period.

He was born in the city of Leiden, then the second largest in the Dutch Republic after Amsterdam, with a population of 45,000 in 1622, and growing rapidly. Its major industry was the weaving of textiles, and through the seventeenth century it attracted many weavers to migrate from Flanders. Another flourishing local industry was printing and publishing, which was helped by the city’s university, founded in 1575, and its role as a centre of learning and scientific development.

Rembrandt was the ninth child in a prosperous family, his father being a miller. He was well educated, initially at a school in the centre of the city, then from the age of 14 at the university. He soon opted to be apprenticed as a painter, and joined the workshop of Jacob van Swanenburg in Leiden, who had trained in Italy. After three years, Rembrandt went on to work for shorter periods with Pieter Lastman, a history painter in Amsterdam, and others there.

Rembrandt’s early painting of The Operation, from his late teens in 1624-25, shows a barber-surgeon and his assistant performing surgery on the side of a man’s head.

In 1625, when he was only 19, he became a master in his own right, and opened his first studio in Leiden, shared with his former fellow-student Jan Lievens. Two years later he started taking on his own apprentices.

In 1626-27, Rembrandt painted this portrait of a Man in a Gorget and a Plumed Cap, demonstrating the strange effects that cast shadows can have on perception of the face. This also shows his early mastery of surface textures and reflected highlights.

Rembrandt’s break came in 1629, when he was discovered by a distinguished poet and composer Constantijn Huygens, who was secretary to the head of state, held influence in the Hague, and was the father of Christiaan Huygens, a leading mathematician and physicist. Huygens helped arrange commissions for Rembrandt, and introduced his work to Prince Frederik Hendrik, then head of state.

Although several of his best-known chiaroscuro paintings were made in his old age, Rembrandt had long used the technique when appropriate, here in Saint Peter in Prison (The Apostle Peter Kneeling) from 1631.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Proserpina (c 1631) is probably the first masterpiece to show this myth. Pluto is trying to drive his chariot away, with Proserpine inside it. She’s putting up fierce resistance, and trying to fend him off. Hanging on to the hem of Proserpine’s floral dress is a woman who should perhaps be her mother Ceres, but bears the crescent moon normally associated with Diana. Pluto’s chariot is being drawn by two black horses through an ethereal almost fluid carpet of flowers. The horses and chariot are about to disappear into a black cleft in the earth to make their descent to Hades.

In 1631, Rembrandt moved his studio to Amsterdam, the centre of trade and business for the Dutch Republic, and growing rapidly from a population of about 50,000 in 1600 to exceed 200,000 in the 1660s. He started getting commissions to paint portraits of those enjoying success in the city.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment, and a good example of his lucrative work. Portraits like this would typically be paid for by subscription of those included, often in proportion to their standing.

Rembrandt’s The Abduction of Europa (1632) isn’t well known today. It conforms to Ovid’s account in his Metamorphoses, but loses dramatic effect by placing the bolting bull in a dominant and very Dutch landscape, cluttered with Europa’s carriage, large trees, and a distant port.

His Philosopher in Meditation from 1632 shows the sinuous curves of a spiral staircase seemingly defying gravity as it rises to the storey above, and is one of his early interiors.

The young prophet Daniel (of lions’ den fame) was King Cyrus the Great’s confidant, according to the book of Daniel. When Cyrus asked Daniel why he didn’t worship the Persian god Bel (Baal), Daniel responded by saying that he worshipped a living god, not a mere idol. Cyrus then claimed that Bel too was a living god, and pointed to the offerings of food and wine that were placed before his statue, and were consumed each night. Daniel remarked cautiously that bronze statues do not eat, which for a moment threw Cyrus. But Daniel had exposed the deception of Bel’s priests.

In this painting of Daniel and Cyrus before the Idol Bel of 1633, Rembrandt has captured Cyrus, standing in the centre, pointing at the food and wine placed on the altar to Bel, whose huge idol is seen rather murkily at the upper right. Behind the modest figure of Daniel are some of the priests who maintained this deception.

Rembrandt painted this portrait of Bellona in 1633, when his career was flourishing. Given that she’s holding the Aegis normally associated with Minerva (Athena), I wonder whether there has been a misunderstanding here, but there’s no mention of the possibility that this might be Minerva instead.

His self-portrait from 1631-33 shows the artist in fancy dress with a large poodle, making it clear that he had truly arrived.

In 1634, Rembrandt became properly established in Amsterdam, when he was accepted as a member of Guild of Saint Luke, and married Saskia van Uylenburgh, daughter of a respected lawyer. The following year, the couple moved into a rented property with a view of the river. That December, she gave birth to their first child, a son, who lived for only two months.

Rembrandt and Saskia in the Parable of the Prodigal Son from about 1635, when the artist was just short of being thirty years old, shows the young wife sitting on his lap as he raises a large fluted glass of beer at the viewer.

With his artistic and commercial success, Rembrandt’s income rose rapidly. Like many successful Dutch citizens of the time, much of that income was spent on gathering possessions. In his case, these included a remarkable collection of Old Masters, including several paintings by Giorgione, objets d’arts, and even suits of armour. Some of these appear as props in his paintings.

Rembrandt’s Blinding of Samson from 1636 is an explicit depiction of the destruction of his eyes, as Delilah makes off behind with his hair and a pair of shears.

His outstanding painting of Belshazzar’s Feast was made in about 1635-38, when he was developing his distinctive techniques of depicting decorative metals, as shown in the detail below.

