Scientists have found new evidence that prenatal exposure to air pollution may cause congenital heart defects. However, inconsistencies with past results make the finding less than definitive, the researchers say.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Epidemiologist Pauline Mendola of the Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and her collaborators compared pollution statistics and records of births between 1997 and 2000 in seven Texas counties. The researchers focused on the quality of the air that women were breathing during their first 2 months of pregnancy, which a 2002 study in California had linked to certain congenital defects of the heart, lip, and palate.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
In Texas, women who'd been exposed early in their pregnancies to relatively high concentrations of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, or particulate matter were more likely than other women to have babies with certain heart defects. As the California study had, the new report identified a tentative link between ozone exposure and defects in the pulmonary arteries, which connect the heart and lungs.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
By and large, however, the new study correlates different pollutants and heart defects than the California study did. Furthermore, pollutants don't appear to be associated with cleft lip or cleft palate, Mendola's team reports in the Aug. 1 American Journal of Epidemiology. "We did not find the same [associations] that they did in California, but we found other things," Mendola says.
Discrepancies aside, the new study strengthens the hypothesis that pollution and birth defects are linked, comments epidemiologist Gary M. Shaw of the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program in Berkeley, who participated in the earlier California study.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
marriage 5.mar.99 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Marriage in 15th-century Florence was not about love. It was about money, property, class, political affiliations and family prestige. Marriages of the rich and powerful were celebrated by public displays of such opulence that sumptuary laws were enacted in the 1460s to ban their morally troubling excesses.
We learn this from “The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance,” a beautiful, compact exhibition, accompanied by an excellent catalog, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The show displays 15 panels from 15th-century Florentine cassoni: elaborately painted and decorated marriage chests in which a bride’s trousseau was stowed and transported to her new home in an ostentatious nuptial parade.
Detached from their original housings by premodern art dealers and collectors, these long, horizontal panels are not the works of mere decorative arts craftsmen. Though not the greatest of Renaissance masterpieces, they are fully realized paintings by accomplished fine artists, qualities that tell you something about how much elite society invested in its matrimonial rituals.
Looking back at the cassone painting fad, the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari said, “even the most excellent painters exercised themselves in such labors, without being ashamed, as many would be today, to paint and gild such things.” Botticelli and Uccello painted cassoni, though examples of their paintings are not included in this show, which was organized by Cristelle Baskins, an art historian at Tufts University, and Alan Chong, curator of the Gardner collection.
Cassone painters usually looked to antique literary and historical sources for their themes, and their works depicted allegorical processions recalling the triumphal parades of ancient Roman victors.
Cassone imagery was loaded with moral import, serving ostensibly to educate newlyweds — especially the bride — in their proper roles and behavior. Chastity, a frequent theme, is the subject of one of the show’s most beguiling works, “The Triumph of Venus.” Painted by a Florentine known as the Pseudo-Granacci in a sweet, pre-Raphaelite style, it shows Venus in a white dress enthroned on a parade float with Cupid, a blindfolded little boy with his arms tied behind his back, kneeling on a pedestal in front of her.
A pair of big white swans pulls the float leftward along a dirt road past rolling green hills as the three graces, symbolizing the wifely virtues of beauty, mirth and good cheer, assume their traditional nude poses to the right. With Cupid thus chastised, Venus ensures the rule of monogamous restraint.
Equally striking, though painted in a more primitive style, are a pair of panels by Francesco Pesellino representing the triumphs of love, chastity, death, fame, time and eternity in a sequence of crisp, glowingly hued allegorical visions. Based on a long poem by Petrarch, they show all the major issues with which the soul must contend on its earthly journey.
While narratives and symbols relating to love, chastity and the soul’s progress are obviously relevant to marriage, it is more puzzling that many cassone paintings depict triumphal military processions or historical battles. A painting in the show executed by an unknown Florentine in a Ucelloesque style portrays the army of Alfonso V of Aragon laying siege to Naples. With horses, soldiers, spears and ladders pointing every which way against the neatly constructed stone wall encircling the city, it is a wonderfully complicated and lively picture.
