“It is likely that Ketel’s painting provides the first appearance of a soap bubble, as opposed to the more traditional air bubble on a water surface as in the Dialogue of Lucian,” writes the mathematician Michele Emmer in the journal Leonardo. The inscription above, in Greek, reads “man is a bubble.” This panel is on the reverse of a portrait of Adam Wachendorff, the secretary of the London offices of the Hanseatic League, a trading alliance of European cities. In 1574, the Dutch painter Cornelis Ketel depicted a husky putto (cherub) standing against a cloudy sky on a bed of grass, in the act blowing bubbles. When it comes to the visual arts, we have to credit Dutch artists for making bubbles a popular subject. Have you ever watched those bubbles that form in the pool of a waterfall? The foam which is made up of bubbles? The tiny ones break and vanish immediately…. I’d like to tell you, Mercury, that to me all men and their lives seem alike. In his Dialogue between Charon and Mercury, the former says: One of the most eminent early examples appears in a dialogue by second-century CE Greek-language writer Lucian of Samosata. “The foam which is made up of bubbles? The tiny ones break and vanish immediately….
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