Wedding Feast at Cana: Day 16

Slow but Steady progress!

I finally got a few hours at the table today. I managed to hunt for and place about 20 red pieces and decided to orphan them and move onto orange. After organizing by shape, I was able to place somewhere around 80 pieces for about 100 piece day... It is painfully slow going for me, I prefer piece counts much nearer 500 but lately the time has been short. Anyhow, here is todays progress.

In other news, we have a new Puzzle Building Service project! We are building the 6000pc Creation of Man by Clementoni for someone in Hong Kong! Customs has the puzzle here in St. Thomas so it wont be long! We look forward to working on this one a lot! It's fantastic that the puzzle came all the way from the other side of the world for us to build it for someone! We could not be happier! What's even more awesome? We have been paid in advance with the 18,000pc - At the Waterhole puzzle for our efforts!

We are certainly going to be busy!

- Tom and Mercedes!

We offer a puzzle building service and are building this one for our friend in Hong Kong! It is the 6000pc Creation of Man by Clementoni.

Our newest puzzle to the collection, Ravensburgers 18,000pc At the Waterhole by David Penfound.

Triple Play!

Today is my bday but if felt like xmas at the post office! Normally I would do huge write ups on each puzzle, but I will get to that later. Today I received two more BIG Boys and one very small boy. In fact its so small, it's the worlds smallest 500 piece puzzle according to Guinness. Anyhow, I really want to get to puzzling with M so I am going to wrap this up and keep it short!

Peru: Historic Sanctuary of Mache Picchu - 500pc, Tomax (World Heritage Series)
Gift from my amazing mother-in-law
Notes: Worlds Smallest 500pc jigsaw puzzle

New York - The City That Never Sleeps - 12,000pc, Ravensburger
Purchased from ebay for $50 on 6/12/2013

Peter van den Keere: Nova Totius Orbis Mappa. Ex Optiums Actoribus Desumta (Big World Map, 1611) - 9000pc, Ravensburger
Purchased from Amazon for $70.00 on 6/14/2013

New Puzzle Day: The Temptation of St. Anthony, 12,144pc

Yesterday, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony - 12,144pc from Ravensburger showed up (at the same time as Sistine Chapel). This is the original really big puzzle. It was released in 1983 and was the undisputed worlds largest puzzle for nearly 20 years until it was unseated by Clementoni’s 13,200 pressing of Tiziano Vecelli’s Sacred and Profane Love in 2002. It is our first 12,000 piece puzzle.

The puzzle itself is still sealed in 4 bags. The pieces are on light green board and the knobs are less eared than their Wedding Feast at Cana or 4 Historical World Maps (It reminds me much more of a Clementoni cut). When assembled, this big boy will be the actual size of the original painting at 7.9ft x 5.5ft

Here is what Ravi has to say about this puzzle:

Hieronymous Bosch (Jheronimus van Aken) was born in ‘s-Hertogenbosch approx 1450 and buried there on 9/8/1516. 

Of the painters who lived around 1500, Hieronymous Bosch was certainly the most enigmatic. Little of nothing is really known about his life. Unlike his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), he left no notes or comments on his works. In the parish register of this birthplace, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, he is first mentioned in 1480 as Jheronimus van Aken, son of Anthonis van Aken. Although the family can be traced back to living in ‘s-Hertogenbosch since 1399, it isn’t thought that they originally came from Aachen. Both his father Anthonis and his grandfather Jan were painters. Hieronymous van Aken travelled widely and was commissioned by many foreign patrons. Perhaps a wish to honor his brithplace made him call himself Hieronymous Bosch. 

His paintings show Hieronymous Bosch to be a very astute and critical observer of this time. It is mostly the faults and the dark side that he pinpoints in very unusual and wildly fantastic allegories. An abundance of detail, strange apparitions, demons, innumerable fantastic and bizarre creatures, have led to very many and often contradictory interpretations of his works. 

The Temptation of St. Anthony, one of his later works, is also one of the most inaccessible because of its overabundance of allegorical detail.
There are 2 passion scenes on the outside panels of this triptych: on the left, the capture of Christ, and on the right, Christ carrying the cross.
On the left-hand panel the saint is carried off into the air by demons. He resists them and they release him, to fall to the ground. There he is found and saved by the monks of his order. 

On the right-hand panel temptation comes in the shape of a beautiful nude woman. St. Anthony, however, armed with his bible, is looking away. 

The composition of the middle panel is striking: the saint’s head is exactly at the intersection of the diagonals. He is looking at the onlooker, with a gesture of giving benediction. At his feet three priests with animal faces are celebrating a black mass. A witches’ Sabbath is going on behind hi. From the left, the storm troop of the Inquisition is approaching with two dogs in amour (The Dominican Friars, the main agents of the Inquisition, used to call themselves God’s blood hounds). But the whole is built upon the unsafe foundation: mud water and rubble give us an idea of the coming end. 