In the summer of 1638, Saskia gave birth to their second child, who died less than a month later.

The following year he followed fashion in painting this Still Life with Two Peacocks and a Girl (c 1639).

That Spring Rembrandt and his wife moved into their own house in one of the city’s more fashionable streets, among successful artists and dealers in art. To finance this purchase, the artist had to raise a substantial mortgage, which was to come back and haunt his later life, as I’ll describe in tomorrow’s conclusion.

According to scientific tradition, we first observe then experiment. If you proceed to the latter before you understand how a system behaves, then you’re likely to labour under misapprehensions and your trials can become tribulations. Only when a system is thoroughly opaque and mysterious can we risk attempting both together.

That’s the case for Spotlight, which despite its name does everything but shine any light on its mechanisms. It presents itself in several guises, as a combination of web and local search (), as local search using terms limited in their logical operators (Finder’s Find), as full-blown predicate-based local search (mdfind), as in-app file search (Core Spotlight), and the coder’s NSMetadataQuery and predicates. It relies on indexes scattered across hundreds of binary files, and runs multiple processes, while writing next to nothing in the log.

Last week’s code-doodling has been devoted to turning the Spotlight features in Mints into a separate app, SpotTest, so I can extend them to allow testing of different volumes, and search for text that has been derived from images. Those are proving thorny because of Spotlight’s unpredictable behaviour across different Macs running Sequoia.

Every week I search for screenshots to illustrate another article on Mac history. When using my old iMac Pro where most of them are stored, Spotlight will find many images containing search terms from the text shown within them, even from ancient QuickDraw PICT images, demonstrating that text is being recovered using Live Text’s optical character recognition. When I try to repeat this using test images on an Apple silicon Mac, Spotlight seems unable to recognise any such recovered text.

Image analysis on Macs has a stormy history. In a well-intentioned gaffe four years ago, Apple shocked us when it declared it was intending to check our images for CSAM content. Although it eventually dropped that idea, there have been rumours ever since about our Macs secretly looking through our images and reporting back to Apple. It didn’t help that at the same time Apple announced Live Text as one of the new features of macOS Monterey, and brought further image analysis in Visual Look Up.

Although I looked at this in detail, it’s hard to prove a negative, and every so often I’m confronted by someone who remains convinced that Apple is monitoring the images on their Mac. I was thus dragged back to reconsider it in macOS Sonoma. What I didn’t consider at that time was how text derived from Live Text and image analysis found its way into Spotlight’s indexes, which forms part of my quest in SpotTest.

This doesn’t of course apply to images in PDF documents. When I looked at those, I concluded: “If you have PDF documents that have been assembled from scans or other images without undergoing any form of text recognition, then macOS currently can’t index any text that you may still be able to extract using Live Text. If you want to make the text content of a PDF document searchable, then you must ensure that it contains its own text content.” I reiterated that in a later overview.

My old images aren’t PDFs but QuickDraw PICTs, TIFFs, PNGs and JPEGs, many from more than 20 years ago. When the circumstances are right, macOS quietly runs Live Text over them and stores any text it recovers in Spotlight’s indexes. It also analyses each image for recognisable objects, and adds those too. These happen more slowly than regular content indexing by mdworker, some considerable time after the image has been created, and have nothing whatsoever to do with our viewing those images in QuickLook or the Finder, or even using Live Text or Visual Look Up ourselves.

There are deeper problems to come. Among them is discovering the results of image recognition as can be revealed in the command line using a search such as
mdfind "(** == 'cattle*'cdw) && (kMDItemContentTypeTree == 'public.image'cd)"
to discover all images that have been recognised as containing cattle. There’s no equivalent of the first part of that when calling NSMetadataQuery from Swift code, and a predicate of
kMDItemTextContent CONTAINS[cd] \"cattle\"
will only discover text recovered by Live Text, not the names of objects recognised within an image.

What started as a quick doodle is now bogged down in the quirks of Spotlight, which defies the scientific method. Perhaps it’s time for a little sorcery.

The Renaissance modernised the art of the late Middle Ages with realistic images that strived to resemble what we actually see, rather than presenting a world of stereotypes and symbols. This is best seen by comparing paintings of a common theme spanning the period, here those of the Madonna and Child.

Cimabué’s Maestà was painted in egg tempera for the main altar of the church of Santa Trinita in Florence, between 1280-90. Little attempt is made to distinguish surface textures, although some use is made of lightness and pattern in fabrics to depict their folds. Faces are uniform and devoid of expression or emotion, most turned in directions determined by its structured composition. There’s no sign of any landscape or other background, and no impression of reality.

While Ghirlandaio’s Madonna and Child from about 1470-75 was still painted in egg tempera, it’s much more realistic in its approach to the figures and the folds in fabrics. Modelling of the figures is still restrained, and there’s no natural background, but its intent is clearly to resemble a real mother and her infant.

Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia (Madonna of the Chair) from 1513-14 shows a thoroughly real and natural mother with two infants, every surface texture rendered as in life, with wisps of hair, differentiation between types of fabric, and convincing expressions and postures.

Many of the changes seen here in the Renaissance can be elaborated as follows:

• surface texture of skin, hair and fabrics;
• individual faces expressing emotions;
• telling stories using body language;
• individual natural posture;
• realistic landscape backgrounds;
• three-dimensional perspective projection with controlled vanishing points;
• varied composition;
• the air of reality;
• use of oil paints;
• increasing production of easel paintings;
• references to both secular and classical literature;
• introduction of new genres such as landscapes and secular paintings;
• direct patronage;
• independent and secular masters.

