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I came across this 16th-century Benin brass head and the story behind it really caught my attention.
It was created to honor a deceased Oba and placed on an ancestral altar. In Benin tradition, the head was seen as the center of a person's character, knowledge, authority and leadership.
So this wasn't simply a sculpture of a king. It represented the connection between a ruler who had passed away and the new king who carried the dynasty forward.
I wanted to bring that story back to life by imagining the artifact in the royal setting it was created for.
Created in FLORA 🌼
@floraai
#FLORAMuseum
Sometimes the most fascinating part of an old artifact isn't how it looks, but what it meant to the people who made it.
such a cool attempt!
i love this concept! don't forget to share the met reference link too!
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Coin cabinet — Charles Percier, Paris, ca. 1809–19
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THE WRONG CAPE
The Wrong Cape reimagines Edouard Manet’s Mademoiselle V. . . in the Costume of an Espada (1862) by building a cinematic world around Victorine Meurent’s pose.
In the original painting, Victorine appears as a male espada, yet her shoes are unsuitable for bullfighting and her pink cape is the “wrong” hue. I treated those contradictions as my creative brief: alternating arena wides, intimate close-ups, shifting expressions, horse details, restrained gestures, and studies of the cape itself.
The film ends by pulling away from Manet’s unaltered painting, revealing the source behind every shot. The visual development and generation workflow was created and iterated on the FLORA canvas.
Original artwork — The Met:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436945
Created in @floraai for the FLORA Museum Challenge.
#FLORAMuseum
I encountered The African Sentinel and was captivated by the fact that even the Met can't explain what he's guarding - their own catalogue calls him "an enigmatic inclusion that cannot be readily explained."
So I answered the question. Vedder didn't invent him; he encountered him, and painted what he assumed he was seeing. A peasant. A musket. A hill. He was wrong about all three.
He cannot be readily explained because he was never meant to be seen.
The whole piece is held in Vedder's own Macchiaioli hand - flat unblended patches, dry paint, visible canvas weave, his palette and his composition intact - so that only three things change: the object, the ground, and where he's looking.
Original artwork : The African Sentinel Elihu Vedder 1865
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/13058
Answering the Met's own unsolved question instead of just illustrating the piece is a bold way to approach a brief like this. Did you look into other theories about the Sentinel before landing on your answer, or go with your first instinct?