This painting is in the Museo Naciaonal de Arte Antiga is Lisbon

Interactive Map Double click to zoom in and click and drag to move the image around (You can also use the controls in the upper right)

New Puzzle Day: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel 8000pc

New Puzzle day is one of my favorite kind of days! Today was a really good new puzzle day. Two puzzles showed up from ebay. One of which is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel – 8000pc from Educa! This puzzle never looks like much when you see it online because the image is too big to be done justice. I went ahead and created in interactive map of it so you can explore this fascinating work. Everyone has seen a few of these panels (Creation of Man) but have you really seen the whole thing?

The puzzle version when assembled is roughly 9 feet long by 3 feet tall! It comes in 4 bags of 2000 pieces and should be relatively easy to assemble based on the section size and colors! I can’t wait to assemble this big boy!

Below is the interactive map: Double click to zoom in and click and drag to move the image around (You can also use the controls in the upper right)

Magna Carta - 6000pc from Clementoni

Clementoni's Magna Carta. Magnificat color in this puzzle.
This is the first in our collection of 6000 piece maps and
our first big boy Clementoni.

Claes Janszoon Visscher's Magna Carta - 6000pc from Clementoni is brilliantly colored and printed on fine linen paper. The pieces feel fantastic in hand and have rounded knobs (versus for lack of a better word, ear shaped knobs). They are printed on blue board and look fantastic. I look forward to assembling this one.

It proved to be very difficult to find information about this piece of art on the web. Eventually I found a French blog where the author expressed the same problem I was having. Google returned nothing but results to buy a poster of it and almost no one gave an artists name. Well, it turns out, there is a lot of confusion.

Claes Janszoon Visscher (a.k.a. Nicolaus Ioannis Vischerius or Nicolas Joannes Piscator) was born in 1587 in Amsterdam. His father Nicolas Visscher was a cartographer and taught him the family business. This map shows two hemispheres, separated at the Atlantic Ocean. The two smaller circles depict the signs of the zodiac. Flanking the upper zodiac are depictions of Terra and Aqua (Land and Water). The lower zodiac is flanked by Ignis and Aer (Fire and Air). The inner frame encapsulating the two globes represent the four seasons clockwise from the left: Ver, Aestas, Autumnus, Hiems (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter).

The outer frame shows the 12 months of the year in the vertical columns and in the corners features prominent figures from history, clockwise from the upper left; Ninus, Cyrus the Great, Julius Ceaser, and Alexander the Great.

The top pane depicts each continent and the lower set of drawings illustrates the Charity (Mathew 25 versus 35 and 36); 

35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

One last piece of interesting trivia, Visscher means fisherman and the family signed their work by placing a fisherman somewhere. Can you find it? It took me a while! 

The following are close ups of the map showing each section discussed above.

The Fisherman's signature

New Puzzle Day Part II: How to NOT ship a puzzle

Wedding Feast shipped in
paper and totally fucked up...

With a gapping split, how confident
would you be the pieces were not
all over from here to Germany?

Another fantastic example of how NOT
to ship a puzzle.

Pieces rattling around the bottom of a
busted up open box... not  good sign.

Box wide open in the packing box...
At the very least, seal the box
with tape, better yet, put the pieces in
ziplock bags and seal the box!

So, today is a bittersweet. Three new puzzles showed up including the long awaited Wedding Feast at Cana, yet two out of the three showed up totally fucked up! Wedding feast was shipped in just the puzzle box wrapped in shipping paper all the way from Germany! When I picked it up at the post office, it was split at the seam and most likely had leaked pieces from here to Germany! This is seriously frustrating to wait over a month for a puzzle to find it in this condition.

The other new puzzle, the 6000pc Clementoni Magna Carta (Art. 36504) arrived in a crushed overpacked box (a box twice as large as it should have been) with the puzzle and loose pieces rattling around inside it. Overpacking a box is a good thing, but it needs to be secure inside the box. Not taping the puzzle box shut or placing the pieces in a sealed bag is another faux pas. It should be plainly obvious that you can't just ship these things like that but apparently not.

I really hope the remaining big boys on their way were packed with considerably more care. For now, I am debating on counting 15,000 pieces or just accepting that they are most likely missing pieces. I'm damned if I do and damned if I dont. It will take 16 hours to count all of them, but then again, if you are missing more than a few pieces, who would want to spend the dozens of hours required to build it?

I suppose people have a common misconception that the USPS cares about your package. They do not. I don't know what they do  to these boxes, but it is far from handling them with care! I know I will be explicit in all future puzzle purchases about how to package it correctly! 99% percent of the problems could be solved by sealing the pieces in some sort of bag. There is a reason they come from the manufacturer that way!

Enough bitching... All in all, this really sucks. It's a lesson to me that I need to communicate to people how to properly ship a puzzle here and if there are missing pieces (it is assumed there are) I will just perfect my technique of making my own pieces.

Wedding Feast at Cana

Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana - 9000pc from Ravensburger is the puzzle that started it all for me. I have written about it a bunch here. I finished the majority of this puzzle maybe 10 years ago and it was destroyed in a move. So I am very much looking forward to getting it done finally.