Technically the Renaissance provided the painter with all the tools for painting anything that might be seen in life. However, the great majority of paintings were commissioned for religious use, so depicted motifs drawn from the Bible and other Christian writing.

One of the early and most skilled practitioners of oil painting was the brilliant but short-lived Venetian master Giorgione, who has the added distinction of painting what was probably the first landscape painting of the southern Renaissance.

Giorgione’s revolutionary landscape The Tempest from just after 1500 remains enigmatic today, and may have religious references, but it marked the start of a new and wholly secular genre.

Late in the Italian Renaissance, emphasis shifted from its birthplace Florence to other centres such as Bologna and, most of all, Venice, where the effects of colour (Italian colore) came to dominate form and design (Italian disegno).

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Crucifixion from 1565 is over 5 metres (17 feet) high, and 12 metres (40 feet) across, larger than many frescoes of the Renaissance. He makes use of this space with a narrative technique based on the popular ‘multiplex’ form: its single image shows events at more than a single point in time, in an ingenious and modern manner.

Naturally, the painting centres on Christ crucified, but the two thieves executed beside him are not shown, as would be traditional, already hanging from their crosses. Instead, to the right of Christ, the ‘bad’ thief is still being attached to his cross, which rests on the ground. To the left of Christ, the ‘good’ thief is just being raised to the upright position.

Tintoretto’s Annunciation is thought to have been painted even later, in about 1582. Its composition is unusual by any contemporary standards, with natural rendering of brickwork, a wicker chair, and a splendidly realistic carpenter’s yard at the left. This is coupled with an aerial swarm of infants, at the head of which is the dove of the Holy Ghost in a small mandorla. Christ’s origins are here very real, tangible, and contemporary, in stark contrast to most traditional depictions of this scene.

If any single workshop brought the Renaissance to a close and moved on to what has become termed the Baroque it’s that of the Carraccis, initially in Bologna, then in Rome.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants, probably from 1590-1620, is the first truly masterly painting of this myth told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and for once an easel painting on canvas rather than a fresco. Although not a religious theme, this drew on the other acceptable source of narratives at the time, classical myth.

If there’s one artist who clearly defined the start of a new era it was Caravaggio, who began his career in Milan, but transformed art when he was painting in Rome.

His portrait of Narcissus from 1594-96 demonstrates how the tools of realism could be used in thoroughly secular paintings, but still of classical myth.

Caravaggio wasn’t alone. Among those who adopted and developed his style, the Caravaggists, was Lavinia Fontana, who came from Bologna and worked at the height of her career in Rome. Her Judith with the Head of Holofernes from 1600 also contrasts completely with the tondo Madonna by Raphael at the start of this article.

There was, of course, much more to the Baroque than Caravaggism. In 1604-06, Annibale Carracci and Domenichino (also from Bologna) joined forces in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome to paint this fresco of Perseus and Phineas. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety. The Renaissance was in the past, and Florence was no longer the beacon that it had been.

Signs of change occurred earlier in the north, where the first tentative steps were made towards a broadening of genres.

It was probably Hans Memling (c 1340-1494) who painted one of the first still lifes, on the back of a panel bearing a portrait of a young man praying, in about 1485. It has been proposed that this was part of a diptych or triptych, and could have formed its back cover when folded.

His choice of jug and flowers confirms its religious nature: Christ’s monogram is prominent on the body of the jug, and each of the flowers has specific references. Lilies refer to the purity of the Virgin Mary, the irises to her roles as Queen of Heaven and in the Passion, and the small aquilegia flowers have associations with the Holy Spirit. The eastern pattern on the rug is so distinctive of the artist that these became referred to as Memling rugs.

Coming closer to what was soon to become the Dutch Republic, Pieter Bruegel the Elder founded a dynasty of Flemish artists who broke from the Renaissance mould and started depicting the everyday.

Two of his major paintings from 1565 were formative influences on what was to come in the Dutch Golden Age. The Harvesters is a complete account of the grain harvest in the Low Countries, and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap below is a pure landscape.

There are no figures particularly close by, and those on the ice are not demonstrating the many different activities they could be undertaking. It also happens that this was one of the first paintings to show Netherlandish people on the ice in the winter, a theme that shortly became very popular, and whose influence extended throughout Europe, across centuries and styles.

By 1600 the techniques of depicting the real world were well understood, and all it required was an abundant trade in art materials including drying oils and pigments, an increasingly wealthy population, seemingly insatiable demand for paintings, and an army of painters. Those all came in the Dutch Republic.

Between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century there have been three periods in which European painting has changed dramatically: in the Renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age, and the nineteenth century. Of those, the Renaissance is usually viewed as the most important. In this series, I make the case for paintings of the Dutch Golden Age being more revolutionary than those of the Renaissance, and bringing greatest change.

The Low Countries, covering what’s currently the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of north-eastern France, had been a patchwork of small duchies and other states under the overall rule of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1568-1579, seven of the more northerly provinces revolted to form their own Dutch Republic with the Union of Utrecht.

These are shown in red, orange and yellow in this map. Centres of art in the Dutch Republic included The Hague, its de facto capital, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft, Harlem, and Amsterdam. To the south were the lands composing the Spanish Netherlands, notably Flanders and Brabant, including the cities of Antwerp and Brussels. Thus, Peter Paul Rubens who worked from his workshop in Antwerp until his death in 1640 was Flemish, while Rembrandt who was brought up in Leiden and worked in Amsterdam until his death in 1669 was one of the leading artists of the Dutch Republic.

