The last testament: Jonas Bendiksen Photograph: Jonas BendiksenDavid Shayler worked for MI5, Vissarion was a traffic policeman… now both preach as the son of God. Jonas Bendiksen tells Paula Cocozza about his portraits of 21st-century messiahs
by Paula CocozzaJonas Bendiksen grew up in a “godless home” in Tønsberg, Norway, which makes him an unlikely candidate to photograph the messiah, let alone six of them. But this is what he has spent the past three years doing: chronicling the lives of men – and they are all men – who claim to be Jesus returned to Earth, from Siberia to the Philippines, Japan to Devon. Read More...
ObituaryMichael RentonArtist and craftsman of consummate skill as an engraver in wood and stoneIt was as the last apprentice in the trade engravers Slingers, in Horseferry Road, London, that Michael Renton, who has died aged 67, acquired his skills with graver and wood; these were invaluable for his later artistic development. Long before wood engraving was revived as a means of artistic expression in the early decades of the 20th century, especially by Eric Gill, and later by Gertrude Hermes, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Agnes Millar Parker, John Farleigh, Reynolds Stone and Gwen Raverat, it was employed by the printing trade for illustrations, often mundane. Read More...
UK news This article is more than 14 years oldRelic reveals Noah's ark was circularThis article is more than 14 years old Newly translated tablet gives building instructions
Amateur historian's find was almost overlookedThat they processed aboard the enormous floating wildlife collection two-by-two is well known. Less familiar, however, is the possibility that the animals Noah shepherded on to his ark then went round and round inside.
According to newly translated instructions inscribed in ancient Babylonian on a clay tablet telling the story of the ark, the vessel that saved one virtuous man, his family and the animals from god's watery wrath was not the pointy-prowed craft of popular imagination but rather a giant circular reed raft. Read More...