The puzzle itself is of the same era as Tower of Babel and is printed on Ravi's green board (versus the blue board of today) and has shape features of that era as well (Limited knob diversity and location) but is well printed on fine linen paper with great color. A fine reproduction of the original art!

Magna Carta

There was so much to say about this puzzle, I moved it to its own  its own page here.

---

Here are some pics from todays haul. Enjoy!

At last, I have her back. She may be damaged, but I will get
her fixed up one way or another. The largest format
of Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana.

Clementoni's Magna Carta has magnificant
coloring and the pieces appear to have
great dichotomy of knob curvature. I love
the blue cardboard. These pieces feel great!

Here are the pieces of Wedding Feast at Cana. As you can see, high quality on Ravi's old
style board. In the background is the claim form I suspect I will need to use!

New Puzzle Day! Les Quatre moments de la journée (The four times of day)

Beautiful pieces of the Jeux Nathan puzzle
Les Quatre moments de la journée 
(The four times of day)  - A. Mucha

It's new puzzle day! The first of our big boy shopping spree puzzles has shown up and unlike the Tower of Babel, it was extremely well packaged! M said since it's going to take 18 years to complete the big boy list, she said the puzzles feel are like our children; somedays she loves them, others, she wants to send them to boarding school!

Anyhow, todays arrival is Mucha's Les Quatre moments de la Journée (The four times of day) - 6000pc from Paris based Nathan puzzles. It is our first 6000 piece puzzle and our first puzzle from Nathan. The pieces feel fantastic and have a  non interlocking edges with scalloped and divotted edges. They seem to fit tightly together and be well glued and flat but nothing like an older springbox puzzle (those are insanely tight). The knobs of the puzzle are more round than Ravensburger and should offer a nice change of pace.

Alphonse Mucha was an influential Czech artists in the late 1800's early 1900's with his distinct style 'le style Mucha' becoming synonymous with the style 'Art Nouveau'.

Mucha is considered the father of the current day art poster. He felt everyone's life could be imporved by art and he created a series of mass produced art panels including: The Seasons (1896), The Flowers (1898), The Arts (1898), The Times of the Day (1899), The Precious Stones (1900) and The Moon and the Stars (1902). Mucha said of his series, "I was happy to be involved in an art for the people and not for private drawing rooms. It was inexpensive, accessible to the general public, and it found a home in poor families as well as in more affluent circles."

Mucha went on later to complete his "life's work" the Slav Epic, A series of 20 enormous paintings depicting the life and struggle of the Slavic people. Some of these paintings were up to 26ft long by 20 feet tall and they all are an extraordinary work.

Les Quatre moments de la journée (The four times of day)  - A. Mucha by Jeux Nathan Puzzles (Paris France)

The box is not in perfect shape but I dont buy a puzzle for the box.

Fantastic fitting piece and nice departure from the standard of today where each side of rectangular piece has a knob or receptacle. (Shown top center piece with two receptacles and two scalloped edges. Top left shows a divotted piece and several scalloped pieces are shown throughout). In the lower left, you can see how nicely the pieces fit together.

Links

The Mucha Foundation: http://www.muchafoundation.org/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Mucha
Slave Epic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slav_Epic
Wiki Paintings: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/alphonse-mucha

Puzzle Craziness

Well, we have completed two puzzle, found 4 more at the thrift store, decide to start on the 18,000 pcs 4 Historical World Maps by Ravensburger and one a bid from ebay Germany on the 9000 piece Tower of Babel  since the last post! It's getting crazy around here!

It took me about 5 hours to sort the first bag of world maps today. I think the pervious owner started on this hardest one! This puzzle is going to be extremely hard.

Power outage? No reason to stop puzzling! Thats why we have headlamps! M puzzling Maui Moon in the dark!

Getting started on 4 World Maps. This might be missing pieces. We bought it used off of craigslist and this section was opened. I feel confident I can make a missing piece if need be. It took about 5 hours to sort this thing.

M and Tessa working on a puzzle.

Completed:

Maui Moon Bay - 500pc, Master Pieces
Purchased at K-Mart in Plymouth, MI  on 3/26/2010 for $8.00

Started: 5/8/2013
Finished: 5/10/2013
Assembled by: Tom, Mercedes and Tessa

Aimee Stewart: The Dreaming Tree - 750pc, Mega Puzzles Reflections
K-Mart in Plymouth, MI 3/26/2013 $8.00

Started: 5/9/2013
Completed: 5/10/2013
Assembled By: Tom, Mercedes and Tessa

Acquired:

John O'Brian: Gallerie de Montmarte - 1500pc,  Jumbo
Purchased from Human Society St. Thomas for $2.00 on 5/11/2013

M.C. Esher: Hand with Reflecting - 1000pc, Pomegranate Art Piece Puzzle
Purchased from Human Society St. Thomas for $2.00 on 5/11/2013

Giovanni Paolo Pannini: Picture Gallery with View of Modern Rome - 1000pc, Pomegranate Art Piece Puzzle
Purchased from Human Society St. Thomas for $2.00 on 5/11/2013

Colorful Candies - 1000pc, Springbok
Purchased from Human Society St. Thomas for $2.00 on 5/11/2013