But why would such a scene decorate a marriage chest? Because, for the groom, securing a well-endowed wife was a kind of victory. In her informative, well-written catalog essay, Ms. Baskins quotes the art historian Brucia Witthoft: “The groom’s triumph is that of a war party, who succeeded in carrying off a bride and her possessions. The family’s triumph is the display of their wealth and power.” http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
From today’s perspective it is easy to feel indignant about this treatment of the bride as a pawn in dynastic power games. But there is a bigger picture, not taken up in the catalog. As Europe emerged from the medieval era, the main collective drive was to create order out of chaos. Passions and conflicts of all sorts had to be subdued in the interest of achieving a stable civilization. We may regret that the means were domineeringly and too often violently patriarchal, but marriage was a comparatively peaceful way to extend social and political stability.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
Today militaristic triumphalism is not so popular. Given the giant consolidations of power brought to us by modernity, we tend to celebrate revolutions — preferably peaceful — by which repressive political, social and cultural regimes are overturned, and new freedoms are created. Under the aegis of romantic individualism, modern marriage (heterosexual, to be sure) favors the desires of the bride and groom over the interests of family and state. Love, as long as it lasts, conquers all. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
We learn this from “The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance,” a beautiful, compact exhibition, accompanied by an excellent catalog, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The show displays 15 panels from 15th-century Florentine cassoni: elaborately painted and decorated marriage chests in which a bride’s trousseau was stowed and transported to her new home in an ostentatious nuptial parade.
Detached from their original housings by premodern art dealers and collectors, these long, horizontal panels are not the works of mere decorative arts craftsmen. Though not the greatest of Renaissance masterpieces, they are fully realized paintings by accomplished fine artists, qualities that tell you something about how much elite society invested in its matrimonial rituals.
Looking back at the cassone painting fad, the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari said, “even the most excellent painters exercised themselves in such labors, without being ashamed, as many would be today, to paint and gild such things.” Botticelli and Uccello painted cassoni, though examples of their paintings are not included in this show, which was organized by Cristelle Baskins, an art historian at Tufts University, and Alan Chong, curator of the Gardner collection.
Cassone painters usually looked to antique literary and historical sources for their themes, and their works depicted allegorical processions recalling the triumphal parades of ancient Roman victors.
Cassone imagery was loaded with moral import, serving ostensibly to educate newlyweds — especially the bride — in their proper roles and behavior. Chastity, a frequent theme, is the subject of one of the show’s most beguiling works, “The Triumph of Venus.” Painted by a Florentine known as the Pseudo-Granacci in a sweet, pre-Raphaelite style, it shows Venus in a white dress enthroned on a parade float with Cupid, a blindfolded little boy with his arms tied behind his back, kneeling on a pedestal in front of her.
A pair of big white swans pulls the float leftward along a dirt road past rolling green hills as the three graces, symbolizing the wifely virtues of beauty, mirth and good cheer, assume their traditional nude poses to the right. With Cupid thus chastised, Venus ensures the rule of monogamous restraint.
Equally striking, though painted in a more primitive style, are a pair of panels by Francesco Pesellino representing the triumphs of love, chastity, death, fame, time and eternity in a sequence of crisp, glowingly hued allegorical visions. Based on a long poem by Petrarch, they show all the major issues with which the soul must contend on its earthly journey.
While narratives and symbols relating to love, chastity and the soul’s progress are obviously relevant to marriage, it is more puzzling that many cassone paintings depict triumphal military processions or historical battles. A painting in the show executed by an unknown Florentine in a Ucelloesque style portrays the army of Alfonso V of Aragon laying siege to Naples. With horses, soldiers, spears and ladders pointing every which way against the neatly constructed stone wall encircling the city, it is a wonderfully complicated and lively picture.
But why would such a scene decorate a marriage chest? Because, for the groom, securing a well-endowed wife was a kind of victory. In her informative, well-written catalog essay, Ms. Baskins quotes the art historian Brucia Witthoft: “The groom’s triumph is that of a war party, who succeeded in carrying off a bride and her possessions. The family’s triumph is the display of their wealth and power.” http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
From today’s perspective it is easy to feel indignant about this treatment of the bride as a pawn in dynastic power games. But there is a bigger picture, not taken up in the catalog. As Europe emerged from the medieval era, the main collective drive was to create order out of chaos. Passions and conflicts of all sorts had to be subdued in the interest of achieving a stable civilization. We may regret that the means were domineeringly and too often violently patriarchal, but marriage was a comparatively peaceful way to extend social and political stability.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
Today militaristic triumphalism is not so popular. Given the giant consolidations of power brought to us by modernity, we tend to celebrate revolutions — preferably peaceful — by which repressive political, social and cultural regimes are overturned, and new freedoms are created. Under the aegis of romantic individualism, modern marriage (heterosexual, to be sure) favors the desires of the bride and groom over the interests of family and state. Love, as long as it lasts, conquers all. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
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