Ten years ago, on a hot spring night in Taiwan, I learned to play Koi Koi, a Japanese game played with beautiful hanafuda cards.

That first deck, still in my collection, is made of beautiful so-called flower cards; the game of Koi Koi is, however, mostly played by gangsters or inveterate gamblers.

The 48-card deck is divided into twelve suits of four cards each, with each suit representing a different month of the year with its signature plant.

January depicts pine trees (the first two images above are half of the cards of that suit); February depicts plum blossoms (the third card above); and so on. Some of the cards also have associated animals.

I’ve been collecting images of hanafuda cards for a while (the August susuki, or pampas grass, on a drawstring bag from a Japanese dollar store, a Gegege no Kitaro demon version of the cards, etc.).

My playing version of the cards are made by Nintendo, which started out in 1889 to manufacture and sell these cards.

Taking advantage of the Easter long weekend, I suggested Matt and I complete a long ago project I planned - to recreate our favourite cards in collage. We just happened to have some frames for which we needed artwork.

Here are my pieces:

January crane with pine trees.

February plum blossoms.

May irises along a pier.

Here are Matt’s versions:

January pine with scroll.

August pampas grass with geese.

August pampas grass with full moon.

And here are the finished product hanging on our wall:

Matt wrote more intelligently about it all on his blog.

I got the idea from Morbid Anatomy.

German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece was made for the Saint Anthony’s Monastery chapel. One of the things the boring aesthetic-based art histories never tell you is that Grünewald (not his real name) made this painting for a hospital specializing in skin diseases: its aim was basically to tell sufferers, “Shut up about your ailments, look what Jesus suffered.” From an article by Stanley Meisler in the September 1999 edition of Smithsonian Magazine:

The Antonite order operated the hospital in Isenheim largely for those afflicted by a disease known then as “Saint Anthony’s fire.”

That disease (now rare and called “ergotism”) struck down many in periodic epidemics during the Middle Ages. [According to the ergotism entry on Wikipedia, there was a 2001 outbreak in Ethiopia.] Saint Anthony’s fire set off painful skin eruptions that blackened and turned gangrenous, often requiring amputations. The eruptions were accompanied by nervous spasms and convulsions. Many victims died.

Saint Anthony’s fire came from the poison of a fungus that clung to rye and was inadvertently pounded into the flour used to make rye bread. The cause, however, was not known in Grünewald’s time. The monks treated the sick with a balm made from herbs and other plants and with prayers to Saint Anthony, who was believed to possess miraculous curing powers. The monks also tried to bolster the faith of the sick by reminding them that Christ - and Saint Anthony as well - had suffered even greater torments. Grünewald’s altarpiece played an important mystical and psychological role in the Isenheim treatment program.

The chapel burned down during the French Revolution, but not before some government officials saved the art. The painting is now in the nearby town of Colmar, where it is displayed in pieces.

Originally the crucifixion image you see above was the two top wings that opened to reveal another painting composed of two wings which themselves opened to reveal Niklas Hagenauer’s sculpture. Luke Ulrich shows how the painting originally worked in this very short video:

This other website explains the subject of each of the panels.

The top wings, or the crucifixion scene, has Jesus just off-centre, with his right arm crossing to the right wing of the altarpiece, in effect, amputated from his body, much as the hospital’s patients often suffered amputation of their gangrenous limbs.

Fun. Now eat your rye bread and be thankful no pus-boils-and-gangrene fungi is clinging to your grains.

“He’s far too egocentric to be self-destructive,” she said. “He always seems to land with his bum in the butter.”

Or,

“He always seems to squeeze lemon juice square into his eyes.”

“He always seems to affix excessive umlauts to ädjëctïvës.”

“He always seems to buzzsnore after a meal of treacle.”

“He always seems to lick lozenges with his ears.”

“He always seems to inflate his neck when operettas conclude.”

“He always seems to balance yolks on his nose while tiptoeing across a razorblade.”

Which means that “happiness [should] be classified as a psychiatric disorder.”

God, I love working with history. My volunteer recruitment poster and a computer virus infection on the other computer conspired to lead me to the comic strip for 19th Century-centred museum employees. You can be sure I’ll add Daze of Our Lives to my Etc links column.

A few highlights:

Hapliss Halfbrella

Shiney Tongue

Sharp Shooter

Hop Scotched

Light Construction

Cancelled Flight

Meow Mix

Wipe-olosus

Free Ride

Striking Position

Inhumane Warship (hamsters included)

Wheeled Warriors

Land Cruise

Regarding Jack the Ripper: was he really the artist Walter Sickert? What about Otto Dix, was he the German soldier nun-rapist because he painted this scene? Do you remember in Blackadder Goes Forth, when George paints Blackadder standing over the body of a ravished nun? But wait, Dix also painted Sex-Murder in 1922 and presented it to his wife for her birthday. Ah ha! But he was born in 1891; the Whitechapel Murders were in 1888. Dang! Another cold trail.

Was Georg Grosz Jack the Ripper because he portrayed himself as Jack (click here for a miniscule image of the photo)? After all, he was discharged from the army because he was considered insane. Too bad he was only born in 1893.