Although the Dutch Republic existed between 1579-1795, the period known as its Golden Age is generally agreed as ending in around 1672, with the French invasion, and its start in art is usually delayed to around 1600. During that period of seventy years the provinces flourished, with extensive colonies overseas and rich trade with them and throughout Europe. The population of 1 to 1.5 million grew prosperous, with rising disposable income.

Society was liberal, with a high degree of religious tolerance and high immigration. Religious and ethnic minorities who were being oppressed in other parts of Europe were welcomed in the Republic, and the city of Amsterdam became a centre for migrants. This encouraged an increasingly learned society, with innovative science and academic institutions, rising literacy, and flourishing arts.

Paintings became popular possessions across much of Dutch society, and were sold in the first art fairs and by dealers, rather than being commissioned through a system of patronage. Few wall paintings were made in this period, and paintings of the Dutch Golden Age are almost exclusively ‘easel’ paintings, most of them relatively small so they didn’t require a large mansion for their exhibition.

Training of painters remained based on apprenticeships in workshops, and there was no academy system to stifle creativity. Once trained, masters joined their local Guild of Saint Luke and were able to establish their own workshop. Prices remained low so paintings were affordable by almost everyone. Production was extraordinary, with estimates of more than a million paintings being produced in a twenty-year period, and possibly as many as five million in the whole period of seventy years.

This resulted in the rapid development of new genres and themes in addition to those established by the Renaissance, and this is probably the most enduring effect of the Dutch Golden Age on European painting.

Portraits extended beyond those of single patrons or their close families.

Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632, as an early commission soon after his arrival in Amsterdam. It’s a group portrait of distinguished members of the Surgeons’ Guild in their working environment. Another novel sub-genre was the group portrait of a section of the local militia, best-known now from Rembrandt’s huge Night Watch from 1642.

Painting other humans was extended to cover their livestock and other animals.

Paulus Potter, who became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Delft in 1646 founded the new genre of animal painting with his nearly life-size portrait of The Bull the following year. Beyond the animals here is the church of Rijswijk, between Delft and The Hague.

The tentative landscapes that had started to appear in the Renaissance flourished into what was probably the most popular genre of all.

Dutch landscape artists quickly realised that, even if they had relatively little earth and water to depict, the heavens above could be equally interesting. Horizons fell rapidly down their paintings, as seen in Jan van Goyen’s View of Dordrecht with the Grote Kirk Across the Maas from 1644.

Some painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that Van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Although Adriaen van de Velde from Amsterdam went on to paint farm animals, his early beach scenes, including The Beach at Scheveningen (1658), broke new ground that a century earlier would have seemed inconceivable in a painting. Others turned their attention to the rapidly growing cities.

Gerrit Berckheyde’s view of Groote Market in Haarlem, Amsterdam from 1673 shows one the largest of the city’s marketplaces at the end of the Golden Age.

Paintings of the Flemish Renaissance had often explored the optical properties of surfaces. These continued in the development of another new genre, that of still life.

Clara Peeters trained in Antwerp, then painted an outstanding series of still lifes in the Dutch Republic. Among those is her still life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels from about 1615, a celebration of the very earthly sensuous pleasures of food.

Ambrosius Bosschaert painted this Flower Still Life in oil on copper in 1614. At first its eclectic mixture of different flowers and flying insects might appear haphazard. However, the flowers include carnation, rose, tulip, forget-me-nots, lilies of the valley, cyclamen, violet and hyacinth, which could never (at that time) have been in bloom at the same time. The butterflies, bee and dragonfly are as ephemeral as the flowers around them, suggesting that this has an underlying vanitas theme.

The son a of Flemish immigrant, David Bailly, who lived and painted in Leiden, painted this Self-Portrait with Vanitas Symbols in 1651, with its multiple portraits referring to the past. The figure shows him as a much younger man, holding the maulstick he used in painting. His actual self-portrait at the time is in the painting he is holding with his left hand. Next to that is a painting of his wife, who had already died, and a ghostly image of her is projected onto the wall behind the wine glass.

Gathered in front of the artist are ephemera and other signs of vanitas: the snuffed-out candle, a glass of wine, flowers, and soap bubbles, together with a string of pearls and a skull. If that message is not clear enough, he provides the quotation on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas, together with his signature and date.

Of all the genres that flourished in the Golden Age, it was painting everyday life, now generally referred to as genre painting, that was most novel and popular.

Long before its value in preventing scurvy was realised (in 1747), or it was carbonated even later, still cloudy lemonade had become a popular soft drink. The extensive trade links of the Dutch Republic made the drink available to the middle classes, as celebrated in Gerard ter Borch’s The Glass of Lemonade (1655-60).

A fashionably-dressed young man is helping to prepare a glass of lemonade for a young woman, who is equally open about her love of fashionable clothing. Behind her is the woman’s nurse or maid, who is having to comfort her through the excitement of the experience. They are surrounded by a contemporary Dutch interior, with the inevitable bed lurking in the dark at the right.

It’s easy to mistake Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Drinking with Two Men from about 1658 for a Vermeer, and like the latter he decorates the far wall with a contemporary map. The Eighty Years’ War had not long ended, and the Dutch Republic was flourishing. Discarded objects are scattered on its black-and-white tiled floor. There’s a large and empty fireplace, and above it hangs a religious painting.

