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Picture of the Month (September 2025)
Dedicated User Captions:
- Action! (by a vlp fan)
- Congratulations, it's a heroic pose - but you should rather take care, that the wind does not blow your shawl away! (by Ancient Model Agency)
- cosmos surfing champion (by lukas)
- God wants You - nearest recruiting station (by lukas)
- feelin´groovy
Michelangelos Image of God in the Sistine Chapel
On January, 5th 1882, the physiologist Sigmund Exner gave a lecture on The Physiology of Flying and Floating in Fine Arts (Die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den Bildenden Künsten) in the Austrian Museum of Arts and Industry: "How can we explain the fact that artists suceed in picturing objects or actions which have never been seen by any human being, and whose existence is absolutely impossible, in such a way that they not only do not seem strange but familiar to us, just like when a memory of things we often have seen is awakened in us?"

Related Items:
Exner, Sigmund. 1906. Über das Schweben der Raubvögel. Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie des Menschen und der Thiere 114: 109-142
See also an article by Peter Geimer: Physiology of the Impossible. Exner meets mythology. (2001)

Picture Source:
Exner, Sigmund. 1882. Die Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten: Vortrag gehalten im Österreichischen Museum für Kunst und Industrie am 5. Januar 1882. Wien: Braumüller

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