The axe is one of the oldest hand tools used by humans, with stone axes dating back to the dawn of the species and those made from metal being prominent relics of the ancient past. Most consist of a heavy wedged blade mounted at the end of a wooden haft used to swing the blade to cleave wood, or wielded as a weapon. Hafts vary in length from short in compact hatchets to over two metres (six feet) in halberds used to attack cavalry.

Although uncommon in paintings, as in real life, an axe can’t be ignored.

Most more recent paintings of the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia at the start of the war against Troy show the use of a ceremonial knife. A notable exception is Domenichino’s fresco in Viterbo, Italy, from about 1609, one of its earliest post-classical depictions. The princess kneels, her wrists bound together, as an axe is about to be swung at her neck. Onlookers at the left are distraught, as her father Agamemnon at the right watches impassively.

Much later in the history of classical Rome, an axe is seen being used to demolish the Sublicius bridge as it was defended by the Roman hero, in Horatius Cocles Defending Rome Against the Etruscans, painted by a follower of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. This bridge is made to look quite flimsy and ad hoc, when in fact it was more substantial at the time.

In Roman times, axes became incorporated in symbols of authority, notably those borne by lictors, bodyguards and attendants to magistrates and all with imperial powers, including the emperor himself.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s Christian Dirce of 1897 is an account of the killing of a Christian woman in a re-enactment of the death of Dirce, in which a woman’s near-naked body is draped over the body of a bull. This shows the emperor and his entourage, including two lictors holding their fasces, symbolic rods and axes, gazing at the grim aftermath. The word Fascism is derived from those fasces, which are themselves often symbolic of Fascist groups.

In 1284, the city of Sassari became the first and only independent city-state of Sardinia, joining more famous city-states such as Florence on the mainland. Proclamation of the Republic of Sassari (The Council of the Republic of Sassari) (1880) is Giuseppe Sciuti’s fresco in the Palazzo della Provincia, Sassari, showing his re-imagining of the moment of creation of that city-state, complete with knights in armour bearing long-hafted halberds.

One of the most unusual paintings of an axe being swung is Richard Dadd’s phantasmagoric Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, completed over the period 1855-64 during his stay in Bethlem psychiatric hospital.

This has its origins in Shakespeare’s plays, with inspiration from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and its main content drawn from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We see Dadd’s scene through fine stalks of Timothy grass, the foreground with scattered hazelnuts and plane tree fruit. Although its perspective is flattened, the figures in the lower half of the painting are stood on a gently rising grassy sward, behind which is a steeper bank and stone walling (prominent at the right). Those in the upper third of the painting appear to be on another level, which rises more steeply towards the top edge.

The scene is set in the night-time, although daisy flowers are still unnaturally open, and there is night sky visible at the upper left. The feller himself, a hewer or fellow, seen at the centre (in the detail below), is about to cleave a hazelnut with his axe to provide a new carriage for Queen Mab (pronounced Maeve, to rhyme with rave), the queen of fairyland.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Education of the Children of Clovis (also known as The School of Vengeance, or The Training of Clotilde’s Sons) (1861) is a scene from Merovingian history, showing Saint Clotilde watching her young sons being taught the royal art of axe-throwing. It’s no wonder that later one of them was to murder two of her grandchildren.

Axe-throwing has recently been revived as a sport, although axes have a more sinister history in their use for executions.

Léon Bonnat’s ornate showpiece in the Panthéon of The Martyrdom of Saint Denis (1874-88) tells this celebrated legend. Saint Denis, patron saint of Paris, was martyred by beheading on Montmartre hill at the edge of the city. It’s claimed that after his head had been cut off, Denis picked it up and walked around preaching a sermon. The legendary location became a place of veneration, then the Saint Denis Basilica, and the burial place for the kings of France.

Paul Delaroche’s convincing painting of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833) shows the fate of a contender for the crown of England following the early death of King Edward VI at the age of just 15 in 1553. As he had no natural successor, he had drawn up a plan for a cousin, Lady Jane Grey, to become Queen. Her rule started on 10 July 1553, but King Edward’s half sister Mary deposed her on 19 July. She was committed to the Tower of London, convicted of high treason in November 1553, and executed on Tower Green by beheading on 12 February 1554 at the age of just 16 (or 17).

Lady Jane Grey and the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Bridges, take the centre of the canvas. She is blindfolded, the rest of her face almost expressionless. As she can no longer see, the Lieutenant is guiding her towards the executioner’s block, in front of her. Her arms are outstretched, hands with fingers spread in their quest for the block. Under the block, straw has been placed to take up her blood.

At the right, the executioner stands high and coldly detached, his left hand holding the haft of the axe he will shortly use to kill the young woman. Coils of rope hang from his waist, ready to tie his victim down if necessary. At the left, two of Lady Jane Grey’s attendants or family are resigned in their grief.