I hope you’ll join me in the coming weeks as I explore how painting flourished and changed in the Dutch Golden Age.

The overwhelming majority of paintings of interiors show rooms we might aspire to. In this last of the series, I show some we’d all hope to avoid, those of the poor and destitute. Although never really popular as motifs, there have always been a few artists prepared to tackle the ills and inequalities in society, and this became increasingly frequent in the 1880s.

In common with other paintings of inns in the Dutch Golden Age, David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50) is set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men appear completely absorbed in gambling their large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is one of the earliest artists to have paid particular attention to the poor. The Young Beggar, painted in about 1645, shows a young boy squatting in a tiny bare nook in a building. By his filthy feet is a bag full of rotting fruit, and some sort of worms, which apparently form his diet.

François-Auguste Biard’s undated sketchy view In a Mountain Hut may have been made in front of the motif, onto paper. This is unusually social realist for this artist, showing the abject poverty and spartan conditions of many who lived in the more remote areas of France at that time.

It was the Naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s that brought depictions of the poor to success in the Salon.

Typical of his portraits is The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers), one of his last paintings, completed in 1883. This young chimneysweep sitting in his tiny hovel with a stray cat and kitten has the air of authenticity. The hand grasping that slab of bread is still black with soot. Bastien painted this in his home village in northern France.

Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation (1880-85) depicts prostitution in the city of Catania on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. The man settling his bill is only seen by his hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade.

We remain in the poor quarter of Catania for Gandolfo’s The Last Coin (c 1880-85). A young woman, who has been spinning, sits on an old chest and takes the last money from her purse, presumably to pay for some milk to fill her blue and white jug. Her family stand with their heads bowed in the gloom behind.

Vincent van Gogh’s early paintings of Nuenen, such as The Potato Eaters from April 1885, depict poor peasant families, here eating inside their dingy cottage lit by a single oil lamp.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.

Much of the data handled on and off our Macs and devices is protected by encryption. That has been designed to ensure encryption can’t be broken in a reasonable amount of time using current and future computing resources. Using conventional computers, for instance, it would take a great many years to break data encrypted using 256-bit AES, so in practice this has been considered to fully secure, for the past.

Threat

For the last 50 years or so, researchers have been working on quantum computers that could radically change that. Instead of using normal binary bits with values of 0 and 1, those use qubits measured in terms of probability, making them non-deterministic. That changes the way they work, and some tough problems in the binary world can be speeded up so much that, given a suitable quantum computer, they could compute in far shorter times. This has already been applied to greatly reduce search times in big data, and has the potential to break most recent forms of encryption.

Progress in making suitably powerful quantum computers to be able to decrypt data encrypted using classical techniques has been slow, but we’re now reaching the stage where that’s likely to be feasible in the next year or three. Now is the time to start deploying more advanced forms of encryption to protect our data from the imminent future.

Data in transit

In February last year, Apple announced that iMessage was transitioning to the use of protocols that are quantum-secure, and those were introduced the following month in macOS 14.4, iOS and iPadOS 17.4 and watchOS 10.4. When macOS 26 Tahoe and its matching OSes are released in a couple of months, they bring further important steps towards fully secure encryption, in encrypted network connections using quantum-secure mechanisms in TLS 1.3.

Classical encryption is at its most vulnerable when encryption keys are exchanged over the Internet, and public key systems can be completely broken by quantum methods. Thus, Apple’s first changes are being made to protect data in transit, where it can be intercepted and stored for later decryption using a quantum computer. Securing iMessage is an important start, and the new features in Tahoe and its sisters extend similarly improved protection to other data transfers.

Apple’s operating systems provide support for encryption and related techniques in CryptoKit, making quantum-secure methods available to third-party apps as well. For OS 26, CryptoKit gains Module-Lattice based key encapsulation or ML-KEM, part of the FIPS 203 primary standard for general encryption. Signatures gain the Module-Lattice based digital signature algorithm or ML-DSA, part of FIPS 204.

Data in storage

Whereas public key cryptography systems can be completely broken by quantum attacks, the news for symmetric key schemes such as those used in FileVault and APFS encryption is considerably better. Although quantum computers will be able to break classical techniques more quickly, that should prove neither quick nor easy.

In Intel Macs with T2 chips and Apple silicon Macs, encryption keys are protected by the Secure Enclave, never leave it, and are never exposed to the main CPU. Attempts to gain access through the Secure Enclave are subject to robust defences: for example, the Secure Enclave Processor allows only 5 attempts to enter a Mac’s password before it increases the time interval enforced between entry attempts, and after 30 unsuccessful attempts no more are allowed at all, and the Mac has to be fully wiped and reset.

Trying to remove internal storage is designed to frustrate the attacker. Although internal storage is referred to as an SSD, the storage used isn’t complete in the sense that you couldn’t remove it and install it in another computer, and most of its disk controller functionality is performed by sections in the host chip, including its Secure Enclave. Even models like the Mac Studio that have socketed storage don’t make this easy: remove its special SSD module and it won’t work in another Studio unless it has been completely wiped and reset, destroying its keys and contents.

Apple’s strategy for the protection of encrypted internal storage is thus intended to block access at every level, so that post-quantum brute-force decryption would have little if any impact should it become available in a few years. The standard encryption method used, AES-256 in XTS mode, may need to be revised as quantum decryption becomes more feasible, and Apple is now recommending that doubling the key size should be sufficient to make encryption suitably resistant to forcing with a quantum computer.

