A Flickr user who calls himself oldcarguy41 has created a wonderful Photo Stream of vintage illustration, advertising and pin-up art, mostly in excellent high-res scans. It’s an impressive and valuable curatorial achievement and a delight to browse through.
I discovered the illustration above, by Bernard D’Andrea, in the collection, which you can visit here.
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The Love Letter
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Constantine embraces Christianity — no good comes of it.
Constantine delayed his actual baptism until he was on his deathbed — a practice followed by many in his time, who wanted to continue sinning as long as possible before taking advantage of the one-time-only guaranteed means of forgiveness for past sins.
The bishops railed against this practice but couldn’t find a theological rationale or a workable process for prohibiting it.
Source — Edward Gibbon.
Constantine has just reunited the Roman Empire under a single head and is now expanding his new seat in Byzantium into what will become Constantinople. At this stage of Roman civilization he can’t find artists capable of making suitable statues so he plunders Greece for its old ones.
Source — Edward Gibbon.
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The Back Room At McSorley’s. During the summer of my 18th year I spend a lot of time in this room, before McSorley’s became a frat-boy hangout. It looked just the same as it did in this painting from 1912 and was about as crowded.
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Cowgirl romance . . . not for the faint of heart.
With thanks to Bryan Castañeda . . .
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