Axes are sometimes shown in their primary role for felling trees, as seen in Émile Bin’s The Hamadryad from 1870, shown in yesterday’s article.

They also make an occasional appearance as a commonplace tool of those who live in wilder surroundings. François-Auguste Biard’s sketchy view In a Mountain Hut may have been made in front of the motif. This has a strong vein of social realism, showing the abject poverty and spartan conditions of many who lived in the more remote areas of France, with an axe beside a well-worn besom in the left foreground.

If you have been trying to use my free utility Providable on a non-English system and have been unable to get it to list apps installed there, you will want to download and use this new version 1.2, which should address that problem.

It’s available from here: providable12
and will shortly be getting its own place in a Product Page, and in Downloads above.

Just to demonstrate that Providable 1.2 does list apps correctly in non-English systems, here’s a screenshot of version 1.1 in the upper left showing no apps found, and 1.2 in the lower right with the three apps it should have identified. That’s in Tahoe 26.2 with Chinese set as the primary language.

The rest of this article explains why previous versions failed to list installed apps on non-English systems, why that has more general significance, and how it’s bad behaviour.

Listing apps

It’s curiously difficult to obtain a comprehensive list of apps installed on a Mac. If you look at proposed solutions, many involve iterating through popular locations such as Applications folders, or other time-consuming schemes. This turns out to be duplicated effort, as Spotlight already does that when indexing, and provides indexes you can search far more quickly.

The common recommendation is to use the mdfind command in the form
mdfind "kMDItemKind == 'Application'"
which should find all items that Spotlight has indexed as being of the kind Application. There’s an equivalent available in the Finder’s Find window that demonstrates how well this can work.

As Apple doesn’t appear to explain any further about how Spotlight classifies items into these ‘kinds’, it’s reasonable to assume they are categories with standard names, although that proves to be incorrect when you try the same on a non-English system. You then realise that a ‘kind’ is just an arbitrary string that may be localised. Run that command in macOS localised to Chinese, and you won’t find any Application at all, and when localised to Italian you’ll need to use Applicazione instead.

The textbook solution to localisation problems like this is to provide a set of localised strings, and to pick the correct one depending on the current localisation setting. That may work when you have specialist teams, and can achieve comprehensive cover of all the possibilities, but here it’s impractical, as it would be when writing a script that uses that search command. It’s much better to cheat.

The most obvious way around this is to use a criterion that’s localisation-invariant such as a UTI. You can then search for .app bundles with the UTI of com.apple.application-bundle. I was disappointed to discover that too isn’t as simple as it could be, as UTIs are available in kMDItemContentType, but according to current documentation that returns a complete UTI ‘pedigree’, for an app something like com.apple.application-bundle/com.apple.application/com.apple.localizable-name-bundle/com.apple.package. That may not be correct, though, as using mdls to list metadata shows that the full pedigree is given in kMDItemContentTypeTree rather than kMDItemContentType.

Preparing for both cases, the correct search command should then be
mdfind "kMDItemContentType == 'com.apple.application-bundle*'"

And that is exactly what Providable 1.2 does now.

Does Spotlight reindex when changing localisation?

My next question is what Spotlight actually indexes for kMDItemKind: is the string localised or not? As we don’t have direct access to those indexes, the closest we can come to inspecting them is by dumping metadata using mdls. Using Italian and English as my examples, when running with English as the primary language, kMDItemKind for an app is given as Application, but with Italian primary, it’s given as Applicazione instead.

This is the only metadata that appears localisation-dependent in this way, so either mdls is lying by returning a localised string, or Spotlight is rebuilding its index for kMDItemKind when the primary language changes. Neither behaviour is documented or expected.

Localisation overreach

This isn’t the first time that I’ve run into problems with localisation in command tools. If you use SilentKnight on Apple silicon Macs running non-English systems, you’ll be only too aware of my previous and apparently insoluble issue, where a major command tool can only return strings in localised form, effectively making their interpretation impossible. In that case it’s one of the many modules in system_profiler, returning key information about an Apple silicon Mac’s security status that isn’t readily available anywhere else.

Localisation is wonderful, and vital for many of us using macOS, but in some cases is now being applied too early. I wonder how anyone scripting with mdfind can possibly make use of kMDItemKind across different localisations. If its kinds were drawn from a set of non-localised strings, there would be no such problems. It makes good sense to localise the strings used in its GUI equivalent, but not for the command tool.

There are many examples of where localisation doesn’t take place, for example in UTIs, and in filename extensions. Can you imagine the consequences of localising the latter?

I’m very grateful to Hill-98 for helping me uncover these problems.