Summary

• Future quantum computers will be able to break some classical encryption methods.
• Public key methods used to protect data in transit across the Internet are the most vulnerable to quantum attack.
• macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 have started progressively replacing iMessage protection to make it resistant to quantum attack.
• OS 26 will extend that protection to cover connections over TLS 1.3, where supported by servers.
• Protection already provided to stored data, such as FileVault, is considered to remain robust.
• Encryption of static data can be made more robust to quantum cryptography by doubling key size from 256 to 512 bits.

Resources

Quantum computing (Wikipedia)
Post-quantum cryptography (Wikipedia)
FIPS 203-206 (NIST standards)
Securing iMessage with PQ3 (Apple)
macOS Tahoe TLS 1.3 support (Apple)
Cathie Yun presentation Get ahead with quantum-secure cryptography, WWDC 2025 (via Apple Developer app etc.)
CryptoKit for developers (Apple)

This week I have another group of four little utilities whose windows have been overhauled, and have new app icons to meet the requirements of macOS Tahoe. Each of these new versions requires macOS Big Sur or later.

Finder aliases

If you have old Finder aliases that need to be checked and repaired, Alifix will do that job with you. Use it to scan a folder containing those aliases, and it will warn you which can’t be resolved any longer, and can rewrite those that need to be updated.

Alifix version 1.4 is now available from here: alifix14
and from its Product Page. As it seldom needs updating, it doesn’t use the auto-update mechanism.

APFS sparse and clone files

As you can tell by its name, Sparsity started off as a means of creating APFS sparse files for test purposes. In addition to that, it has a valuable scanning feature that will detect and report details of all sparse, clone and purgeable files in a selected volume or folder. Information reported includes both the nominal and actual size of each file, so you can see which sparse files are saving the most space on disk.

Sparsity version 1.4 is now available from here: sparsity14
and from its Product Page. It too doesn’t use auto-update.

UTI file types

Give UTIutility a filename extension and it will tell you its Uniform Type Indicator (UTI, also UTType), traditional Mac OSType, MIME type, Pasteboard type, and a list of UTIs it conforms to. You can also find the same information from those other properties. This too has a crawler that will search through a volume or folder and compile a list of all the UTIs it encounters there. Its Help book contains an extensive reference to UTIs to help you get the most out of them.

UTIutility version 1.4 is now available from here: utiutil14
and from its Product Page. It doesn’t use auto-update.

Natural language

For many years, macOS has had built-in features to handle and parse natural languages including French, Spanish and German. Nalaprop uses these features to analyse text files, or text pasted into the left view in its main window. That text can then be parsed by downloadable linguistics modules supplied by Apple, and each word displayed in colour according to that word’s part of speech or grammatical type. From that it can automatically construct dictionaries or concordances of words used in that text, arranged by part of speech, and giving word frequency for each.

Nalaprop comes with a multilingual demonstration file to show how well it copes with language transitions.

Here it has parsed and coloured the text in the middle according to part of speech, for two languages, English and French. To the right of those is the dictionary it has compiled, ending verbs and starting the list of nouns. At the far right is a colour key for parts of speech.

In this demonstration, Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield has been parsed, a total of nearly 360,000 words. Currently such large documents are analysed in the main thread, so you’re likely to see a spinning beachball during parsing, but can still switch freely to other apps when that’s taking place. Those with Apple silicon Macs will see that analysis is performed in a single thread running on one P core, so all the other P cores remain free to run other tasks. I was hoping to use different threads for this, but it proved too complicated to incorporate in this particular version.

Nalaprop version 1.4 is now available from here: nalaprop14
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.

Enjoy!

Here are the 21 icons for those of my apps so far ported to be compatible with Tahoe.

You don’t have to collect all in the series, though.

It wasn’t until 14 May 1842 that wood engravings of news stories were first published, in The Illustrated London News, a weekly collection of illustrated reports of wars, accidents, fires and other news. Towards the end of that century, magazines were starting to include colour images of newsworthy events.

Enterprising painters had anticipated public demand for colour images of catastrophes like fires since the early seventeenth century, and in the Dutch Golden Age these were known as a brandje, showing a major fire, usually at night. This weekend I show a selection of these, but exclude depictions of fires that the artist clearly didn’t witness, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the sack of Troy, or the burning of Rome.

Among these are some of the earliest examples of what the Impressionists specialised in, depictions of the transient effects of light, often painted en plein air.

Frans de Momper’s A Fire in Antwerp was probably painted around 1640, and shows a large fire occurring at night in the centre of the major city of Antwerp. De Momper not only shows the crowds of people bringing ladders and tools to help, and the bright white light of the fire itself, but the huge pall of black smoke rising over the city.

In mid 1652, Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten seems to have witnessed the destruction by fire of part of the centre of Amsterdam, which formed the basis of his studio painting of The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam on Fire, 7 July 1652 (1652-55). Local inhabitants are walking in orderly queues to boats, in which they escape from the scene.

De Momper and Beerstraaten didn’t specialise in brandjes, though. Egbert van der Poel did, and probably painted more than any other artist in history. Van der Poel moved to Delft in 1650, and four years later was a victim of the massive explosion in a gunpowder store there on 12 October 1654. That killed one of his children, and he moved again to Rotterdam.

It has been thought that most of van der Poel’s Fire of a Church with Staffage and Cattle from 1658 is a carefully-composed composite of his experiences. A small church at the edge of a village is well ablaze, and the inhabitants are abandoning it, taking all the possessions they can, including their horses and livestock, and leaving the fire to burn itself out.

Van der Poel’s undated A Fire at Night shows a similar scene and composition, set this time on the bank of a canal.

One established exception to this is van der Poel’s Fire in De Rijp of 1654, completed in 1662. This shows a fire that worked its way through more than eight hundred buildings in the town of De Rijp during the night of 6 January 1654. This left only the northern section of the town standing and inhabitable, and resulted in more casualties than did the more famous explosion in Delft at the end of that year.

Doubt is cast on this received account of van der Poel’s work by sketches such as this, of The Fire in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, in 1645, made in front of the motif using washes with touches of pen and brown ink. Perhaps he was the first ‘ambulance chaser’ who travelled out to sketch fires, from which he later painted his famous brandjes in the studio.

Adam Colonia and Philip van Leeuwen were followers of van der Poel who specialised in brandjes, although both also painted other nocturnes, or maneschijntjes (moonshines) as they were known at the time.

In 1720, the cathedral in Rennes caught fire, and burned from 22-30 December. The scene was painted in this View of Notre-Dame de Bonne Nouvelle (1720-21), shown here in a copy by Jean-François Huguet, which is claimed to be in watercolour on canvas. As with some earlier depictions of burning churches, the patron is shown watching the scene from the heavens.

In the winter of 1789, Venice’s oil depot at San Marcuola caught fire. Although Francesco Guardi was 77 at the time, he painted the scene in his Fire in the San Marcuola Oil Depot, Venice, 28 November 1789. This is one of three versions of his painting; this is believed to be a copy made between 1789-1820, and is now in the Rijksmuseum, the others being in the Alte Pinakothek, and the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

During the Napoleonic Wars, between 1803-15, civilians living in European cities were dragged into battles as their homes came under bombardment, and buildings were set alight. One example of this is the Second Battle of Copenhagen, in which the Royal Navy attacked the Danish fleet in Copenhagen harbour. This brought much of the city under bombardment, causing serious fires.

The Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg was a student in the city at the time, and painted several works depicting the effects of the bombardment, including The Terrible Bombardment of Copenhagen (1807), showing the Church of Our Lady well ablaze.

In Copenhagen, the night between 4 and 5 September 1807 seen from Christianshavn (1807), Eckersberg gives a broader impression of the effects on the port area during the height of the bombardment.

When Napoleon’s army approached Moscow in the summer of 1812, most of the city’s residents fled. As the French army was entering the city on 14 September, following their success at the Battle of Borodino, on the orders of Count Rostopchin, the few remaining Muscovites set fire to some of its major buildings before fleeing. By the following day, a massive fire was burning in Kitay-gorod, at the heart of the city, and that didn’t burn itself out until 18 September.

There are many paintings showing different views of this catastrophic fire, but A. F. Smirnov’s Fire of Moscow on 15-18 September, 1812, after Napoleon takes the city (1813) is probably one of the best.

It’s thought that two-thirds of all private dwellings, most shops and warehouses, and more than a third of all churches, in the city of Moscow were destroyed by the fire over those four days, and 12,000 bodies were recovered.

膝盖骨乐队 Kneecap，8.5/10

评分给高了一点，是因为我部分地代入了音乐教师 Dj Próvai 的角色，于是它似乎成为了对我而言最好的中年电影之一。

不再是那种俗套的中年电影：在生活压力或者虚无中产生情绪，寄情于（事业 or 自然 or 某种兴趣爱好 or 性爱）之中，最终（成功 or 不成功）的故事。

而是，在碌碌生活中，仍然坚信自己的某些想法是对的（譬如怎样普及爱尔兰语），尽管无力去做什么，却仍然保持着心底的理念，不让屁股决定自己的脑袋。然后，某一天，恰逢其会，遇到了更有天赋和激情的小朋友们，就可以随时行动起来，为他们提供支持，用自己的经验和技术，让那些 idea 更有机会实现。

同时，一方面，在社群中维持某种程度而又不喧宾夺主的 ego；另一方面，在自己原有的社会连接中，纠结而微妙地平衡着，和各种被动或主动地岁月静好的人们、为你好但理念非常不兼容的人们、以及用非无政府主义的态度搞事情的人们，或者试探、或者坦承、若即若离。

---

以及，经常遇到小朋友们听不懂年代梗的尴尬。

：我这个录音棚比不上 Abbey Road 啦。
：Abbey 啥玩意？
：……

：大家看啊，Roland 808 鼓机！
：这是啥？看着像 80 年代的垃圾？
：……是我们要用来录音的设备。

（Update，才发现这两个梗都被放到官方预告片里了 lol

Disk images have been valuable tools marred by poor performance. In the wrong circumstances, an encrypted sparse image (UDSP) stored on the blazingly fast internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac may write files no faster than 100 MB/s, typical for a cheap hard drive. One of the important new features introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe is a new disk image format that can achieve near-native speeds: ASIF, documented here.

This has been detailed as a major improvement in lightweight virtualisation, where it promises to overcome the most significant performance limitation of VMs running on Apple silicon Macs. However, ASIF disk images are available for general use, and even work in macOS Sequoia. This article shows what they can do.

Apple provides few technical details, other than stating that the intrinsic structure of ASIF disk images doesn’t depend on the host file system’s capabilities, and their size on the host depends on the size of the data stored in the disk. In other words, they’re a sparse file in APFS, and are flagged as such.

Make an ASIF disk image

Currently, there are only two ways to create one of these new disk images, either in Tahoe’s Disk Utility, or using its diskutil command tool, as in
diskutil image create blank --format ASIF --size 100G --volumeName myVolume imagePath
to create an ASIF image with a maximum capacity of 100 GB with a single APFS volume named myVolume with the path and name imagePath. You can also use a from option to convert an existing disk image to ASIF format.

These are only good for Tahoe, as there’s no support for their creation in Sequoia 15.5 or earlier. Neither is there any access documented for the hdiutil command tool, more normally used to work with disk images, although its general commands should work fine with ASIFs.

Resulting disk images have a UTI type of com.apple.disk-image-sparse, in contrast to RAW (UDIF read-write) images of type com.apple.disk-image-udif, which can be used to distinguish them.

Economy

When first created, a 100 GB ASIF disk image took less than 1 GB disk space, but after extensive use and adding a second volume, its size on disk when empty again ranged between 1.9-3.2 GB. No attempt was made to compact the disk image using hdiutil, and its man page doesn’t make clear whether that’s supported or effective with this type of disk image.

Performance

Read and write performance were measured using Stibium over a total of more than 50 GB in 160 files ranging in size from 2 MB to 2 GB in randomised order. When performed using a 100 GB ASIF image on the 2 TB internal SSD of a MacBook Pro M3 Pro running macOS 26 beta, transfer speeds for unencrypted APFS were 5.8 and 6.6 GB/s read and write. Those fell to 4.8 and 4.6 GB/s when using an APFS encrypted volume in the disk image.

Although there’s currently no way to create an ASIF disk image on a Mac running Sequoia, I compressed the disk image using Apple Archive (aar) to preserve its format and copied it to a Mac mini M4 Pro running macOS 15.5, and repeated the performance tests on its 2 TB internal SSD. Unencrypted APFS there attained 5.5 and 8.3 GB/s read and write.

Use

Apple recommends switching from the previous RAW (UDIF read-write) disk images used for the backing store of VMs to ASIF for their greater efficiency in file transfer between hosts or disks. As the disk image in a VM is created when the VM is first made and installed, this awaits implementation in virtualisers. Because the only access provided at present is the diskutil command tool, apps will need to consider creating an ASIF image where that’s available, in macOS 26 Tahoe.

Although ASIF appears to be supported by Sequoia 15.5, the danger with a VM based on an ASIF image is that it may not be compatible with older versions of macOS. Apple hasn’t yet revealed which of those can mount and use this new format.

Previous tests on different types of disk image demonstrated that, prior to ASIF, the best performance was achieved by sparse bundles. The following table compares those with ASIF.

Allowing for the differences in chips, ASIF is clearly faster than both UDRW read-write and UDSP sparse images, whether plain or encrypted. It’s also likely to be significantly faster than sparse bundles, and has the advantage that it uses a single file for its backing store.

Conclusions

• Where possible, in macOS 26 Tahoe in particular, VMs should use ASIF disk images rather than RAW/UDRW.
• Unless a sparse bundle is required (for example when it’s hosted on a different file system such as that in a NAS), ASIF should be first choice for general purpose disk images in Tahoe.
• It would be preferable for virtualisers to be able to call a proper API rather than a command tool.
• Keep an eye on C-Command’s DropDMG. I’m sure it will support ASIF disk images soon.

看《波斯语课》，犹太人阴错阳差，靠着教德国军官波斯语来活命，但他完全不会波斯语，于是硬编了一门语言出来，每天编出一些单词让德国人背，犹太人自己也拼命背，忽悠了两年都没穿帮。

这听起来不太可能，当然电影里也做了很多铺垫，譬如犹太人声称自己也不懂读写，只是单纯教口语。在那个信息不流畅的时代，人们对如何学习一门外语的认知，也和我们如今相差甚远。总之，这只是电影里的设定，借此体验剧情就好。

电影的情节，让我想起萨苏说过一个段子：抗战时期的冀中八路军，冒充日本兵去刺探情报，他们只是跟着亲中的日本人学了一阵子口语，就能练到，让日本人听不出是 “外国人在说日语” 的程度。

你们现代人学不好外语，就是少挣俩钱儿。我们学不好的，都牺牲了。

萨苏《尊严不是无代价的》

---

想象如果换作是我，或者，如果是几个我脑中浮现出的，日常就有压力和情绪状况的朋友，面对这样的情境，这种一旦露馅就会死的巨大压力，能不能蒙混搞定？

大概有人真的会直接选择死亡吧？相比之下，虽然我也焦虑，但默认的思考方向，仍然是先去试试，再大不了一死。虽然自认是语言天赋很糟糕的人，但也存在着微小概率，拼命学外语，然后蒙混过关？——某种意义上，我觉得自己并不是因为面对压力而焕发了斗志，而是，没有经历过这种必须拿命学外语的样子，作为一种体验，有些好奇？

从文化决定论的角度，这些不同的状态，和环境、和文化，有很大的关系。但究竟有多大的关系？古代和如今的环境，对人的影响到底差异在哪里？我并不清楚。甚至，这样的人的比例，古今是否真的不同，现在是否变得更多，我也不清楚。也许他们之前只是没有显现。

---

以及，我第一次意识到「有的人会在面对巨大生存压力时，直接选择去死」这件事，大概是《大逃杀》里，那几个直接跳崖的学生。

（Abstract）因为汉字圈的外国人在日本既有可能使用护照上的英文名，也可能使用汉字名，而读音又各不相同，于是就会出现各种五花八门的组合。